I would characterize working over talented foreigners in this way as a grift, rather than a scam.

They pay the high sticker price because it's rationally their best choice, but the value they're purchasing isn't in the degree, but rather the favorable status they earn in the immigration labyrinth.

This isn't good for them, except in comparison to other options. It certainly isn't good for native-born Americans, who are (for the most part) stuck paying the same high sticker prices, without getting the features which justify the high cost of the product.

It should also be viewed as potentially disadvantaging people already in the US. If these programs are catering to wealthy foreigners looking to immigrate, then we're not serving whatever need may be inside the country already.

In some fields, there is no need for masters degrees at all. For example in physics you can get a bachelors and career out, or get a PhD and be a physicist (industrial or academic), but there are no jobs I can think of that a masters would qualify you for that a bachelors wouldn't.

> but there are no jobs I can think of that a masters would qualify you for that a bachelors wouldn't.

Typically, community college faculty (and sometimes university lecturers) require a minimum of a master's in the field, and at least the first is as true of physics as it is generally.

In government it makes a difference in promotions and salary bands.

I have seen in electrical engineering some jobs advertise that they want someone with a masters, but really what they want is someone who understood and can use at least something from their undergrad and can be relied upon to exercise theory as opposed to someone who just passed.

I'm considering a masters in physics because I'm interested in possibly pursuing a Ph.D. there, but never got beyond 200-level in undergrad. The local university offers a physics MS that's basically a rebranding of their undergrad core, but at night to cater to working adults. It'd be cheaper to just take the undergrad classes, but that just doesn't fit into life, so I'm willing to pay for the privilege of being able to take them at night. (A Ph.D. program may never fit into real life either, but that's a different problem for a different day).

Some employers pay for higher education, but there is little ability for people to actually get that education. Many people in this thread do not value a masters specifically because they are not a good investment just looking at the price.

If the education system was different, more people would want them, and they would be more useful. See commenter below who notes that CS masters are usually quite useful but also are not employment gating and have many reasons to stay competitive with other programs.

A master’s in physics is usually a sort of consolation prize to people who do not finish their PhD. Like you said, you either need a BS or PhD.

Assuming you're actually smart and skilled - wouldn't it be better to just start your own consulting business, or if you're really ambitious, eventually an agency?

Aren't H1-B visa workers mostly in extremely HCOL areas and significantly underpaid / taken advantage of?

I imagine if you're from India and you really want to get out of India - this sounds like a good deal (although wouldn't $50k for tuition be hard to get?) But, I'm assuming most people just want to have more money / a better life?

Wouldn't the first option be better? And then you could stay closer to friends and family.

Consulting straight out of school is a really tough sell. Consultants are most often considered valuable by their employers because of their experience in a given industry.

I would not want to try to pitch myself as a consultant as a foreigner with little to no American work experience. If you’re doing it yourself, sales will be a challenge.

To speak more strongly, it’s going to be impossible unless you’re a rock star.

My first gig out of school was consulting.

Heck, I did consulting in school to support tuition.

I think there are a few factors to consider.

(1) Ability isn't one-dimensional. Consulting is a different skillset than full-time work. It's not harder or easier -- you just have to be more of a package deal -- finding business, contracts, billing, etc.

(2) Interest. Most people are happier in a full time job not because consulting is hard but because they'd rather not do all those things. If you don't want to deal with contracts and billing, consulting isn't for you.

(3) Consulting goes all the way from cheap Indian contractors, through boutique UX shops, through Caltech professors consulting on esoteric issues.

You definitely don't need to be a rock star. Companies hire consultants for a variety of reasons. Some need some particularly hard technical problem, but plenty simply need a talent for a short amount of time. It's the same difference between in-house counsel (which is good for ongoing legal issues) versus law firm (which is good for one-off issues). Or if you're worried about a tree falling down on your house, you might bring in a random arborist to consult.

I picked up the skillset because I needed to pay tuition, not out of any innate interest or talent. You might not have the skillset for it, but it's not rocket science. You could pick it up too pretty quickly if the situation arose.

Now double the age, I find I don't actually like consulting very much. I need to charge about double to triple my salary to cover overhead, and overhead is all stuff I don't actually enjoy doing. It does have upsides. I do like the variety. The boom/bust of consulting works well if you have a bit saved up and a low cost-of-living -- booms are intense, and busts make for nice vacations. I also prefer not having to worry about things like overarching employment agreements and an employer owning me. But that doesn't outweigh the hassle of having to sell myself, send invoices, negotiate contracts, etc.

