Pay and prestige.
Some baseball dude just received a $439 Million contract. Dope dealers peddling crack make many times more than a STEM graduate. So do many lawyers and doctors. Union electricians make $120k/year without going through a hard 4 year curriculum. STEM is hard, requires lot of hard work and basic intelligence.
Americans are not going to do it. And there is no shortage of foreigners available. Corporations are not out there to mete out justice for American citizens, they care mainly about profits. So do not be deluded into thinking wages of STEM graduates will ever reach levels of crack peddlers.
If you are not a protected class, don’t bother applying for grad school.
Had it stated to me by a prof at my alma mater. She didn’t like it, but those are the rules.
Also, there is the cost. For foreign students their home country and the US government pay for most of it.
When I ran the calculations, it would have taken me an exta $35K for a masters. I didn’t even bother figuring out what it would take for a PhD.
That doesn’t even get to the actual jobs that are open for STEM grads, or the fact that many schools are looking to cut the programs over cost (Liberal Arts programs are very cheap to run, Chemical Engineering is not), or that STEM simply does not fit into the worldview of most schools.
If you are a young man trying to figure out what to do, I would caution about a STEM career. I have had a great one, but the doors that were open to me in the 90’s are closed to boys now. If you are a girl and have the skill? Go for it.
But that is few women. I have trained a few, and been very proud of them, but most move to some sort of job that is not engineering very quickly.
Absolutely. And stop suppressing pay with 3rd worlders using H1Bs