usa higher education

According to a recent National Science Foundation study, there has been a five per cent decline in overall doctoral candidates in the US over the last five years, going down from a peak of 42,652 in 1998 to 39,955 last year. While US citizens continue to dominate in humanities and social sciences, there is a steady decline in the number of Americans getting Ph.Ds in physical sciences (down from 6,679 to 5,715). They are also ditching math (1,123 to 917) and computer sciences (909 to 811). The study points to more and more foreign-born students, particularly Asians, getting doctorates, evidently, at the expense of Americans. In engineering, for instance, the number of US-born doctorates went down from 2,739 in 1997 to 1,890 in 2002. The corresponding rise for foreigner-born doctorates was 2,555 to 2,645. As a result, the share of foreign-born scientists and engineers in US science and engineering occupations stands at 29 per cent at the Master’s level and 38 per centat the doctoral level. At a meeting of graduate school deans held in Washington recently, the sci-tech studies crisis topped the agenda. For the first time, US educationists discussed the prospect of brain drain from USA. Typically, the top three countries of origin of non-US citizens earning doctorates are China, India and Korea. The University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), whose acronym is sometimes jokingly referred to as the University of Indians and University of Chinese, topped the list of institutions which had the largest number of non-US citizen doctorate recipients. But foreign grads are now conquering even smaller campuses. Last month, Rapid City in sleepy South Dakota celebrated its youngest and fastest Ph.D to graduate from its School of Mines and Technology.It is a familiar story across America’s elite institutions such as MIT, Harvard, UCLA and so on. The gradual decline of Americans going in for Ph.D in science, engineering and math is at the heart of the current crisis of jobs in the US hi-tech sector.