“The odds of you earning $100K/pa the year after graduating are tiny: IB / Wall St jobs at top tier firms is pretty much the only path, and those jobs are ferociously competitive to get.”
Or a tech job with FB, Google etc. To me that’s more plausible than Wall St for an international student. But you’d be much better off targeting Stanford for that and living in Silicon Valley wouldn’t be cheap either.
The reason it is difficult to have post graduate employment statistics for students from India is that for Harvard, there is only about 5 per year. That is across all majors. There are High Schools in the US that send more students to Harvard than the whole country of India.
Sorry OP, but your post is sooooo naive. Forgive me, for I’m going to be brutally honest. It’s great that you are actively thinking about your future and how to earn money, but you need to read post 1 again. Each of those colleges, including Stanford (oops, I meant Princeton, right?) is aware that thousands of international kids are looking for the same thing as you, including financial aid. They are not going to admit you unless you give them what they are looking for. They won’t admit you because YOU want a good career and can’t afford the tuition without aid. You have to offer them something that any other student from India can’t offer them.
There are 19 students right now in Harvard College. That’s roughly five a year, and the number is down from previous years. How many kids do you think apply from India? Apply, by all means, if you know what any of those colleges is looking for. But these colleges are not the same as each other. Yale is nothing like MIT. Harvard isn’t Princeton.
Your chances aren’t even in single digits. They are in decimal points. If you invest a lot of time and energy on what will most likely be a fruitless effort, you are missing opportunties to apply to other colleges where you might have a much better chance of acceptance.
One further point: at all the universities you are targeting you will have to take some classes in “arts or soft [sic] humanities”.
Tx for the add, @Twoin18 - and you are probably right that they are more in line with the OPs areas of interest.
The underlying logic holds - the jobs are highly competitive (as in, ~3m applications for ~4000 hires at Google) and the regional cost of living is such that saving $35K / year will be hard- but more relevantly to the OP, none of the schools on the OPs list crack the top 19 colleges that Silicon Valley hires from (MIT comes in at #20)*
Also, building on @Lindagaf’s post: the structure of how university status works is different in the US than in India: famous names are obviously a help, but they are not make-or-break. You can apply to Google & take their test with a degree from University of Alabama at Huntsville- which, with the right test scores can be tuition free.
*sample sources:
https://qz.com/967985/silicon-valley-companies-like-apple-aapl-hires-the-most-alumni-of-these-10-universities-and-none-of-them-are-in-the-ivy-league/
https://money.cnn.com/2015/04/09/technology/google-people-laszlo-bock/index.html
The H-1B process is a lottery. This year there were 190,000 applicants for 65,000 visas. Getting a degree from Harvard or MIT will pretty much assure that you’ll be one of those applicants, but that’s all. At that point, you have the same chance of getting an H-1B visa as someone from any other school. There are an additional 20,000 H-1B visas available for those with Masters degrees.
The number of H-1B visas granted hasn’t decreased. Rather, the government is less willing to give them out to entry-level workers. When the program was first started, the visas were only meant to be used for those with hard-to-find skills, but companies instead used the visas to bring in cheap workers with unexceptional skills. That includes new college graduates, and it undercut American workers.
I suspect that those few that get in from India come from fairly wealthy families whose kids have had the best of private education. This seems to be more the reality then a student who comes from a situation needing significant FA. My DD has a roommate from India at UChicago and she is a full pay private education type. So like most posters are saying is that not only will it be difficult to get accepted it seems that there are very few that get in needing FA even being need blind for internationals. Obviously still apply, but open your window up to some less selective colleges and don’t plan on getting a job in the US after graduation. In four years it could be better or worse for H-1B and that is not really knowable.
@CU123 I know for a fact that that is not the case at least for MIT. Consistently, for the last 4 years, ALL (with the exception of a few) students admitted to MIT have had Olympiad Medals (multiple) + stellar academic records. I don’t think all of them will be so rich.
@ttauri, when you throw down gauntlets like “I know for a fact”, be prepared to defend your argument. What is your evidence that “with the exception of a few” every single student who has been admitted to MIT in the last 4 years has IMO Medals? Did you mean to say every student from India? If so, again, what is your information source?
Number of undergraduates from India by school: Harvard 19, MIT 20, Yale 42, Stanford could not find data. If you divide by 4 you get the number of new students per year.
