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by jenny91 496 days ago
People seem to be getting stuck on the PhD opportunity cost piece for STEM. The matter of fact is that Americans don't do PhDs in STEM: if you look at the top schools and top departments, they are 70-90% international students. The PhD then is a phenomenal deal: by and large people are coming from places where FAANG jobs don't just fall on your lap at SF salaries. You get a free education in the US, and can jump straight into the job market as top-educated talent.

Also I think from NSF stats STEM PhDs are on a slow and upward trend, unlike the countries mentioned in the article.
1 comments
avs733 496 days ago
Your numbers are way off…number of American citizen or permanent resident divided by number of doctorates awarded:

35,566 / 57862 = 61.5% (overall)

26,622 / 45,533 = 58.5% (stem PhDs)

Survey of earned doctorates, national center for educational statistics, 2023 data…very useful, as are many of the data products the federal government collects, for however long this is up

https://ncses.nsf.gov/surveys/earned-doctorates/2023#data

link
jenny91 495 days ago
I'd say it's not that off: for computer science the numbers are 686/1150, so only about 40% are US citizens or PRs. This is even more scewed at top schools in my experience.

Also thanks for finding this data, didn't know it existed!

link