Only Five Percent of Students from India Find Jobs in the US After a Master's Degree
Why a student from India, who borrowed $65,000 to pay for an American degree, may have trouble repaying the debt
By Ignatius Chithelen
May 16, 2026
“I just rushed here after my classes,” says Krishna R, as he introduces himself. We met last week at a conference on Trends in Credit Markets, held by a financial data provider in New York.
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,” says Krishna.
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 had more experience. More than five years,” says Krishna.
The key courses in his MS program 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, typically prefer candidates with an undergraduate degree, or at least a minor, in 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 does not have a math or related degree, 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 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 total about $130,000 for Krishna’s two-year Master’s. “I got a scholarship. It covered half my costs,” Krishna says. “It was merit-based. I got 750 on the GMAT. This was 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.
Most Master’s programs in the US, including at the top business schools, offer “merit” scholarships to fill up the class. Apparently using the data of past students with similar financial backgrounds, universities offer an amount of scholarship which is most likely to get 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 graduate student enrollments are declining. There are fewer foreign students in the US due to reduced job opportunities and adverse changes in work visa policies. To try to make up the shortfall in revenues, US universities are offering teaser scholarships, paying consultants in India $10,000 for each student they help enroll, and using other aggressive strategies to recruit more students from India.
As is evident from Krishna’s class, students from India provide a sizeable portion of the revenues for many Master’s programs in the US. In the 2024-25 academic year, there were 363,000 students from India at colleges and universities in the US. That year, they spent at least $24 billion to study in the US, with 90 percent of them pursuing Master’s degrees.
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 10th 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 at an annual interest rate of 10.5%. “They gave me the loan because I have a good chance to repay it,” 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 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. More important, State Bank lends only to students admitted to one of 100 universities around the world. The university Krishna attended is not among the 36 US universities on the list. The interest rate on the State Bank loans are two or more percent lower than those from private lenders.
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 universities.
Krishna grew up in Chennai where his father works in a white-collar job at a government-run company. While Krishna was working for a finance company in Bangalore, given his interest and his passing the second CFA exam, he decided to pursue a MS in Finance and seek a financial job in the US. “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 revenues, some of the big universities offer more than a 100 Master’s programs, most of which offer limited job prospects, especially for Indian 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 the universities, I ask. “I used the World Rankings published by the Financial Times. I also looked at the 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.
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 admitted to Pace University in New York. “They gave me roughly a similar scholarship. But they are not ranked as high as the university I joined.”
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 Trump’s changes in work visa policies, a student from India, with an MS or PhD in Science, Technology, Engineering or Math, had only 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. “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 Krishna. He has good grades but has not found a job.
Did Krishna not realize that President Donald Trump’s new work visa and other policies would lead to even fewer jobs in the US for students from India. “I had already taken the loan and was in my first semester when Trump was elected” in 2024, he says. I ask, did you not want to return to India, during the first semester, avoiding at least $45,000 in debt? “I was getting top grades,” says Krishna. “I decided to continue and earn the degree.”
Given the massive unemployment in India among college graduates, Krishna evidently has good skills and work habits to be hired by the major financial firm in Bangalore. I ask him if he should have stayed on the job in Bangalore 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 three self-study 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 overall 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 CFAs on the job, which enhances their career prospects.
Very few of the top students from India, including from the reputed Indian Institutes of Technology, pursue advanced degrees in the US if they have to borrow large sums to cover their costs.
Indians pursuing MS degrees in the US are mostly from mid-or-low tier colleges in India who believe they will have better career opportunities in the US than in India. They are influenced by the stream of stories of the success of Indian professionals in the US, widely covered by the media in India. Yes, many of the engineers and doctors from the top colleges in India, who migrated to the US in the 1970’s and 1980’s, achieved professional and financial success.
But expecting to repeat such success today is like driving a car by looking in the rear-view mirror. The current reality, as Krishna and his classmates have found, is that the prospects of students from India even finding a job in the US, after earning a Master’s degree, is far less than one in three, even one in twenty.
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.)
Ignatius Chithelen is the publisher of Global Indian Times and author of Six Degrees of Education and Passage from India to America.