ExponentialDecay

Why, to entice you to attend, of course! As @WildeThing mentioned, USD 1500 against a total tuition bill of over 60k is nothing. Given my experience with cash cow masters in the US, I would take a "scholarship" under 10k as an insult tbh. Price formation in US education is demand rather than cost driven, so these tuition numbers are a pie-in-the-sky figure that schools use to price-discriminate applicants; a program can give you anything up to free tuition and a stipend, if they want to. It all depends on how interested they are in you as a candidate. I don't think this is a useful axi

If those are the types of skills you mean, I am not sure why you advocate for some involved selection process - you can learn these skills at any job.

Not really: 1. Trying to predict what will happen 5-10 years from now is a fool's errand. You can make an educated guess, but the degree of field-specific perspective you would need to do that is not typically available to the average entry-level applicant. Also, in 5-10 years, any technical skills you have will be out of date anyway. 2. The vast majority of jobs don't require any special skills, or require such that are easy to pick up in a couple months. 3. Just in my personal experience, the bigger benefit of having work experience as an applicant with a PhD is that it give

They're rich and can afford to.

Funding for professional master's programs is rare, funding that covers living expenses is rarer, and funding that will be enough to support a wife and 3 children is infeasible. Maybe if your country has a program that sends students to America, you can see if they'd give you that volume of funding, but it's not something you can expect from a university. If you need a visa, keep in mind that an F2 spouse would not be eligible to work and, while a J2 spouse can work, right now it takes about 6 months to get a work permit and since you'll be in the country for two semesters, your spouse will pr

The career pivots you are considering are all pretty disparate and it is not clear to me how a policy master's would help you with them. For example, economic consulting is actually highly quantitative, so going from a policy degree to economic consulting is a difficult leap; if you are interested in economic consulting, you should get a quant degree with a focus on applied math and econ. On the other hand, a policy degree would set you up well for political risk consulting. But, because you're considering political and economic consulting in the same phrase, it feels like you think they're in

You are OP. Then you have to pay for health insurance.

The school has to offer health insurance to international students because health coverage is a requirement on the F1 visa, but most likely OP will have to pay for it. That's about 2k. I have never heard of a school paying for relocation.

I have no experience with the Huntington Library, but I research a topic for fun (as in, all of my credentials are in a completely different, non-humanistic area), and I've gotten access to the couple of archives I need (albeit in Europe) simply by following their access procedures and talking about what I need the access for. I find that archivists need to know who you are and that you'll be respectful with the documents, but they're not gatekeeping for the sake of gatekeeping. Have you tried actually applying for access before you posted this rant about how you feel rejected?

No policy degree is worth more than like 20k out of pocket (I personally wouldn't even pay that). Take the full ride.

Can confirm. Once you're out, people see 1) that you have a master's, 2) that it's in IR, which doesn't imply anything in particular about what you know or can do. The hair-splitting about the relative prestigiousness of various IR programs that goes on in this forum is pretty silly. If you're going to get this degree, praise be to god, get one that doesn't put you in a financial hole. Everything else is very secondary.

Is there a reason you're singling out Chinese students rather than asking this about international students in general? Or would you rather not bring that up, since that would be "geopolitical"?

US News rankings and similar aren't very meaningful. You should be basing your school choice on things that more immediately reflect quality, like placement and what professionals employed in your target field think.

I'm afraid it's much more difficult than a general definition for either of those terms. Career paths: there is no set career path for either of those degrees. It depends on a variety of factors, like your background, what school you go to, what classes you take, what internships you do, whom you meet at this one happy hour... I know tons of people with either degree, and they're employed in anything from investment banking, to the State Department, to random private companies, to local government, to moving back home and working at the supermarket. Courses: entirely depends on the

The public sector is not a monolith tbh. Of course, the various museums, schools, public transports and other parks and rec are very much in flux right now. But a huge proportion of the government machine is countercyclical. If you have skills in macro modeling, bank closure, and a whole slew of obscure economic-financial subdisciplines, you can have a job yesterday - and the number of these positions will only increase in the next 2 ish years. If US public policy were run differently, a bunch of other sectors, from education to infrastructure, could also be countercyclical. I don't like