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New Study Suggests No Shortage of American STEM Graduates
An anonymous reader writes "A study released Wednesday by the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute reinforces what a number of researchers have come to believe: that the STEM worker shortage is a myth. The EPI study found that the United States has 'more than a sufficient supply of workers available to work in STEM occupations.' Basic dynamics of supply and demand would dictate that if there were a domestic labor shortage, wages should have risen. Instead, researchers found, they've been flat, with many Americans holding STEM degrees unable to enter the field and a sharply higher share of foreign workers taking jobs in the information technology industry. (IT jobs make up 59 percent of the STEM workforce, according to the study.)"
Obviously the shortage is dreamed up by corporations attempting to justify importing cheap foreign labor.
This actual study itself has at least one very good point that may not be obvious to people: our leadership's drive to promote the idea of a STEM shortage is primarily to justify guestworkers and allow them to add provisions like OPT-STEM extensions. Don't get me wrong, there is a sort of shadow brain drain war going on here that for a long time the West had easily been winning. UK, Germany, USA, etc had been sucking up the talent from India, China, Russia, Ukraine, Turkey, you name it we took the brightest from it. And it was really really easy. And now Western leaders are kind of getting uncomfortable because, well, it's not really working in our favor anymore. I care that our politicians are being deceiving about this concept but I don't care about the "taking our jobs." In fact, I'm one of those meritocratic boogeymen that thinks our borders should be open with nothing more than a background check into your criminal record before you're granted entrance to the United States. Sure, some other stuff would need to change but that's an entirely different argument I'm not going to get into.
The main point of this study, however, is what the Post picked up on and is being reiterated: there is no shortage of STEM workers here in the US. And while that's likely true, the study (though comprehensive) doesn't really seem to ever step up to the plate and look at STEM versus non-STEM in the cases of employability and what those industries do for our GDP. Our leaders like Obama are operating on the assumption that a surplus in STEM workers is better than a perfectly equalized workforce with zero unemployment. They're not going to say that but my guess is that they're getting uneasy that China is mandating how many STEM workers it will produce and limiting the number of liberal arts degrees. The West is now uneasy that they might start losing the STEM war and they're trying to figure out how to scare their populations into letting them selectively brain drain other countries. A fake "massive shortage of STEM workers" is pretty much their only card so far.
My work here is dung.
There's a huge difference in the job market for pure scientists (the "S" in STEM), and IT folks. The job market for someone with a PhD in, say Astronomy is terrible. Lumping these folks together with the legions of code hackers is ridiculous.
Unless you're in the top end, your wages have been stagnating, your purchasing power has been decreasing, and your relative wealth has been degrading.
Why would we need so many people to work with Scanning Transmission Electron Microscopes anyway?
of course it is a myth. It is just a ploy by large businesses to boost the H1B Visa program to increase the supply in order to push wages down.
I'll take, "Corporations prefer international young and desperate engineers they can lock into five or ten years of indentured servitude for much less money and minimal benefits for $500, Alex."
What would Richard Feynman do, if he were here right now? He'd do some math and he'd follow through!
There's no shortage of STEM graduates.
There's most _certainly_ a shortage of _cheap_ STEM graduates.
I consult as a programmer. I work for large corporations and mid-cap companies. When I stated a LONG time ago it was pretty common to see college hires and interns in programming departments. Interns are extremely rare, and I haven't seen a college hire in a programming team in 6 years. Companies would rather hire "experienced" off-shore programmers. So the only pressure there is on wages is off-shore.
Since the quality of off-shore work is a bit suspect I make a lot of money (almost certainly too much) as the lead/architect that's keeping things together. If companies want to stop paying people like me too much money they should be hiring young (cheap) workers to put downward pressure on wages. That doesn't happen because it's seen as easier to just go off-shore.
That's not to say all off-shore programmers are bad. There are several eastern European/ec-Russian block states that produce high quality code. They happen to cost about 2X the wages of India Off-shore and carry some IP Protection baggage.
The single-minded pursuit of the best and the brightest candidates is a fool's errand. There are only a few of "the best" by definition, and they can work wherever they want. If you are not getting enough good applicants, it's because you are failing to attract them in the competitive marketplace. That may not (just) be because of salary, but also factors like where you're located and whether the work is interesting at all.
