Those grad programs are too large. The main draw for international students is often the visa, and the universities treat them as cash cows, often providing poor quality product.
A friend of mine in a graduate physics program recently told me that he felt that 90 percent of the students lacked the aptitude to capitalize on the program at all, but that the university was financially incentivized to keep them in.
Obviously, this applies to both foreign and domestic students, but the point is that these programs are grossly inflated.
This so much. I live in Boston so I end up interviewing a lot of new Northeastern grads. Foreign Masters students are the absolute worst cohort of candidates I deal with. The vast majority cannot write fizz buzz without help. A Northeastern Masters in CS seems to be nothing more then a way to buy a visa.
This is doubly sad because Northeastern BS in CS grads are probably the most successful group I interview and hire.
FWIW, I've interviewed tons of CS Masters grads myself, US and international. Northeastern is not alone in awful coding skills.
Makes me wonder what the typical curriculum is in a CS masters degree? How can so many people get a Masters without actually knowing fundamental programming skills?
Not a great analogy perhaps, but you can't get a Masters in French without speaking the language right?
This would depend on what specialty you're getting your masters in. What we would call theoretical computer science is really just math and predates computers. How many working programmers can explain fundamental concepts like the halting problem to a layperson? Clearly this knowledge isn't required to write good code but to use your analogy I'd say your average good programmer is more like the man in the chinese box than a fluent speaker of the language.
A friend of mine in a graduate physics program recently told me that he felt that 90 percent of the students lacked the aptitude to capitalize on the program at all, but that the university was financially incentivized to keep them in.
Obviously, this applies to both foreign and domestic students, but the point is that these programs are grossly inflated.