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Comment by fellellor | Hacker News Reader

>go back home for a job

Haha. Not really. American salaries, standards of living are among the highest/best in the planet. Plus an abundance of economic opportunities and relatively low discrimination compared to what one may face in other developed countries.

These are the only factors which decide whether a family sends their kid to the US for higher ed or not. The degrees themselves aren't worth much at all.

Unless on course you are talking about the very elite, who have well established businesses and properties in their home countries, who then want Ivy League degrees for their kids. They won't give a fk about the average mid western universities that the article is actually talking about.

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My old country gave to whoever returns home with a foreign degree up to 95% salary match from what they would have made if they stayed.

You can rack $100k USD, in a country where average yearly salary is $2k and living expenses are nil.

When you talk about 'standard of living', imagine what standard of living you'd have in USA at 50x average salary. If I'm not mistaken that would be around 1-2 million a year. Add to that free unlimited healthcare, free prescriptions glasses. No land ownership fees, no condo fees, some money to buy your way anywhere, etc.

Your country sounds highly unusual. Are these government jobs? Talking about naivety, this certainly doesn't seem like it's true generally.

Also note that I said US offers a lot of economic opportunities not that other countries didn't. And I was talking from the perspective of a person from a developing country looking to travel to a developed country. Sorry if that wasn't clear.

I've met enough international students to know different countries have different strategies to bring the knowledge home. Some have 2x time retainer for whatever length one studied on their expense. Others have guaranteed government jobs. Mine had any general engineering/it jobs in the private sector. Where are you drawing the conclusion from that this is the exception?

I fully get that a STEM graduate has an easy life in USA, we have that anywhere. But you have to look at regular people, with average jobs. What you refer to as "developing country" most of the time offers better free healthcare that the top notch USA option that's simply out of financial reach.

Not to derail the discussion but just to illustrate. Canada just brought a law for maternity leave to be up to 18 months, paid.

Certainly not true for India (second largest contributor of international students, behind China [1]). By my (extremely unscientific) estimate, less than 5% of Indian students arriving in the US for higher education go back to work in India.

[1] https://www.iie.org/Why-IIE/Announcements/2017-11-13-Open-Do...

I wouldn't move back home even with a 100% salary match.

You underestimate the value of an “overseas” degree in “developing” countries like China. A student who comes back to China with a US/UK degree will get preferential access to first-tier city resident permits, direct financial “housing” benefits from the city, a good job and faster career advancement and more besides. Some of those benefits are starting to get scaled back but it’s still a big advantage.

Sounds like in the current environment those are no longer advantages, considering China is home to some very good universities herself.

Also these degrees don't offer any substantial advantage in any of the other countries you mentioned.

Those good universities have caps and very tough entry exams. People who go to Midwestern schools are not typically your elite students --but rather students whose parents thought it would be a good investment in career to send their kids to study a couple years in the US.

Ok, you seem to be missing this factor in all of your arguments.

The currencies of all the countries you mentioned trade very unfavorably (maybe not the right word) with respect to the USD. So even if the cost of a higher ed degree seems like a lot to US locals, that cost is a few orders of magnitude higher from the perspective of a family considering this investment for their ward.

The only way this degree is worth the money, even after the substantial scholarship/assistance that US schools used to offer, is if you got a job that pays you is US Dollars. If at the end you don't get such a job, then the degree isn't worth the paper it's printed on.

A masters degree used to cost about 20-30 thousand dollars in total if you got the aforementioned scholarships/assistance. Then once you landed a tech job you'd have made up your original investment within a year if you lived frugally, which most international students tend to anyway.

After that you could save up your money, which would be a substantial amount once exchanged for the local currency and return. This is unlikely.

Because most would choose to stay and climb higher on their career ladder and provide a more luxurious standard of living for their families.

This is the whole point of going through the university system, not the degree.

You may have a valid point --I will not contest that. However, what you say there was not the experience related to me by international students. Maybe I knew atypical international students. As I understood it, for the most cases, a degree from here afforded them better chances back home at some BIG CO., given they were unable to attend elite home country Uni (National Uni of xx]

>a degree from here afforded them better chances back home at some BIG CO

Again, you don't need the foreign degree if the BIG CO is hiring locally anyway. Sure it makes you stand out, but your net gain is very little compared to someone who got educated locally as well.