H1-B visas broaden the candidate pool but they won't change a company's competitive standing relative to others. "The best" are still going to go to the most attractive employers, and if that's not you, then I see two alternatives: either make your jobs more attractive somehow, or admit that what you really want are not "the best," but "the good enough."
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
Basic dynamics of supply and demand would dictate that if there were a domestic labor shortage, wages should have risen. Instead, researchers found, they've been flat, with many Americans holding STEM degrees unable to enter the field and a sharply higher share of foreign workers taking jobs in the information technology industry. (IT jobs make up 59 percent of the STEM workforce, according to the study.)"
Wages will only rise if the labor supply decreases. The labor supply won't decrease if you import foreign workers.
In other words, your car will stop if you run out of gas. The car is still moving, so you must not be out of gas. Please kindly ignore the fact that you're rolling down a mountain.
Everything is better with chainsaws.
Why then have our political and business classes made the decision not to enforce immigration laws against an unchecked flow of illegal aliens from Mexico?
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
Separate S from T from E from M.
I studied E. Most of my former classmates are dutifully employed *posted from the job I had secured prior to graduating in 2011*.
An internal system operation returned the error "The operation completed successfully.".
... are STEM graduates who are willing to work for the pittance most companies intend to pay. The shortage is of salaries, not candidates.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
There's no shortage of STEM graduates. There's most _certainly_ a shortage of _cheap_ STEM graduates.
If something is in short supply, prices tend to go up. If the market price for STEM graduates is relatively high compared with other professions, that is strong evidence that there is indeed a tight market for STEM graduates. If there was a surplus of STEM graduates, their wages would tend to fall. Market forces are pretty good at solving this problem. Stipulating for argument's sake your claim that STEM graduates are not cheap, then by definition they must be in relatively short supply.
Allow an H1B visa holder to change jobs freely within the 6-year timeframe of their visa.
An employer would *have* to pay them a competitive salary to keep them from defecting to the competition. In that case, the employer would only willingly go through the hassle of justifying an H1B hire (we'd keep that requirement firmly in place, BTW) if there was a true need, not simply a desire to get an indentured serf on the cheap.
This would be good for everyone who's honest and upfront about their motives. It would only hurt sleazy employers who are falsely claiming a shortage of labor to underhandedly keep wages low.
Of course, the cynical part of me says it'll never happen.
And, for full disclosure: I started out as an H1B myself, and would have LOVED for the system to work like this...
Where Slashdotters who are used to deriding those "racist anti-immigration rednecks" suddenly revert to "dey took our jerbs" mode.
You mean, they are just greedy fucks who want cheap slave labor?
Who knew! Oh, we did.
There is indeed a profound shortage of STEM workers, in much the same sense that there is a profound shortage of 2014 Corvettes on sale for $10.
The past twenty years has been dominated by the MBA and the JD. The same people who demand outrageous salaries on the premise that they are indispensible, seemingly have a difficuly time understanding supply-and-demand when it applies to other people.
If you are capable of getting a degree in a STEM field, then you are likely more intelligent and rational than the average person. And an intelligent, rational person is less likely to commit to years of graduate work given the low salaries and job security that seem to be the norm. Why work and sweat so hard, when your CEO is just going to send your job to India so he can get his quarterly bonus.
When STEM grad students can expect $100k job offers out of the gate, and MBAâ(TM)s have to live with their parents to make ends meet, I bet our âoeshortageâ of STEM workers vanishes rather quickly.
(Have both a MBA and most of a Ph.D. in physics. Gave up the Ph.D. after I met brilliant people in my field who were in their 10th year as a postdoc and needing food stamps to make ends meet.)
But the shortage of *qualified, employable* STEM is very very real.
This report does effectively see what is going on. Its the continuing effort to destroy high wage jobs in the US because corporate interests do not want to pay high wages.
Manufacturing jobs have faced this over the past few decades. Middle management has faced this. Now the skilled technical worker is the target for wage lowering.
However, our Captains of Industry have lost the wisdom that Henry Ford had about making sure their employees can afford the things they make.
There is really a neo-feudalism being formulated right now with the CEOs and corporate officers and boards taking a huge chunk of the company money, and with the money changers on the other side skimming off the top as well. They fail to see that enriching and advancing the middle class is the best way to actually make more money in the future. Their current method is going to empty the tank for the engine of the economy and set us on a continuous downward spiral.
The key thing to fix this problem will be to have businesses move away from "Increase Shareholder Value" and back to "give the customer what they want."
