Why Can't US Build A Homegrown Tech Workforce?

Tech industry giants Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Google were all founded by first- or second-generation immigrants . Furthermore, immigrants have founded more than half of the nation's billion-dollar startups since 2018.

Restricting foreign graduate students' path to US employment, as some prominent Trump supporters have called for , could significantly reduce the number of international graduate students in US universities.

About 80% of graduate students in American computer science and engineering programs – roughly 18,000 students in 2023 – are international students.

The loss of international doctoral students would significantly diminish the research capability of graduate programs in science and engineering. After all, doctoral students, supervised by principal investigators, carry out the bulk of research in science and engineering in US universities.

It must be emphasized that international students make a significant contribution to US research output .

For example, scientists born outside the US played key roles in the development of the Pfizer and Moderna Covid-19 vaccines . So making the US less attractive to international graduate students in science and engineering would hurt US research competitiveness.

Computing PhD graduates are in high demand. The economy needs them, so the lack of an adequate domestic pipeline seems puzzling.

So, why is there such a reliance on foreign students for US science and engineering? And why hasn't America created an adequate pipeline of US-born students for its technical workforce?

After discussions with many colleagues, I have found that there are simply not enough qualified domestic doctoral applicants to fill the needs of their doctoral programs.

In 2023, for example, US computer science doctoral programs admitted about 3,400 new students, 63% of whom were foreign.

It seems as if the doctoral career track is simply not attractive enough to many US undergrad computer science students. But why?

The top annual salary in Silicon Valley for new computer science graduates can reach US$115,000. Bachelor's degree holders in computing from Rice University have told me that until recently – before economic uncertainty shook the industry – they were getting starting annual salaries as high as $150,000 in Silicon Valley.

Doctoral students in research universities, in contrast, do not receive a salary. Instead, they get a stipend. These vary slightly from school to school, but they typically pay less than $40,000 annually. The opportunity cost of pursuing a doctorate is, thus, up to $100,000 per year. And obtaining a doctorate typically takes six years .

So, pursuing a doctorate is not an economically viable decision for many Americans. The reality is that a doctoral degree opens new career options to its holder, but most bachelor's degree holders do not see beyond the economics. Yet academic computing research is crucial to the success of Silicon Valley.

A 2016 analysis of the information technology sectors with a large economic impact shows that academic research plays an instrumental role in their development.

The US is locked in a cold war with China focused mostly on technological dominance. So maintaining its research-and-development edge is in the national interest.

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Yet the US has declined to make the requisite investment in research. For example, the National Science Foundation's annual budget for computer and information science and engineering is around $1 billion. In contrast, annual research-and-development expenses for Alphabet , Google's parent company, have been close to $50 billion for the past decade.

Universities are paying doctoral students so little because they cannot afford to pay more.

Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai speaks at a Google I/O event in Mountain View, Calif., on May 14, 2024. Photo: AP via The Conversation /Jeff Chiu

But instead of acknowledging the existence of this problem and trying to address it, the US has found a way to meet its academic research needs by recruiting and admitting international students.

The steady stream of highly qualified international applicants has allowed the US to ignore the inadequacy of the domestic doctoral pipeline. The current debate about the H-1B visa system provides the US with an opportunity for introspection.

Yet the news from Washington, DC, about massive budget cuts coming to the National Science Foundation seems to suggest the federal government is about to take an acute problem and turn it into a crisis.

Moshe Y. Vardi , Professor of Computer Science, Rice University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article .

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