In 2019, the U.S. Congressional Research Service issued a report (to Congress) finding that 49% of STEM grad students were foreign born (as of 2016-2017).
This percentage is even higher for graduate degrees, as foreign students accounted for 54% of master’s degrees and 44% of doctorate degrees issued in STEM fields in the United States in SY2016-2017
Within some specific STEM sub-fields, the % who are foreign born is vastly higher: “81 percent of full-time graduate students in electrical and petroleum engineering programs and 79 percent in computer science at U.S. universities are international”. That data comes from this report (see table, below).
A majority of those with PhD degrees will remain in the U.S. (72% after ten years). The percent of those with Masters degrees, who stay, was not specified, but may be similar.
As a rule, those with advanced degrees are those who move up in their organizations into positions of leadership. Since those who move up are a subset, it works out that those with advanced degrees and global experience are those who move up. Corollary: if you lack international experience, your odds of moving up are diminished.
At the end of my career in tech: nearly 100% of those in management had extensive global experience from having been born abroad, studied abroad, worked abroad and lived abroad – often a combination of all of those. During the majority of my work years, my managers had extensive international experience.
Even if you do not work in a position abroad, if you are in STEM, it is a given you will work side by side with those from other countries, and it is a given that at some point, you will either manage workers from other countries or they will manage you.
Take away: if you plan to work in a STEM field, you must get global experience. Unfortunately, at the undergraduate level it is difficult for those in engineering and computer science to do a study abroad due to the large number of required courses and lack of courses transfer-ability between U.S. programs and international programs. This is a known problem and some universities are working to address this. Unless it is addressed, many U.S. college students in STEM may have a difficult time obtaining international experience and the U.S. will increasingly rely on international immigrants.
Source: Foreign Students and Graduate STEM Enrollment (insidehighered.com)
Related: Only about 1 in 5 engineering degrees go to women, in the U.S. Yet in 1986, 40% of computer science degrees went to women. One thing that changed in the U.S. was the large increase in foreign-born engineering workforce since then. It is possible that some or many of the foreign born workforce come from cultures where the role of women is different than that of the U.S., and this might bias the field towards more males then females. In other worlds, it is a global culture/societal norms issue.