Sorry about belaboring this point.

This is true, but your in with a foreign degree is different. For china in high tech, returnees (sea turtles, 海龟) are very much in demand and will command US-like salaries (for the same reason, China attracts Japanese, Taiwanese, Korean tech workers, they pay very well in comparison to other Asian countries). This applies to Big Co as well (or at least the big co I worked for in Beijing).

U overstated it vastly...In China, UK degrees got so inflated, many of which being one year master, that they are pretty useless now.Oversea working experience is still valued

While it may be true with regard to UK Unis, I'm not sure it's applicable to US schools.

Obviously depends on WHICH schools you attend. Even in case of UK, if you went to Oxford/Cambridge, people would still recognize it. However, studying in some random UK/US schools won't bring you too much benefits as you might think.

In China, UK degrees got so inflated

This is driven by ex-poly degree mills cashing in. If you’re studying in the UK it’s Russell Group is still prestigious for the right reasons. Otherwise the value is questionable.

Even that is changing. I know of a masters course in a UK Russell group uni where Chinese students outnumber any other group including locals. The result of this is terrible, terrible English skills and huge pressure from the "sales" department to give better grades to keep that sweet Chinese money flowing. Essays written in broken English that suddenly and suspiciously transition into perfect prose are common and no longer punished. When one of the students was asked why they picked that course at that uni, they said it was because the entry requirements were easiest and the level of English required was low.

Now, obviously, this course at this uni is clearly going to crash and burn at some point, having used up all good will pandering to rich Chinese students. The problem is that this is an industry race to the bottom. Sure, the main stem subjects at Cambridge or Manchester are in good shape, but all the fringe subjects are going to shit, especially the one year masters courses.

I can't name the specific course or university as I was told this in confidence by a faculty member, so believe what you will, but the race to the bottom is happening and is causing immense harm to UK institutions at all levels, not just the ex-poly degree mills.

Maybe true, though I don't really know Russell Group until now. Ultimately it depends on name recongition and rarity.

Yes I though about doing a masters in cyber but it would only be worth it if I did it at Oxbridge or better Cranfield though id have needed a sponsor for that one :-)

Sure, having a degree from a prestigious US school is a big advantage both here and in China. OPs point, I think, was that when it comes time to cash in that advantage, you will probably get more dollar-equivelents for it here than you would in China.

Of course, there are other considerations besides pay... but if you are trying to maximize pay, beating Silicon Valley or New York takes some doing.

About this, there was a relatively recent article from a chinese POV: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15769807

In this article, surprisingly, the author suggests that his education abroad (Cambridge) was a result of his failure in the chinese system.

Finally, I threw in the towel, and asked my parents to send me abroad. Anywhere else on this earth would surely be better.

And regarded western universities as much less competitive and demanding.

Personal experience: My college undergrad education which is considered one of the hardest in the country was a fraction of the difficulty compared to the education friends at home went through.

What it lacked in rigor, however, it more than made up in the remarkable growth of perspectives I experienced by interacting with students from a massive spectrum of backgrounds from all over the world.

That will be another major loss for US universities, outside of the purely financial side.

> Haha. Not really. American salaries, standards of living are among the highest/best in the planet. Plus an abundance of economic opportunities and relatively low discrimination compared to what one may face in other developed countries.

"Let me fix all of these points for you!" - Donald Trump

If the degrees didn't matter, then they would not send their kids here in the first place.

Most of the folks I ran into liked America but loved their countries of origin and looked forward to getting a job and doing well. I was not talking elite students (which is different from students at elite unis who can be a mixed bag)

Obviously you don't stop loving your home country just because you chose to immigrate. Unless your home country is some hellish warzone which China isn't.

That still doesn't mean you wouldn't rather settle in the US when you went through all the trouble to get educated there, in most cases.

There is absolutely no shortage of excellent universities in China.

The degrees open doors to high-skilled visa programs. Same reason many of my international coworkers have Masters degrees in CS - it massively increases the success rate at getting official permission to work in the US, even if employers themselves are indifferent to them.

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