There are legitimate and rational reasons for not wanting a large influx of poor immigrants into a developed nation.
Using the US as an example, in the 1800's and early-to-mid 1900's, American work was largely labor intensive agricultural and factory based work. Labor was in huge demand, and as a result the middle class was able to thrive. Today that is no longer the case, and a massive rift between rich and poor is developing as the middle class collapses without an economic foundation to support its existence, this being the labor intensive industries that have largely disappeared in modern Western nations. This has been the development path of all developed nations.
As modern economies are already struggling with worsening labor conditions for the majority of their people and the resulting stresses on social programs, it makes little sense to open immigration to the impoverished masses.
This is a realist perspective. Denying the economic factors at play here will only lead to increased socio economic tension in developed societies at a time when such tension is already at a high water mark in modern history.
This isn't "realist", it's the usual clichés and lies that are always propagated by people trying to justify anti-immigrant sentiment.
It perpetuates the falsehood that immigrants stress social programmes. In fact, social programmes in Western countries are stressed by the shifting demographics of their indigenous populations, and require immigrants to prop them up.
Social programmes like state pensions and healthcare were created in an age when Western countries had large working-age populations, and relatively small numbers of older, non-working people. However, the decrease in fertility and increase in life expectancy across the West has flipped this. There are too many older people, and not enough indigenous tax-paying citizens to support them.
Politicians in Western countries saw this problem coming in the 1990s. Since cutting social programmes that affect the elderly is politically impossible, they realised the only solution was to liberalise their immigration policies. Immigrants are statistically younger, healthier, harder-working, and pay more taxes than the average indigenous citizen. As a bonus, many of them return to their home country when they get older, so you don't need to pay for their pensions / healthcare.
Ironically, old people in these countries then decided, or were persuaded, that they disliked immigration. So they started supporting parties with anti-immigrant policies, even though this was totally against their economic self-interest. The result is a political paradox that no Western politician has been able to unravel, although populists have made hay exploiting it.
College is largely an exercise in social credentialing and signaling. If we make college free, the people who want to get ahead in society will just go to expensive graduate programs in order to distinguish themselves. Then the discussion will shift to fully funding those programs...
Our current system is very fair. Take out a loan if you need to, but make sure your post graduation prospects justify taking a loan out. If they don't, then don't get the loan.
One of the major reasons why college is so expensive today is because the availability of loans means Universities are able to continuously hike tuition in support of ever expanding bureaucracies (not in support of the core educational mission) without fear of students not being able to pay, because the loans mean students can always secure funding! Society is basically writing them a blank check... The answer is NOT to give them even more money!
College education has become a financial black hole that will only expand if we throw more money at it.
PhD students getting stipends are essentially contract employees. They are doing work, either as associate instructors or research assistants, for that money.
Just asking to gauge the community: I'm about to start a full time in person MS CS program at an Ivy League school. The school I'm studying at is not recognized as having an elite CS program, but it is top 20. Will the general prestige of the school I'm studying at help with getting internships and jobs after graduation?
Totally as an aside, but for what it’s worth, 20 years ago when I did my degree I gave myself a rule that I would do 1 extracurricular activity every year that I could talk to for 5 minutes in a job interview.
I theorised that over the course of 4 years (5 as it turned out) would give me 20 minutes of talking time.
It worked. Even with average scores (and a handful of fails) I got a well paying job at a top company. Even back in the late 90’s many hiring managers valued experience and personality equally to academic transcripts.
The extracurricular activities were:
* organised LAN gaming days for 100 people to teach myself networking, event management, marketing etc. Quake was the game by the way :)
* half a day a week work experience for a year at a relevant employer
* involvement in a paid capacity at the student association, taking on leadership roles
* something else I cannot remember now!
It'll help if you learn to network with alumni and pull together a good portfolio for you resume. Consider how balanced your resume looks today and what it's going to look like with only that MS CS program. As you go, investigate what companies are currently looking for and try to balance it with some practical skills that are related to what they are doing. You don't have to program the exact same language, but try to match at the conceptual level. Example: if they used Scala then your Clojure and Java experience is likely enough for them to take a bet on you assuming other fundamentals match up. Things like hackathons etc. might be a good start if you have real world experience today.
It's also good to look for any sort of volunteer position that'll help development of leadership skills. With a master's degree expectations will be that you can develop into a leadership role which doesn't necessarily mean management.
maybe, but you'll still have to interview and do okay. It matters if you are cmu, mit, stanford, berkely, uw (maybe?) but who knows the next tier. this will probably be unpopular but there's so much more demand than available students that just doing a decent job in an interview will yield you all the jobs you could ever want.
Using the US as an example, in the 1800's and early-to-mid 1900's, American work was largely labor intensive agricultural and factory based work. Labor was in huge demand, and as a result the middle class was able to thrive. Today that is no longer the case, and a massive rift between rich and poor is developing as the middle class collapses without an economic foundation to support its existence, this being the labor intensive industries that have largely disappeared in modern Western nations. This has been the development path of all developed nations.
As modern economies are already struggling with worsening labor conditions for the majority of their people and the resulting stresses on social programs, it makes little sense to open immigration to the impoverished masses.
This is a realist perspective. Denying the economic factors at play here will only lead to increased socio economic tension in developed societies at a time when such tension is already at a high water mark in modern history.