Graduating Into Second Place

At UMass Amherst, Foreign Graduates Got Jobs at A Far Higher Rate Than American Citizens — and Federal Policy Is Why

Earlier this week I spoke with students at Boston University and the week before at Miami University, Ohio, about visa programs such as the H-1B visa and employment authorization programs such as Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math Optional Practical Training (STEM OPT) that were ripping out the bottom rungs of the career ladder as they prepare for graduation. What I was telling them was not hyperbole. For white-collar professional workers in the United States, job opportunities and solid career paths are drying up faster than Lake Powell, and the educations they and their families have invested in may have amounted to a fool’s errand.

University of Massachusetts Amherst Campus

And contrary to a popular myth being circulated these days, AI is NOT ripping out the rungs. Torsten Slok, chief economist at Apollo, stated on March 23^rd, “We are monitoring the unemployment rate in the Philippines and India for any signs that AI is reducing the need for outsourced workers in corporate America. So far, there are no signs of AI replacing offshore workers. By way of example, on January 7, 2024, IBM listed just 173 open positions in India, but by early 2025, that figure had grown to 3,866 open roles—while U.S. job listings remained well below 400 during the same period. Now if roughly 1/3 of IBM’s global workforce, a hundred thousand workers, are in India, why are the only job reductions happening in the United States and Europe? Again, it is not AI.

In addition to corporations becoming addicted to cheaper and more compliant workers, hiring in many places becomes tribal as leadership chains become predominantly Indian. Some may question if it is correlation versus causation. But it is a fact that Indian CEOs notably expanded their India operations under their tenures.

Moreover, here in the United States, there is unusually strong evidence by the standards of workplace discrimination that includes federal jury verdicts, EEOC findings, DOJ lawsuits, and detailed internal company documents that show a pattern of US citizens being discriminated against for hiring, promotion, and pay. For instance, the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) sued Oracle for wage violations and hiring bias, alleging the company favored Asian applicants (90% of recent college graduates hired were Asian) and discriminated against qualified White, Hispanic, and African-American applicants. The DOL attributed the discrimination to strategies like targeted recruitment and referral bonuses that encouraged its heavily Asian workforce to recruit other Asians.

When I speak at campuses, I come armed with STEM OPT data for that particular school, which is available at optobservatory.org, produced by the Institute for Progress, and a state End STEM OPT petition, which you can sign if you’re from Massachusetts and can be found here. For instance, Boston University graduated 1,770 U.S. citizens and 1,552 foreign nationals on F-1 visas with master’s degrees in engineering between 2008 and 2022. 1,069, or 69%, of the international students obtained an engineering job right after graduation via STEM OPT. In addition, Boston University graduated 4,087 U.S. citizens and 2,615 foreign nationals on F-1 visas with master’s degrees in computer science between 2008 and 2022. 1,638, or 63%, of the international students obtained a computer job right after graduation via STEM OPT.

Painting with a broader brush, between the Class of 2008 and the Class of 2022, Massachusetts colleges added 55,042 foreign STEM OPT workers in those fourteen years. 19,049 foreign students were trained for engineering jobs, and 16,563 foreign students were trained for computer science and mathematics jobs in Massachusetts. You might say that’s not a lot. However, there were only 66,590 employed engineers in Massachusetts in 2023. Meanwhile, the employed Massachusetts OPT engineering workforce was 5,420 in 2022, meaning OPT workers actually made up 8.1% of the state’s total engineering workforce.

Now let’s zoom our analysis in even further, to the master’s computer science program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. The University of Massachusetts Amherst graduate program ranks among the top 10 computer science public programs in the United States and is the number one public program in the Northeast. Unlike most colleges, the computer science program was created early in 1964 and is housed in its own separate school, the Robert and Donna Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS).

Interestingly, Robert Manning graduated from the UMass Lowell campus in 1984 with a degree in information systems management and rose to become president and CEO of MFS Investment Management. Donna Manning earned a nursing degree in 1985 and an MBA in 1991 and had a 35-year career as an oncology nurse at Boston Medical Center. In 2021, Robert and Donna Manning gifted $50 million to the UMass system (the largest in the school’s history), with $18 million earmarked to the computer science college that now bears their name.

Robert and Donna’s philanthropy philosophy is deeply rooted in the understanding their “parents made a lot of sacrifices to send them to school.” I wonder how they would feel if they understood how federal employment visa programs and the UMass system were undermining the career opportunities of today’s graduates, graduates who, like them, grew up in places like Methuen, MA, and whose parents invested and sacrificed in and for them so they could have a shot at the American dream?

Read our latest data research brief here in full, or I can just give you the short version below:

We have concrete data on job outcomes for the Class of 2022 six months after graduation, specifically at the Robert and Donna Manning CICS master’s program. Our data came from the First Destination Survey, which is done across the country by hundreds of public and private colleges. Moreover, UMass Amherst’s career department pulled in data on 98% of 2022 master’s graduates from sources such as “the Careers Survey, Graduation Celebration Registrations, LinkedIn Profiles, and Staff Knowledge.” Other data included already compiled Optional Practical Training data by the Institute for Progress and classroom citizenship data from the Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics. All that data allowed the Institute for Sound Public Policy to show how employers are prioritizing foreign graduates over Americans for jobs before and after graduation from the same academic program.

Sadly, the picture we were able to paint was not a pleasant one. Our key take aways were:

1. Only 60% of American citizens who graduated with a master’s degree from UMass Amherst’s computer science college were working in any capacity after graduation, while the remainder were looking for work, continuing their education, or had an unknown situation.

2. Meanwhile, 86% of foreign student graduates got jobs related to the computer science major through Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) Optional Practical Training (OPT).

3. Class of 2022 unemployment rate: 12% overall, 23.5% for American citizens, and 6.7% for foreign graduates.

The Mannings are a rare and admirable example of people who never forgot where they came from. But where they came from no longer exists in the way they remember it. Today, a student from Methuen who works as hard as Rob did, sacrifices as Donna did, and graduates from the very college that bears their names, faces a 23.5% unemployment rate — not because they failed, but because federal visa policy made them an afterthought in their own country’s job market. Robert and Donna Manning deserve to know that. So do their fellow Americans.

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