This is what is so dangerous about the Hedge fund managers' desires to increase Apple dividend payments. Apple has a clear focus on giving the customer good products. Turning them into a shareholder value type of company will only lead to disaster.
Parent is a Troll.
Certainly there is a conspiracy, but there is nothing mysterious about it.
It is clearly advantageous for companies to hire people that will be happy with flat earnings and no job advancement opportunities, as well as fewer costs associated with the eventual lay-off.
People like to say H1Bs make the same wages as other IT folks, and this may well be true, but they do help keep wages flat, and their overall cost is less.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
An unstated premise in this article is that people who have STEM degrees are actually capable of doing useful work in their field. But that is not necessarily the case. Anybody who has tried to hire STEM-skilled people recently knows that there are lots and lots of clueless job applicants out there who happen to have very impressive-sounding credentials.
Ideally, credentials would be a very good proxy for capabilities. But the world is not ideal. In my experience, the correlation between credentials and capabilities is not that great, and has been on the decline in recent years.
There may or may not be an abundance of STEM-capable workers already in the US - I don't know. But measuring the number of STEM-credentialed workers does not tell you anything useful about the number of STEM-capable workers.
I'm a long-time Googler. Part of the job is conducting technical interviews. Which means that I spend many hours each week talking to people who, despite their impressive resumes and academic degrees from world-class institutions, *can't program a fucking computer*.
Don't talk to me about a sufficiency of trained workers until one of them shows up for an interview with some grasp of the fetch-execute cycle.
Ok, now the title of this post gives it all away. The real APK would never admit to a weakness such as being unemployed. He's instead rant and rave about how much of a genius he is, and why the world is wrong for not listening to or employing him. This is clearly some troll copypasta. Still, I do fully support smearing APK's name, so great job!
Just because a person has a STEM degree doesn't mean they are qualified to do the work. I work in the software industry and it has been impossible for us to find quality software engineers. Maybe that's a problem with our HR and recruiting but I highly doubt it that's the only issue. Most people we interview seems to look good on paper but once you start giving him a problem to solve, the person crumbles. And the people we do hire, all they are thinking about is when's my next promotion. When can I be the manager or the architect? What happen to the pride of just being good solid software engineer?
And I have to take offense for people saying that Indians and Asian are stealing all of their engineering jobs as stated by some readers in the Washington Post. A company will always try to hire the best and the brightest at the lowest cost. And if that means foreign workers then so be it.We are all part of global economy and if you want to compete, you better raise your game.
The initiative should not be to try get as many STEM graduates as possible but more STEM graduates that can compete at the world's level. There was a time when the US workers were a leader in the engineering and sciences.
I don't know if it's a good strategy to deduce from flat wages that there isn't a shortage in supply of STEM workers. In fact, it is more than likely that the 'replacement STEM workers' for Americans (i.e., immigrant workers) come cheaper. If there is a 'market force' of labor shortage, which brings wages up, there's a counteracting force of 'cheap labour', which brings the wages back to where they were. Essentially, if you pick 'wage behavior' and 'number of employments' as your two metrics for deducing something, you may be underestimating the dimensionality of your 'state-space'.
After looking at EPI's paper, the wages graphs vary around in an errorbar of about 100%, which is incidentally how much the number of employees graphs vary, too. Without actual errorbars, correlating two quantities with a similar-looking 'statistical spread' would lead to an underestimated total (or propagated error).
The real issue isn't the number of "STEM" graduates there are looking for jobs, it's that so many current STEM degree holders are incapable of performing in their field with any real competence.
Heck, kids are graduating from high school INCAPABLE of reading, not just at a lower grade level, not able to read - and this after 12 years of taxpayer-funded education. That they go off and then work towards STEM degrees after spending half of their first two years on remedial writing and math classes may expalin their inability to secure employment.
Ken
Paul, you fail it. Your skill is not enough.
But it's obvious the foreign workers are willing to work for lower wages and benefits compared to US workers, which is why big corporations are pushing so hard to increase the visa limits. Why pay an American 50K a year for an IT job with medical, dental, vacation and sick pay when you can pay a foreigner $20K a year with no benefits?
There is no shortage of STEM workers. There is though a shortage of STEM workers that are willing to work for barely above minimum wage.
Did they do it from the grassy knoll?
