computer science - Is obtaining a PhD from an Asian country really a career suicide?

There is a proverb going around for a long time

Doing a PhD from an Asian country is a career suicide.

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  What is the significance of this proverb in case of Computer Science?

  
  


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  Does this also include high ranking universities in Russia and the middle East?

  
  


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  Does international ranking have any positive effect in this regard (e.g. there are some universities from China and Singapore among the top 20)?

  
  

Reference

1. What are some down sides of doing PhD in a Japanese/ Korean/ Chinese university than that of the USA?


2. Are there any professors with PhDs in Humanities from Asian Universities working outside of Asia?



3. Why is a PhD from a university outside of the white sphere called ‘career annihilation’?

Answer

Yes and no.

Jeff Huang and his student at Brown University compiled data from over 2,200 computer science professors in the United States. The data is only from the top 50 CS graduate programs. A writeup is available here, and the raw data is available here.

If you believe the data, then out of over 2,200 computer science professors at the top 50 programs, many got their Bachelor's degree from Asian universities, but only a few got their PhDs there:

• 8 from China


• 17 from India


• 1 from Singapore



• 47 from Israel


• 11 from Russia

In fact among all universities with at least 10 graduates who went on to become CS professors in the US, only one, the Hebrew University in Israel, is not in the US. In other words CS professors in the US, at least in top programs, are overwhelmingly likely to have gotten their PhDs from a US university.

That's the yes part. Now for the no part: this data is only in the US, and it's natural to expect that the data for any country is biased in favour of students who did their PhDs in the country (for example, there are only 16 CS professors in the US with a doctorate from France). The students awarded PhDs by these Asian universities can't have just disappeared; they must've gotten jobs elsewhere. In all likelihood, they were successful, just not in the sense of becoming a professor in the US.

So what is career suicide to you? If your aim is to become a CS professor in the US, then you should get a PhD from a US university, preferably MIT, followed by UC Berkeley, Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in that order. If you don't mind working elsewhere or perhaps taking on a different job, then there's nothing wrong with studying elsewhere also.