November 13, 2006Foreign professors wantedAfter reading my story on Virginia Tech's new policy about sponsoring foreign faculty and staff for Green Cards, I received an email from Steven Toth of Roanoke which read, in part: "It was an eye-opener to read that VT found it necessary to establish a policy for a "growing number of foreign scholars" at VT. Why does VT find it necessary to hire foreign scholars to teach science and engineering at VT? Is there some sort of a prestige status or label attached to that practice? Aren't there enough U.S. scholars interested and capable of teaching at VT?" This article in today's Inside Higher Ed suggests that people in higher education think that looking beyond national borders, at least for students, is a good idea. And after a post 9-11 decline in foreign students in American schools, the numbers are finally on the way up again. While I'm still trying to track down figures for the number of foreign faculty nationally as well as get numbers to show recent trends at Tech, I have been able to find some statistics on students receiving engineering PhD's in the U.S. with the help of Mike Gibbons, director of data research for the American Society for Engineering Education. Only 14 other universities give out more engineering PhD's each year than Tech. Tech ranks seventh in the nation for the number of bachelor's degrees awarded in engineering each year. And since people teaching the classes are the ones with the PhD's, that would seem to give a good indication of the talent pool for engineering faculty. The numbers surprised me. The percentage of foreign students receiving engineering PhD's at American universities grew from 45.6 percent in 1999 to 59.4 percent in 2005. Gibbons told me that there are about the same number of American students receiving engineering PhD's today as there were in the early 1970s. |
About this blog
Rhode Island native and Virginia Tech reporter Greg Esposito posts on everyday college life, trends and issues affecting the 35,000-plus students in the New River Valley and beyond.
Tim Thornton, who is old enough to have children attending college, is still taking classes and is still fascinated by colleges, the students who populate them and the bureaucrats who operate them. His reporting beat is Radford University.
West Virginia native Anna Mallory blogs on student life topics at Virginia Tech, Radford University, New River Valley Community College -- and beyond.
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