Phillips Academy 2017 matriculation: Harvard 16, MIT 7, Yale 7, Stanford 4.
Again I’m only talking about internationals from India, and your telling me all these winners(and all from India) were not well off and needed FA to attend…I’ll will agree that most internationals need that kind of profile to be admitted to MIT.
Even if it’s true that all students admitted to MIT have Olympiad medals and stellar academics, the converse is not necessarily true. That is, you can not infer from that fact that all, most or many applicants with medals and great grades get admitted to MIT. For all you know, the bare minimum required for an Indian applicant to be accepted at MIT is medals + grades + full pay and most people who fit that description get rejected.
You keep asking about whether schools have good jobs. I don’t know whether it’s just your turn of phrase or a misapprehension about how college grads get jobs. Schools don’t have jobs. Employers come to schools to do interviews. All of the schools you’re considering have many excellent companies coming. Exactly which companies will be going to which schools 3-5 years from now is a question no one can answer. There are also job fairs at schools. I’d be shocked if any job fair bars non-US citizens at the door. But just because you talk to someone or even have an interview doesn’t mean they’d be willing to hire you. All the people telling you about visa difficulties should be listened to. And, of course, you can send a resume anywhere you like.
Application hint: If you tell any of those schools that the reason you want to go there is to leverage their name and prestige to make a lot of money, you will be rejected. First, all of these schools, while certainly hoping and expecting to produce many financially successful alumni, are about much more than than the paychecks for your first few years. Second, your reasoning is circular. You need to go to a fancy, expensive American school so you can make enough money to pay back the cost of going to a fancy, expensive American school. It’s hard to see why your planB isn’t your plan A.
I sometimes have difficulty because English is not my native language, but it seems to me that if there is an “exception of a few” then the statement that all of the 5 (on average) admitted Indian applicants have an Olympiad medal is not even close to reality. If I were an Indian applicant, I’d be more concerned with the 5 number than the medal. But I guess it’s just me. 
@millie210 Everyone calm down! I already have admission to the best ranked university in India and it will cost me nothing (due to a scholarship) to go there. So I do have a solid PLAN B. But it is a research institute (IISC) and although right now I am happy to go into a research career, I want to keep my options open. That is my reason to apply. Secondly, it is not as if we will have to take out a loan or something. We do have a ok salary + excellent assets (300000$). Now, in the case I do get admission to these 4, my objective will not be research but a corporate career. If I want to do research I will obviously go to IISC then probably go to US for PHD. Based on my (limited) research on net, I have come to understand that a corporate career pays far more in USA than a research career.
All of you have told me one thing that its a lottery if I end up getting job in USA or not and even then 100K is a slim possibility. Thank You, this is the advice I need. Please bear with me and help me with some more things also. Do graduates from these top 4 get good jobs in other countries (EU, Singapore, Canada) and if they do is it a good enough to job to pay back 70K in 2-3 years?
@ttauri Sounds like you have a great backup plan; you’ve got nothing to lose by trying HYSM. Out of four you are interested in, MIT is probably the least holistic, most difficult for boys but a bit more predictable if you have distinguished STEM achievement. Lot of multinationals recruit from HYSM and station them overseas with good pay, so your visa situation may not be a deal breaker.
IMO, Yale gives you the best chance–though still small–out of the four because the school is trying very hard fill its class with strong STEM kids.
Another thing, India’s top engineering institute in IIT BOMBAY and the top branch is COMPUTER SCIENCE (in india marks decide which branch you can take). From IIT BOMBAY. Every year a significant number of students (more than 10 from batch of 120) get offers in USA for more than 100K. Now, the question which comes to mind again is that if a tech company from USA is willing to hire 1 in 12 CS grads from India’s top college, it is reasonable to assume that they will hire 1 out the the 5 Indians from the world’s best college. Similarly most companies from Europe/singapore/australia must be looking to hire CS graduates from MIT?
sources
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/mumbai/microsoft-offers-most-us-jobs-highest-pay-at-iits-on-day-one-of-placements/articleshow/61887269.cms
https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-average-salary-of-an-IIT-Bombay-CSE-graduate-1
https://www.quora.com/How-do-IITians-and-BITSians-get-a-package-of-over-1-crore/answer/Aman-Goel-9
IIT fees are 13K USD for 4 years, so it is not as if it’s a paltry amount. The real question is whether it is worth spending 5 times more not just for better pay but also better contacts/quality of education.