Indians With US Degrees Face Intense Competition for Work Visas from Fellow Indians

Only Five Percent of Students from India Find Jobs in the US After a Master's Degree

(Image: Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.)

By Ignatius Chithelen

June 21, 2026

“I just rushed here after my classes,” says Krishna R, as he introduces himself. We met last week in New York, at a conference on Trends in Credit Markets held by a financial data provider.

He was registered for the conference by the job placement office of a university in the New York area, where he just completed a MS in Finance. “I came here to network with employees of Fitch and Moody’s (which are financial rating agencies.) I want to find out what skills they seek in entry level employees,” he says.

Krishna, who graduates this week, has not found a job in the United States. How about the other students from India in your class, I ask. “Only four found jobs” in the US, he says. “There are ninety Indians in my class. We make up half of the 180 students” in the MS program. Why did only four Indians, and not the others, find jobs, I ask? “They have more experience. More than five years,” says Krishna.

The key MS Finance courses include Data Analytics, Corporate Finance, Capital Markets, and Risk Management, all of which require good numerical skills. Employers in the US, hiring for such roles at the entry level, prefer candidates with an undergraduate degree, or at least a minor, in either math, statistics, accounting, or econometrics.

Krishna, 26-years-old, earned a BA in Economics and Finance from a mid-ranked college in Chennai, India. Employers in the US may not hire him since he did not study math, I say. “No. It is because I have only two years of experience,” he says. He worked as a junior analyst in the credit department of a major private Indian finance company in Bangalore. “I have financial skills,” adds Krishna. “I passed the second level CFA exam” in 2024, before he came to study in the US.

The tuition, room, meals and other costs totaled about $130,000 for Krishna’s two-year Master’s. “I got a scholarship. It covered half my costs,” he says. “It was merit-based. I got 750 on the GMAT. Higher than the 730 minimum required for admission to Harvard’s MBA program,” he says.

More business schools in the US “are giving steep discounts on tuition that can save students up to 50%,” The Wall Street Journal reported last week. Also, the Journal reported, that “The unemployment rate for workers (in the US) under 35 with a master’s degree has rarely been higher in the past 20 years…”

Most Master’s programs in the US, including at the top business schools, offer “merit” scholarships to fill up the class. Apparently, by analyzing data of past students with similar financial backgrounds, universities offer an amount of scholarship which is most likely to attract a student to enroll, by borrowing the funds needed to cover the rest of the costs.

US universities face large, rising budget deficits, with even some major ones having to cut faculty and staff. Part of the reason is that, after years of sharp increases, foreign enrollments in MS programs are declining. This is because there are far fewer jobs for foreign graduates in the US and due to visa restrictions. To try to make up the shortfall in revenues, US universities offer teaser scholarships, pay consultants in India $10,000 for each student they help enroll, and use other aggressive strategies to recruit more students from India. The rational guiding faculty and officials at US universities is the version of India publicized by Indian government officials: there is a rapidly growing, wealthier middle class in India due to the country’s strong economic growth.

As is evident from Krishna’s class, students from India provide a sizeable portion of the revenues for many MS programs in the US. In the 2024-25 academic year, there were 363,000 students from India in the US, with 90 percent of them pursuing Master’s degrees. That year, they are estimated to have spent at least $24 billion to study in the US.

Scores on the Graduate Management Admission Test, GMAT, are not required by most MBA and MS programs in the US, including by the university Krishna attended. In fact, even the Harvard Business School has no minimum score requirement on the GMAT or even the less rigorous GRE test. Only 28 percent of the 943 students, in the Harvard MBA Class of 2027, submitted scores for the old, more rigorous GMAT 10^th Edition; the scores ranged from below 690 to above 770.

Krishna, along with 85 of his classmates, will have to leave the US within a month since it is highly unlikely an employer will hire them on a practical training visa. They return to India with a huge education debt burden to repay.

Krishna borrowed $65,000 from a private lender in India, with no collateral, at an annual interest rate of 10.5%. The lender “saw I have a good chance to repay the loan,” he says. “I got into a good university. I had high GMAT scores. I passed the first two CFA exams.” His parents were against him borrowing such a large sum. “My parents did not have to put up collateral for the loan,” says Krishna, as he wipes sweat from his forehead.

Major Indian banks, including the government-run State Bank of India, require collateral, usually the family home, for foreign education loans above Rupees five million, or $52,000. Also, apparently to reduce its losses on the loans, State Bank lends only to students admitted to one of the top 100 universities around the world. The university Krishna attended is not among the 36 US universities on the list. The terms of the State Bank loans are far more consumer friendly than on those made by private lenders, including interest rates which are two or more percent lower.

Like Krishna, most Indians who study in the US are not from wealthy families. So, they borrow $50,000 to $200,000 from Indian banks and lenders to pay for their education expenses, depending on whether they pursue one-or-two year-Master’s degree, at state or private US universities.

