Hacker News Reader

Comment by theparanoid | Hacker News Reader

Regehr is beating around the bush. In my MS it was about 65% Indian BS students and 35% local students (various backgrounds). The local students were working professionals and the Indian students just wanted the credential.

The cause is simple, an MS is very advantageous when applying for an H-1B.

View on HN

Indian here.

I am not sure if you have any idea about the quality of STEM education in India but let me tell you it is far more pathetic than you can even imagine. Even I graduated from such an awful college and I know nothing about any area of CS. Nothing.

I am now 37 year old and working in non-software field but I now sorely miss the opportunity of getting good CS education and I wish I went through a decent college.

While your point may be a valid point (I have never been to US) but I do believe many enroll in those US college for good quality education, at least once. Hell, given a chance, I myself would enroll for such a course just for real education rather than H1B visa.

That's interesting to hear. I have a number of people working for me who are in our Hyderabad office and when they showed me their school on a map, I found it was usually extremely small, hardly looked like a college at all. And there seem to be a lot of schools, pretty much everywhere. I get that India is extremely large to that makes some sense, but it's interesting to hear another perspective from someone who has been through the schooling.

Anecdotally, the people on my team seem quite smart and capable, regardless of whatever quality of education they received, but we did have an intern locally who had a bachelor's from a school in India and was working on his masters at Oregon State University -- he knew so little about how to even use computers, much less write code that wasn't copy/paste from Stack Overflow, I was amazed that he was an actual master's student.

To be fair, I think saying they all "simply wanted the credential" is a bit dismissive of the Indian students. I'm sure many of them are passionate about computer science, and view an American MS as a path to higher learning and understanding in a subject they care about as much as they see it as a useful credential.

Why? It's a stupid hoop we make people jump through to get a job here (well, not a requirement, but it smooths the path. Both for the visa and for being located in the states to interview.) I've interviewed (and hired!) a ton of such folks and don't think most of them got much out of the MS programs they went to. FWIW we would almost certainly have been happy to hire them anyway.

It's true that an MS is advantageous when applying for an H-1B (albeit an advantage that has been steadily eroding over the years). But equally attractive is the vastly better quality of instruction, facilities, and opportunities available at even the median American university compared to some of the top Indian schools.

Although the parent is not 100% correct, the majority of MS students from India and China are in the US for improving their odds of getting the H1B visa. These students either missed the H1B boat while they were working in India or they were not competent enough to be hired from their college campus, or their colleges were not good enough for a company to recruit.

H1B is a quota based lottery system. There is extra quota for MS graduates in US. They also have two chances to get an H1B while being in the US under an OPT work visa after studies. (2 years stayback visa)

Now after graduation, these students go to the body shops which are conveniently setup in those college cities. The body shops are usually run by IT managers in fortune 500 companies who is now a US citizen. (most of them came in the Y2K boat). The IT managers bill the body shops at very high billing rate, thus filling their own coffers.

For example: Take ASU, Arizona State University. Check the demographics of MS students there and the body shops around that area.

You get the idea.

More about the faux consulting companies here. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4100451

> In my MS it was about 65% Indian BS students and 35% local students

I can top that. When I was doing an MS in CS at UT Arlington between 2005 and 2008, I was one of two US citizens in the entire program.

Do you have any estimates for what countries or regions the other students in the program were from?

LOL. Almost all of them were from India. There were a handful (less than a dozen) from China, but in more than one case I was taking a course with about 35 other students where I was the only non-Indian in the room, including the instructor.

Friend was in USF. Class composed entirely of Indians, no exceptions. Not a single US citizen in it.

I agree with you and Regehr. As a longtime IT hiring manager I have noticed that candidates with a coursework-only MS do no better in screening interviews than those with a BS degree, but applicants with a research-based MS fared much better. It is rare to be able to see the distinction based on resume alone, but it comes out clearly in interviews when we ask about their Master's work and focus.

Our oldest son earned a Master's degree in CS from the same school where Regehr teaches and did the research path. He now works at Google. His program was the most difficult thing he has ever done and it prepared him well for his career.

Not just in the H1B lottery. There’s also the OPT (2 years for STEM) which allows graduates to work in the US while trying for the lottery.

yes its obvious that there is massive gaming going on you can see this by students doing a Bsc the immediately a MBA (which was originally meant for late 20's mid 30's bog standard managers in big companies)

> The cause is simple, an MS is very advantageous when applying for an H1-B.

Not really. It's okay, I guess.

As an Indian who did MS in US. The parent is 100% correct.

He's not. Think back about your peer group and see if you can pick many people that did a MS because there's an extra 20000 slots. It was zero for me.

It increases your chances in a competitive system. It's good, not "okay, I guess".

> The Immigration Act of 1990 limits to 65,000 the number of foreign nationals who may be issued a visa or otherwise provided H-1B status each fiscal year (FY). An additional 20,000 H-1Bs are available to foreign nationals holding a master's or higher degree from U.S. universities.

> Those who have the U.S. master's exemption have two chances to be selected in the lottery: first, a lottery is held to award the 20,000 visas available to master's degree holders, and those not selected are then entered in the regular lottery for the other 65,000 visas. Those without a U.S. master's are entered only in the second, regular, lottery.

That is definitely a non-negligible advantage.

I agree it's non-negligible. It's not a very big advantage.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com