S.T.E.M students might not fair the best on tangible ROI. Technology and Engineering pay off with good solid jobs, but encumber the graduate and overwhelm whatever extra Salary benefits they received.
Science and Math are worse. If you’re not in the top .2% you’re basically a high school teacher candidate. University level if you’re in the best of the 2nd tier group.
Each one of those in the S.T.E.M. class though has an added benefit. They’re good bets. if even 1 out of a 100,000 are successful per generation, that could be a great economic win for the country.
— which leads to another gripe. University level schooling in the United States is not the right of foreign students, like it has become. Foreign should be limited in mass and controlled by the government in the form of largesse to countries with exemplary cooperation.
Our Colleges and Universities are letting in elements of foreign students that are subversive to U.S standards.
Not quite sure what you point is but your third sentence seems to contradict your first sentence.
From my almost 40 years of working in the “STEM” fields both as a worker bee & manager my observations are, new BSs/BAs in math & science will get “entry level” type jobs maybe as a lab technician or beginner programmers, then if they show any initiative at all the move “up” which could mean out to a different job. These “entry level” jobs might be at a lower salary level then an engineer but within 5 years that difference dissipates. For liberal arts & humanities BAs its much harder to get started, now I am talking about corporate or government hiring. But once that happens again its the individual. The biggest problems I have seen is liberal arts, etc seem to have an “attitude” the “corporation” is required to do them a favor until they write that “Great Novel” or something equivalent. “Liberal
Arties” etc who strike out on their own and make it. Great! More power to them!
When I was an undergraduate there were a lot of profs in engineering and even the sciences with industrial experience. Now its very rare, in fact I detect a hiring prejudice against them. That trend of hiring profs who haven’t stepped outside the doors of academia since they entered at age 18 started during the Vietnam War. Goal was obviously to protect them from the draft!
As far as foreign students there is way way too many of them in STEM fields at US colleges& universities. Unfortunately for a lot of state schools they need them for the extra money they bring. Some schools would be hard pressed to keep their graduate programs going without foreign students. Other issues driving the foreign student surge, the schools getting “academic ego & reputation boost” by having foreign students, also after 50 some years of allowing this to occur, there are a number of “foreigners” maybe on paper USCITS but in practice and attitude not really. They are now not only in the faculty but in administrations of colleges/universities often “feathering their nests” for themselves and other foreigners. Additionally I have seen them break every hiring regulation civil rights law to hire their tribesman, clansman & nationality. Doing things no native USCIT could do. Also the college/university gets to indulge themselves in the fiction that they are doing that “world citizen thing”. They are part of this world community and not part of the USA or even the state where they sit.
So in so many ways they are subversive to US standards, yes definitely true!