Indians still mad for engineering despite threat to H-1B visa

Indians still mad for engineering despite threat to H-1B visa

Mumbai, India (CNN)They're harder to get into than Harvard, Yale or Oxford. India's 23 elite engineering schools attract more than a million applications each year and less than 1% of applicants are successful.Traditionally seen as a ticket to a plum job in the US, the appeal of Institutes of Technology (IIT) hasn't been diminished by US President Donald Trump's "hire American" policy -- at least yet."It may impact engineering jobs for Indians in the US, but I know that global demand for IIT graduates will be sustained -- in other countries too," says Naman Narang, an 17-year-old student from Mumbai, who took the national test for admission In April.He's hopeful that, by the time he graduates in five years, "there might be another American president with revised policies."

he mad rush to get engineering degrees is driven by the relatively high salaries graduates can expect to earn, as well as the potential to work overseas.India produces nearly 1.6 million engineers from its more than 2,900 colleges every year, and the number of Indians issued H-1B visas, the entry ticket for many foreign workers into the US, went up from around 108,000 in 2014, to more than 126,000 in 2016, according to government data.But Trump's immigration crackdown has left many worrying that growth could be reversed, making the competition for the coveted visas even tighter.

Ref: http://edition.cnn.com/2017/06/04/asia/india-engineering-school-h1b-visa/index.html