Krishna grew up in Chennai where his father works in a white-collar job at a government-run company. While working for a finance company in Bangalore, Krishna met colleagues who had worked in the US for three or more years and saved a decent amount, even after paying for loans for their American MBA or MS Finance degrees. So, he decided to seek a financial job in the US by pursuing a MS in Finance. “I wanted to study in New York. It is the financial center,” he says. Krishna had no interest in studying in the United Kingdom, even though the total costs are roughly a third to half lower than in the US.

Most universities in the US, especially those in the big cities, offer several Master’s degrees in finance, full-time and part-time and on campus and online. Programs include MBAs, Finance, Quantitative Finance, Data Analytics, and Risk Management. In addition to finance, in their drive to bring in more revenues, many of the big universities offer more than a 100 Master’s programs, most of which offer limited job prospects, including for American students.

Krishna applied to eight US universities, four top schools and the rest of lower quality in the New York area. How did he choose them, I ask. “I used the rankings published by the Financial Times. I also looked at job placement information” from the schools, he says.

Business schools in the New York City area emphasize that students will study in New York, the financial capital of the world, minutes from Wall Street; they can participate in a broad range of networking opportunities; and work as interns at financial firms. They also highlight that their MS degrees are Science, Technology, Engineering and Math programs. This allows Indian and other foreign students to be eligible for employment for up to three years on the Optional Practical Training visas, unlike one year for those with non-STEM degrees.

Krishna was rejected by Princeton, Columbia, New York University, the University of California, Los Angeles, and Baruch College. He was accepted by the University of Southern California. “The cost was $200,000. They did not offer me any scholarship,” he says. He was also accepted by Pace University in New York. “Pace gave me a similar scholarship. But it is ranked lower than the university I attended.”

The university where Krishna earned his MS is ranked in the 50’s, only a few steps higher than Pace and slightly lower than the University of Southern California. The Financial Times ranks 70 MS Finance programs around the world.

In 2024, before President Donald Trump’s changes in work visa policies, a student from India, with a STEM MS or PhD, had at best a one in three chance of being hired on a practical training visa. I ask Krishna how he knew if the rankings and job placement data would mean he will find a job in the US upon graduation. “I connected with recent graduates on LinkedIn,” he says. “They said if you get good grades and have experience you can find a job.” But do grades matter, I ask. He has good grades but not found a job.

I ask Krishna if he realized that Trump’s visa policies would lead to far fewer jobs in the US for students from India. When Trump was elected in 2024, “I was already in my first semester,” he says. I ask, did you not want to return to India and avoid at least $48,000 in debt. “I was getting top grades,” says Krishna. “I decided to continue.”

Given the massive unemployment among college graduates in India, Krishna evidently has good skills and work habits to be hired by a major financial firm in Bangalore. I ask if he should have stayed on the job and finished his CFA instead of borrowing $65,000 for an American MS degree. He leaves, saying he must network with employees of the rating agencies.

The US based CFA Institute confers the Chartered Financial Analysts designation to those passing all three exams. The fees for the exams, including for study materials and practice exams, total $3,520 for early registrants. Each exam lasts 4.5 hours, split into two sessions. In 2025, more than 150,000 candidates sat for the exams around the world. A quarter of them were from India, where the exams are held in 26 cities. The pass rate, for completing all three exams in the minimum 18 months, is around 10 percent. There are more than 200,000 CFAs around the world. Financial firms, including in the US, hire CFAs and many employees earn the charter while working, which enhances their career prospects.

Since the 2010s, most top students from India, including from the reputed Indian Institutes of Technology, avoid pursuing advanced degrees in the US since they have to borrow large sums to cover their costs.

Currently, most Indians pursuing MS degrees in the US are from mid-or-low tier colleges in India, who ignore the burden of debt, believing they will find better career opportunities in the US than in India. They are influenced by the stream of stories on the success of Indian professionals in the US, widely covered by the media in India.

Yes, many of the engineers and doctors, who migrated to the US in the 1970’s and 1980’s, achieved professional and financial success. But they were the top students in India, from the IITs and the best medical colleges. Most of them did not take on large debt to pursue advanced education in the US. More important, most found jobs in the US upon graduation.

Ironically, since the 2000s, the reduced work visa and job opportunities for Indians earning foreign degrees is in part due to a sharp increase in their numbers. In 2024, more than 1.3 million Indians were enrolled in foreign universities. This is up twenty-five fold, from about 53,000, in 2000; and up seven-fold, from about 192,000, in 2010. Hence, the intense competition, among college graduates for jobs in India, is also occurring among Indians with degrees in foreign countries.

The current reality, as Krishna and his classmates have found, is that the prospects of students from India finding a job in the US, especially after earning a MS from a mid-or-low ranked university, is one in twenty; US job prospects are far lower for Indians with non-STEM MS degrees.

I see Krishna at the cocktail reception after the conference ends. I wish him good luck in finding a job and paying off his debt.

(The student is referred to as Krishna.R, not his real name, to protect his identify.)

Story updated May 17, 2026.

Ignatius Chithelen is the publisher of Global Indian Times and author of Six Degrees of Education and Passage from India to America. A CFA, he is manager of Banyan Tree Capital, New York.