The Shortage of U.S.-Born Graduate Students
Re “A Frayed Welcome Mat” (Prism, March-April, 2019): The U.S. engineering education system is addicted to foreign graduate students in order to train future faculty and to raise tuition revenue. Because B.S.-degree graduates can draw high salaries, more funds need to be made available to encourage U.S. citizens to go to graduate school. My Last Word article (Prism, January 2018) proposed that the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academies’ Board of Higher Education and Work Force conduct a study that addresses trends in tuition and student debt; trends in graduate engineering degrees earned by U.S. citizens and foreign-born students; future demand for Ph.D.’s in industry, universities, and national labs; and H-1B and student visa programs. The point would be to recommend policies and actions needed to increase the number of U.S. citizens qualified to become faculty members. The United States should be ashamed that we can’t get enough of our own graduates into engineering graduate school. Why aren’t the presidents, deans, and department chairs demanding a study?
John Johnson
Presidential Professor Emeritus
Michigan Technological University
Re “A Frayed Welcome Mat” (Prism, March-April, 2019): The current research model in STEM fields—requiring a continuous labor feed from foreign countries—is politically unsustainable. Our universities must aggressively address the issues that are dissuading our undergraduate students from continuing their education beyond a bachelor’s degree to build a domestic labor force necessary to sustain our research enterprise.
Madhukar Vable
Professor Emeritus
Mechanical Engineering-Engineering Mechanics
Michigan Technological University
CLARIFICATION: In “Polar Prospects” (Prism, February 2019), a passage on Harvard fellow Russell Seitz’s approach to geoengineering contains what he says is an incorrect paraphrase. Instead of making ice more reflective, he suggests making water brighter by injecting microscopic bubbles. “By itself, deep water is dark, but if microbubbles are added near the surface, they backscatter sunlight, and the water becomes brightly reflective, just as light scattering makes snow white,” says Seitz, a senior research fellow at the Climate Institute.