Name: Who's Hiring? Insights on the U.S. Job Market for International Graduates with F1 Hire's Andrew Chen
Uploaded: 2026-01-17T17:43:18.000Z
Duration: 25 min 54 s
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Welcome back to another episode of Breaking Boundaries, the world's premier podcast for international students, or at least in the top 500.

I am joined today by Andrew Chen, the CEO of F1Hire, a distinguished guest who has an enormous amount of insight on post graduation work.

To-infinitive

I'm very glad to be here and glad to talk to your audience.

Now Ed, before we dive into the data, I want to ask a personal question.

You studied at the University of Missouri, commonly known as Mizzou, let's say a few years back you studied nuclear engineering and computer science.

But first, if you don't mind sharing with the audience what your experience was like going to Missouri to study.

I came from Beijing, a very large city, and my undergraduate study was in nuclear engineering.

I studied four years in China and then one year of graduate school.

And then I applied to the graduate program of nuclear engineering because at that time it was 90.

So Internet was just up and I have to go to my professor's office to send one email and wait probably one week to receive the email back.

So it took me two years to apply to a school.

And at that time all those Chinese students come here, they have to rely on scholarship.

So I was so lucky I got half scholarship.

It's a research assistant and half means I have half of a stipend which is about $500 a month and I can work 10 hours a week on campus.

So in the first month I applied a job at the office of registrar and admission.

At that time they want someone to do world Wide web page for their office.

So I worked there for about one and a half years and did the first webpage for them.

Not the first did the webpage for them, but

I think it's the first online college application form for for a major university.

So I have to consider how much bandwidth and to do that.

But I was told it was the first of a major university that was back in 95, 96.

And because of that experience, later on I got the opportunity to get a full scholarship from the medical school doing medical informatics.

And then at that time I started to get into the computer science program.

So when I graduated I had two master degrees, Master of nuclear engineering and Master of Computer science.

One main reason of that is at one weekly seminar of the nuclear engineering program, chair, chair of the department showed us A curve.

Basically the curve is like this going down.

It said, okay, this is your career outcome as nuclear engineer, but

don't be too sad because somebody are going to retire.

So that's one I think, wow, if I want to earn some money, I have to have some other skills.

So later I got a computer science degree.

So I spent three years at Mizu and got two computer science, two master degrees.

And about three days, literally three days after I graduate, I sit in front of a desk of a computer company.

So I worked, yeah, three years at the computer company at that time it's called.comcompany and then later on a major nuclear company start to hire hire after 15 years and I worked there for eight or nine years and then I started on my own.

Now I'm not doing software, not doing computer, not doing nuclear.

And I become a full time international student Advisor for about 15 years already.

My takeaway is that web development in 1995 was so complicated it required a nuclear engineer to build a webpage.

And I know that there is policy uncertainty worldwide, but

students can only control what they can control today.

For, for those who are coming to study in the U.S.

do you have any insight on the programs of study that might offer the most relevant pathways to post graduation work in the United States?

Data is what the US companies are going to take the effort to sponsor those foreign students or foreign workers to get the working visa.

And number two is what we call perm data.

They have prediction, the field prediction.

So based on those three sets of data, it's very clear that computer science, data science and health science are the top three areas where the jobs are.

That's the same to the domestic students and to international students, but

especially to the international student because you can see about 70% of the international student sponsorship on H1B are STEM.

And of the 70%, about 60% of all the sponsored H1B are computer related.

So computer related, computer science, information technology are number one career outcome majors.

And as you drill down a little further into computer science, data science and health science, let's Talk at the H1B level.

You mentioned that it does take time and effort on the part of employers to sponsor international graduates.

Does that result in a landscape where most of these hires are being made by large employers with robust administrative staff or is it spread out among employers of many sizes?

One is they have to put in a lot of effort to sponsor because say, if I'm a company, I hire a data science major.

If I'm just a local company, I'm doing probably a pan.

I don't have to tell anybody else what this person make, what's the title and where is he graduated from, so on and so forth.

But if I have to sponsor this person, I have to get this person the H1B so that this person can work for me for a long time or green card in order for him to stay.

So I have to give up all the information to Department of Labor to the uscis.

In this process, the company have to give a lot of information and a lot of companies, they don't want to do that because this can be viewed as release too much information to the government.

And once the information is reported to government, we can actually download them quarterly with those data.

So we know pretty much all the data except the person's name.

We even know the case number and also what's the title, what's level, what's the salary range, where does he work, and

So this is a very lengthy and sometimes vulnerable thing for the employer to sponsor a foreign worker.

But on the other side, those foreign workers that want to get H1B want to get green card, they have their strong internal values, they work hard and usually you don't have to deal with much of retention issues.

If they want to stay here and you treat them well and they work hard, they will stay here for probably three years, six years, eight years, probably until their whole status is settled down.

Usually now I think for Indian students It takes about 10 years to get a green card.

For Chinese student, it's probably six to eight years to get a green card.

So the retention of STEM of your developer, I think that worth gold to many, many hiring companies.

And also another fact is Those in the US about 50% of the graduate level STEM degrees are issued to international students.

So yeah, so they are pretty good at those.

There are big companies like Amazon, Microsoft, Google.

They are relying on many of those STEM talents with international background.

You know that last week I was in Seattle, I went to the Amazon campus.

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Who's Hiring? Insights on the U.S. Job Market for International Graduates with F1 Hire's Andrew Chen

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