Some thoughts on foreign graduate student citizenship

[johnd83]

4. I think things have actually gotten a little worse

At my university there are two sources of funding: teaching assistants (TA) and research assistant (RA). The TA are funded internally, and the RA are funded externally by companies or from government grants. About 3-4 years ago they changed the rules so that a student could only get 2 years of TA funding, meaning that every student needed external funding to finish a Ph.D. This is a very hard situation considering the economy crashed about that time and it led to a lot of pain. About 6-7 years ago my university introduced a 5-year co-terminal masters program that allowed a student to keep their undergraduate funding arrangement (whatever they decided to knock off the top since the tuition is so ridiculously high anyway...) and get a master's degree. The problem with this situation is that they usually wind up with an M.Eng. instead of an M.S. The M.Eng. degree is basically a dead-end in graduate school.

I feel your pain for funding. My advisor for my M.S. liked my work and promised to fund me throughout my Ph.D. Even then it was struggle and I worked on a lot of different projects over the years to stay funded.

The real problem here is that we just aren't investing enough in research and graduate level education. It is not that there are too many foreign graduate students, there just aren't enough students period. A relative pittance of federal government investment in NSF, NIH, etc. would do have a massive payoff economically.