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Comment by aggronn | Hacker News Reader

An old professor of mine had a conversation with someone at MIT about a student trying to get into their PhD Econ program, and he relayed to me an interesting, paraphrased quote:

"Of the 30 person cohort they take in every year, only about 4 or 5 of them were domestic. I don't understand why that seems so odd to people--isn't it presumptuous to assume that every year, more than 20% of the top 30 students in the world are american?"

In other words, it really shouldn't surprise people that for universities that compete on an international level, a majority of students are international.

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I would also argue that there's substitution effects too. Many Americans capable of getting into the top Econ Phd programs can get salaries post-undergrad that would rival their post-Phd salaries. This is less true of students in many other countries.

It would be odd if more than50% were Chinese. If we are talking about worldwide populations ans statistics.

Slightly, but not entirely. I wonder how many Chinese people want PhDs per year vs Americans? I'd expect the former is larger, partly due to sheer population size and partly due to the must-get-credentials culture that I've not seen in the US as much.

Chinese Uni's are PhD mills. Every student who attends, and can put up with indentured servitude for n years gets one. That's not to say that there aren't some very smart Chinese, and some good Uni's in China, just that the average Chinese PhD is meaningless. edit: (not meaningless, but that the avg Chinese PhD isn't equivalent to one from the US, Europe, Russia, etc.)

source: Colleague with a PhD from China, and living/working in China for a couple of years on a research project.

This is quite true. The best students go abroad to get PhDs anyways, or...maybe some very special institutes in China that are up to Western standards (e.g. Andy Yao's lab in Qinghua).

Smart students still come out of these schools in spite of the PhD programs, but there are plenty of wasted opportunities.

Good universities in the US are really very, very good - it makes sense for them to recruit internationally. But bad universities, man, they are just plain awful.

I think the graduate program at Dead Squaw College, IA should close its doors today instead of keeping its head above water with foreign students. With that kind of doctoral degree they hand out there no one finds employment, either in the US or abroad.

For many countries any sort of American degree is a huge credential for any candidate returning home. Even if people bother to check the reputation of the course, which they usually won't, study in America indicates some level of aptitude in English (and for those developing countries further establishes them as being from a wealthy, high status background and capable of getting past US immigration.)

And yeah, I'm confident that the PhD from Dead Squaw would get them senior academic roles in the top national universities of some backwater countries.

I think the assumption is that top universities don't compete on a perfectly international level. For example, not everyone can speak enough English to attend an English university.

(Yes, insert jokes about how your TA was unintelligible- I mean the students who do not speak a single word of English. I would bet they are less likely to attend English universities.)

You would be surprised. I have a fair few fellow students who speak English well enough to hold basic conversations but the moment you need to talk about more than the weather they lack the understanding of the language to put the sentences together (like someone who can piece together code suddenly being asked to synthesize a new program from scratch). A few fair better in technical subjects but at least for one English university, this doesn't appear to be a barrier.

(As an aside, I had a pair of Portuguese TAs who spoke very good English, but had a slight issue with the letters of the alphabet. And a couple of the English letters share names with different Portuguese ones which made for interesting Elementary Logic tutorials.)

I can totally talk about the weather in Chinese but as soon as we start talking about work, I have to switch to English.

Thankfully, my Chinese colleagues have much better English than I do.

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