But not necessarily a technical rock star… If you’re really good at sales and you can somehow procure the technical talent elsewhere, you might be able to pull it off.

I am no rock star but my first three gigs after my MS were consulting gigs. 1 software and 2 network consulting jobs, including a high speed metro area network.

It is fun and flexible but not as nice as a steady job. Plus, I have no people skills. :)

"Smart and skilled" are only loosely correlated to success as consultant and small business.

This is not meant to be sarcasm. There are many other characteristics necessary and better indicators. I am smart skilled and successful. But I made a lousy consultant when I tried it too early in life - (self)salesmanship, business skills, tenacity and courage, people skills, and a specific view on risk acceptance are far more important. Relationships and a full Rolodex and branding / reputation don't hurt either.

(A specific view on integrity and ethics too. I'm not saying no integrity or no ethics. But the salespersons / deal closers in my area are all honourable truthful people whose job I couldn't do because my view of truth wouldn't necessarily correspond to theirs)

Finally, if we grant your last statement that most people want renumeration and happy life, for many smart and skilled people, stress and risk that comes with consultancy business does not contribute to happiness.

I used to work for a small tech company in the suburbs outside of St Louis, which is definitely not a HCOL area. When I left (to move back to a HCOL tech hub), probably about half of the engineering staff were H1-B visa holders. This was because we often had trouble finding qualified candidates that were either already local or willing to relocate to the area. Visa sponsorship was a much more compelling reason to relocate than anything we could offer US citizens.

The office was near Mastercard's global operations headquarters and it seemed like they also employed a lot of visa holders. So I don't think we were particularly unique in our willingness to offer visa sponsorship in a LCOL area.

>This was because we often had trouble finding qualified candidates that were either already local or willing to relocate to the area. Visa sponsorship was a much more compelling reason to relocate than anything we could offer US citizens.

Seems rather unlikely. What I guess you might mean is that you couldn't find qualified candidates at the pay ranges you were offering.

No, speaking from the Midwest there is in some areas a real shortage of experienced/qualified candidates. Even if you pay $200k, $300k, more, there are a lot of Americans who will not move to the Midwest. Folks from overseas, though, don't have the same preferences or prejudices. If you're coming from China, India, Bulgaria, Nigeria, Colombia, what does Minnesota vs Missouri vs Maryland really matter if you're coming for a job? Iowa vs Ohio? As long as you can find a suburb with good schools it's interchangeable. People who are attached to San Francisco or Seattle or the Northeast though do not harbor the same openness to moving to Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, etc.

I'd love to see any midwest company paying those numbers, for a non C-level role. Hell, even trying to get above 100k/annum in the midwest is nearly impossible. Remote work options have made this a bit better; if the company then doesn't offer you "local market rates" bullshit.

Having driven through St. Louis (and Missouri) quite a number of times, I would be not be willing to relocate to the area. Maybe if the job paid really well AND was a really close match to what I wanted to do I might consider it. But for just pay, it's not even on my list of places I'm even looking for jobs.

That H1-B workers are "taken advantage of" is a myth. Yes some of them are but it isn't the case that if you hold such a visa you are being underpaid. Source: was an H1-B holder.

Depends on the industry and profession. A lot of professional healthcare workers are hired well below competitive market rates.

Source: partner was one, doubled salary after, is friends with dozens more who went through the same exploitation now making significantly more.

1. I think you are mixing smart with courageous, starting a business requires some courage.

2. Nope. At least those working for FANGs aren’t. You can see so many cases of folks were for low paying consultancies in India getting masters and then getting a job at FANG.

3. Getting an education loan for STEM is really easy and people are willing to put their parents house up for collateral.

I think with a FANG or good tech job you can be done with your loan in an year or two. Some people go to state schools and don’t get into any debt, or pay it off via internships. The US in most Indian people’s head comes with a better quality of life, a lot more money and better infrastructure. Perhaps some status too.

> Assuming you're actually smart and skilled

as an interviewer, I see many w/ masters degrees who are neither.

Right - I think a lot of people hope that by being more educated they'll get "smarter". That's not really how it works. You just get more educated.

In software, you DO need a lot of skills. But I think more important than that is having the ability to learn new things/skills quickly (being smart). The industry is always changing and evolving.

College is only going to get you the skills - maybe, a lot of times they teach you things that aren't that useful in the job market and don't teach you the things that are.

Nobody gets paid if you're an autodidact.

No, they're also abused in MCOL and LCOL areas. And they might be smart and skilled, but most of the ones I interviewed are lousy software engineers.

