Friday, July 11, 2008

Chinese dominate Ph.Ds in US

A post in Science indicates that Chinese students dominate the Ph.D degrees in US. The top 2 school who provides the most US Ph.Ds are Tsinghua University and Peking University, which are the top 2 universities in China. As shown in the following graph, the number of Ph.D holders from China is increasing over the past years and is now above UC Berkeley to be the top 2.

From my personal point of view, one reason that causes this could be the better visa situation in China, which encourages more and more students in China to pursue a degree in US. Another reason I suspect could be because of of the H1B visa limitation. Due to the harsh situation of getting a H1B visa, many students choose to stay in School and get a higher degree in order to win in the job market.

This is interesting to the IT field, too, because for one, it says clearly that more Chinese students are coming to US, and most of them are in engineering major. It could mean a lot to the job market, which has already been dominated by engineers from China and India. For another, Ph.Ds are the fresh blood of the academic field, which to me, will potentially affects the direction of the market. It won't have any effect in the next couple of years, but I think it's surely an interesting trends for both industrial and academic fields. Let's see if the Congress is gonna do something.

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