Do you have a point? Perhaps you could even explain why you think the OP's point is wrong, or what your alternative explanation is. For a really tough assignment, find some objective evidence that says there really is a STEM shortage. Hint: tech billionaires saying "trust us, there's a shortage" is not objective evidence.
I think this is best summed up by the following short post at Marginal Revolution (an excellent economics blog):
http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/04/is-there-a-shortage-of-stem-workers-in-the-united-states.html
It comes down to the definition of shortage. The standard economics definition of a shortage is when supply does not meet demand. The paper shows that the supply of STEM workers does seem to meet demand for them.
However, it could well be that we'd be better off if there were more STEM workers -- driven by higher demand for them. That is not addressed by this paper, and this definition (that more resources allocated to STEM would be better) is a fine definition for a shortage.
That's the underlying issue.
Microsoft lied to us so they could hire foreigners at a lower cost then American workers? How can this be!
Why are people always talking about STEM shortages, but not the shortages in doctors or pharmacists? Corporations always lobby to increase the H1B quota, but you will never see anyone lobbying that we need to bring in more doctors or pharmacists to lower the cost of medical care. The reason I believe is quite simple: The American Medical Association and National Pharmacists Association are very strong unions. They even lobby against increasing seats in US medical colleges and even building more colleges. However, whenever someone talks about trying to form a union for IT developers or Engineers, we call it socialism, nazism, communism. Seriously, we have been saying for the past 10 years after NAFTA and other free trade agreements that only the "low skill" manual laborers will suffer. Well, now they have destroyed the market for manual labor and the corporations are coming for engineers, IT, and scientists wages. The only way we can fight this is if we stand together. This is not about Xenophobia. I myself am an immigrant from India. We need to ensure fair pay and benefits for domestic workers.
I believe that the decreasing demand for STEM educated people and the desire to get only "the brightest" is just another indication that the robots are taking over the engineering/IT jobs too. In the past each leading engineer needed a bunch of average ones who would do routine work (and learn in the process) on the design of the Master. Now "the brightest" can just use more of the CAD tools, so it is not just the uneducated low-paying jobs that are eliminated by the "robots", they are coming for our jobs also.
Parent is a Troll.
Whooosh!!!!! Feeling a little humor impaired today? Apparently I didn't make the joke ridiculous enough for you to get it.
Certainly there is a conspiracy, but there is nothing mysterious about it.
A conspiracy is (by definition) an agreement between two or more people to commit a crime in the future. The only way this is a conspiracy is if they somehow were contemplating committing a crime. It is not remotely clear that anything illegal is occurring. No crime contemplated = no conspiracy. (I'm not judging the ethics, just the legality here) At most it *might* be collusion though proving it in a court of law would be extremely difficult.
People like to say H1Bs make the same wages as other IT folks, and this may well be true, but they do help keep wages flat, and their overall cost is less.
No argument but this does not make it a conspiracy.
There, fixed that for you.
That would explain it...
apprenticeship and tech schools.
To curtail the H1B visa program. Our jobs have been STOLEN from us by our legislators and big corporate interests. It's time we get them back.
The only way this is a conspiracy is if they somehow were contemplating committing a crime.
No, that's the way criminal lawyers define it for their purposes. In plain English the definition is much broader.
It's been well established that it's Jonathan Coulton (prominent nerd musician) doing this. Lurk moar.,
You can find the breakdown of degrees by area in the US from:
http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d11/tables/dt11_286.asp
You can find estimates of initial unemployment rates after getting a college degree, and expected earnings from:
http://www9.georgetown.edu/grad/gppi/hpi/cew/pdfs/Unemployment.Final.update1.pdf
If anyone knows more links to other data sets, I would be very interested. I want to provide my students with the best data available.
If you are interested in physics, the American Institute of Physics (aip.org) under "Physics Resources", "Statistical Research" has a huge amount of data - if anyone has similar data for other STEM majors (actually, for any major) I'm interested.
a war on terrorism? How can we end a war on a method?
I want my baristas to know string theory or how to rationalize a database, not some horseshit about Renaissance art! STEM! STEM! STEM! VENTI
Uh-oh, sounds like Johnny C's in trouble.
I don't know if there are too many STEM workers, but there is definitely a huge shortage of understanding of science and math in the general population...
I'd like to hire a good one. Being a small IT shop makes recruiting hard because I cannot compete with Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, etc.
I have a hard time getting local CS/IT graduates to even interview. It's even harder to keep good System Admins once they are hired.