If we were talking about people with master's degrees from MIT or Stanford, it'd be a different ball game.

But I can't tell you how many candidates I've seen with something like a "Master of Science in Information Systems from the University of South Central Appalachia".

Well, even then framing a $50k degree as a workaround for US immigration woes, and not as an $50k worth of added value in terms of skills and education makes it sound like a racket, even if the numbers work out in the students' favour.

The USA essentially runs on rackets. E.g higher education, changing engine oil at 5000 miles, Citizens United...

The gist is right, but details are wrong. Undergraduates can also get a 3-year work visa via OPT with STEM extension during which you can enter into the H-1B lottery multiple times (as many as four times if you time it well). It's just masters have higher chances in that lottery.

> are huge moneymakers as a ticket to working in the US.

Beyond that, the international Masters students are really subsidizing the education of other students. Every time there is some friction added to the student visa process, all but the top schools with huge endowment funds feel the financial pressure.

Most narratives I read about this situation paints the picture of the students buying their way into US residency via Masters program. But it works the other way too - many US citizens are able to get educated at an affordable price because of the money these Masters students bring in to the school.

Seems the US government could skip the middleman by just selling work visas for $50k and subsidizing education for Americans.

we've had foreign job candidates with masters degrees in CS from top 50 schools who couldn't pass a simple programming test or who couldn't answer some basic CS questions on O(n) or whatnot.

I'm not talking sadistic google interview questions, these were things that anyone with a BS should be able to answer.

That has happened to me so many times that my last company shreds resumes from foreign students with a prestigious American masters where the undergrad is not similarly prestigious (eg IIT and Tsinghua are good, but not many other schools).

India has a population of well over a billion people. IITs admit only about 5000 students per academic year, from about 100K students applying, across all disciplines. If you find all other students from India not qualified, maybe there is something seriously wrong with your candidate outreach, or you hire from a very exclusive pool even stateside.

That's true, but having seen (non-IIT) Indian colleges, I am not surprised if 80%+ students they see are like that. Moreover, intelligent ones less commonly opt for masters degrees because they get good offers in campus placements, especially those from middle class or rural areas are already doing undergrad on loans.

We did only hire from about 20 schools in the US. The unfortunate thing is that the masters programs did not filter nearly as exclusively as the undergrad programs.

Ok, so you were "shredding resumes" of students of all but 20 schools in US, IITs and Tsinghua. That's an extremely high hiring bar.

I don't think this experience can be used to draw general conclusions on the quality of education across Masters programs in US.

Yeah, I know many people who wouldn't have passed that bar making bank working at FAANGS.

for "top 50 schools", what "top 50" are you implying? top 50 worldwide? top 50 us? or top 50 in their own foreign country?

As a sidenote: a lot of CS/Software Engineering graduates with a bachelor in my own country (Italy) can't pass simple programming tests, because most of the education is (too?) focused on theoretical aspects, and most of the time people is tested with non-practical exams.

Masters at Buffalo in computer science costs about 26k in tuition.

You forgot another option. Immigrate to Canada and then move to the US on a TN.

That may be an even better option because you can retire in Canada with free healthcare.

> are huge moneymakers as a ticket to working in the US.

Not just the US. Most countries in Europe offer international master degrees in english that serve the exact same purpose.

I came to post the same thing - sometimes Americans forget that they are a country of immigrants. And one of the routes for potential immigrants is college education.

But with a typically enterprising capitalist mindset, the American system also wants to ensure that talented individual don't go back to their country (or elsewhere) immediately after getting a degree. This is where the high cost of a US college degree comes into the picture - the burden of paying for it acts like an anchor for most students who come from developing countries or econonomically weak background. Even if they get some kind of scholarship and / or do part-time work, they still have to take a huge loans to live in the US to complete their education. And often the fastest way to repay these loans is to work in the US or other developed nations. This may take another few years. The American system hopes that by then the potential immigrant would be sufficiently exposed to the American culture and lifestyle and consider staying here.

(The high cost also ensures quality of education is high in the US, thus attracting talents from around the world. And the money is also pumped into a lot of R&D in the college allowing US to maintain a big tech lead. It's a neat system that seems to work so far.)

The other aspect of ensuring that higher education remains costly in the US is to also ensure that a blue-collar workforce continues to exist, and wage is suppressed among the white-collars. Perhaps the law makers also feel that it acts like an incentive to work more diligently, out of anxiety and worry - after all, people with more qualification, experience and higher stable income often tend to jump around more (which the big tech try to thwart by entering into illegal agreements to not hire each others employee).