Indeed. Grandparent suffers from a common misunderstanding, that is, if it's a conspiracy, it cannot be happening.
I am John Hurt.
A conspiracy is (by definition) an agreement between two or more people to commit a crime in the future.
Your definition disagrees with mine:
(OED 4th Edition)
Even if we confine the discussion to legal defintions, they vary from place to place. Here's OED's second defintion, which is tagged as relating to law:
So even in this definition, the act need only be reprehensible and not strictly illegal to qualify.
...
Meritocracy would be a big improvement, but the execs (business and academia) have been resisting that mightily. They don't want any solid, objective, enforceable minimal (intelligence, knowledge, work experience...) standards for the low-skill E-3, H-1B, J, and L visas for cheap, young, pliant labor with flexible ethics.
None of the cheap labor crowd want proper background investigations of visa applicants. A lot of politicians think it's wunnnnderful that the US government has signed onto "visa waiver" pacts.
While reading the EPI report Low-skill H-1B guest-workers in the US STEM job market I was prompted to dig up the latest DoS statistics. 135,991 H-1B (including the H-1B1s set aside for Chile and Singapore) were issued through consular offices in FY2012 (so much for all the propaganda of an annual limit of 65K or 85K). My main complaint with the EPI report is that they fail to include a precise definition of "IT work-force" and "IT occupations" that they're using, though they talk around it a bit.
The US competes against other nations. STEM salaries in the US can't rise much beyond what people would be paid elsewhere, no matter how many workers would be available at higher salary levels.
Here's one idea: You might have to overpay or take someone more "average" than you are expecting. But, that is life.
The most parsimonious explanation for a wide range of phenomena, including the very significant phenomenon of massive immigration following on the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 to replace the population lost with the destruction of the middle class along with its total fertility rate during the ensuing generation, is a breeding program getting rid of individualism in favor of eusocial workers. Individualist tendencies are hard to manage.
Seastead this.
...
There is no "overall wage". When we talk about supply and demand, we're usually taking about the supply of and the demand for some particular product or service, or "market basket" or products and services. In practice, we use statistical averages or medians, income quintiles... and use longitudinal studies to track a sampling of individuals or families over time.
But, if the supply of currency goes up, by quantitative easing a.k.a. old-fashioned debasing a.k.a. inflation, for instance, then the amount of currency required to purchase goods will increase, i.e. prices will rise. But they don't all rise at once, nor by exactly the same amount or percentage, because some people get the new currency earlier than others. Some people don't become aware of the increase in currency (directly or indirectly) until late in the sequence.
Those who get the new currency first are usually able to buy at pre-inflation/pre-devaluation/pre-QE prices, while those who catch on late, find themselves buying at the higher prices.
Debasement of the currency hurts poor and wealthy alike, but those with closest ties to the issuers of the currency, those who receive the new money first, come out better than most. Those who keep savings through the period lose as its value is eroded. Those with debts win because they can pay their debt with the lower-valued currency.
In this case, the supply of labor is being expanded, the compensation of those in the affected fields drops, their "purchasing power", savings, and retained wealth are eroded (as stuff wears out and they cannot afford to maintain or repair or replace).
OTOH, the reason given for moving manufacturing off-shore was to be "competitive" (with whom?), to hold down or reduce prices. But prices went up from the 1970s to present, and profits and compensation to many executives, and some investors rose. But, at the same time, the Fed and US (and other) governments were debasing the currency and competing for finances, and playing weird games with regulation of financial institutions, so the financial waters were muddied. During which quarters did debasement predominate? During which did reduction in quality of goods predominate? Which goods increased in quality and which decreased? During which did retail price rises predominate?
The summary's reasoning is that "Basic dynamics of supply and demand would dictate that if there were a domestic labor shortage, wages should have risen. Instead, researchers found, they've been flat..." but this same reasoning implies that if there hadn't been an influx of foreign workers, then wages would have risen, and thus their definition of a labor shortage would have been met.
I think the usage of terms like "shortage" on both sides is misleading. What there really is is a supply curve for IT related labor, and a demand curve for IT related labor. H-1B's increase the supply of IT related labor, lowering prices (i.e. wages). No matter what rules are imposed such as "equal wages for the equivalent job" H-1B's will lower wages, and if they didn't then they would not benefit industry in any way since (as is rightly pointed out by anti H-1B advocates) when people say they can't find an employee with certain traits, what they really mean is they can't find someone with those traits for that particular price
We complain when smart people come to the U.S., and complain when dumb people aren't allowed to come to the U.S. Our immigration policy makes as much sense as demanding our children date a ditch-digger instead of a doctor.
What they can get are H1-Bs, who are like indentured servants. H1-Bs can't change jobs easily. They're cheap. They can be fired on a whim. Insuance can be optional. They're slightly better than purely offshored work because you can communicate with them more easily and have some hope of getting what you asked for, usually.
Employers will *always* choose the slavert/serf option if it's available. This is the kind of unregulated capitalism favored by libertarian nitwits.
Regulations happened for a reason. Work it out.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
You can take any 3 programmers, lock them up in a room, and sooner or later, 1 of them will be pushed out of the nest. It's the only constant involved with programming jobs.
I think this is best summed up by the following short post at Marginal Revolution (an excellent economics blog):
http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/04/is-there-a-shortage-of-stem-workers-in-the-united-states.html
It comes down to the definition of shortage. The standard economics definition of a shortage is when supply does not meet demand. The paper shows that the supply of STEM workers does seem to meet demand for them.
However, it could well be that we'd be better off if there were more STEM workers -- driven by higher demand for them. That is not addressed by this paper, and this definition (that more resources allocated to STEM would be better) is a fine definition for a shortage.
That's the underlying issue.
Huh?
from your link:
Even without boosts in the complementary inputs, more STEM workers still can be put to good use, even if there is no “shortage” today.
How? Government mandate?
And it is intersting - your link and your comment have the same obfuscated (constipated) writing styles.
this definition (that more resources allocated to STEM would be better) is a fine definition for a shortage
The Humpty Dumpty school of economics. If you can't figure out how to refute the study that says there is no shortage, then just change the definition of "shortage"!
"When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less."
-- "Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There" (1871), Lewis Carroll
As far as I know, the big Hartford insurers still have their training programs - no degree needed.
You'll be learning CICS and COBOL, though ....
You get laid off every few years so that the Ivy League educated CEO can make his numbers and his bonus, but it's a pretty good living - being bored out of your goard.
Employers are largely composed of con men and criminals. Ask any IRS agent about it; they just take this as an accepted fact going in and they're not wrong. I have worked for upwards of 20 employers of various descriptions from flipping burgers to mega corps and I can say with certainty that each and every one of them was some species of scammer.
Congress listens to them at all because Congress is more of the same- ambitious men who want money, women and power. Anything that gets in the way- in this case paying Americans American wages instead of pretending there's a desperate STEM labor shortage and flooding the market with H1Bs- is a total non-starter for them. They don't even think twice about it- "oh... here's how you run THIS scam ..."
There's not really more to it than that. Employers are liars through and through and the companies they create are in a constant game of cat and mouse with the law, with their customers and with their employees.
It's genetic and what we need to find is a genetic cure for it. We need to tone down the sociopathic impulses that drive people and tone up the empathetic ones. Doing that will be THE achievement of the 21st century.
It's not panacea, but any little movement in that direction would yield huge savings in law enforcement, regulation, societal disruption and a massive increase in egalitarian outcomes. We can then take all that saved energy and money and attention and put it on creating even better things and circumstances for ourselves.
People from future generations will look at our literature and TV and movies and culture and be glad they didn't now just as we're glad we didn't live in the Dark Ages.
In all projections of a future (where humans have survived), we're more peaceful, more productive, there aren't have and have nots , there isn't just base level strife that causes grown men to rape 5 year old children.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/18/africa-child-rape-crisis_n_3103558.html
How do we get there? By religion? By indoctrination? By capitalism? By communism? The fact is men are genetically predisposed to not just crave having more than the other guy but to FLAUNT it and to absolutely GRIND the other guy down. This is how men show their brightly colored feathers to females and females do indeed prefer men who have more stuff, power and prestige.
Women like winners and men like to win. It's a marriage made by hell.
So sure, the corporations are knowing and deliberately lying about the STEM graduate situation. They've been doing that since at least 1995 according to Norm Matloff.
http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/h1b.html
http://www.sandiegoreader.com/news/2012/feb/08/citylights1-fed-H1B-visa-engineers/
And Congress and the press go along with the lie because all the men at the top of THOSE hierarchies stand to benefit by undermining other men who do not hold those positions of power. This is just instinctive knowledge. Congress knows they're lying, knows why they're lying and knows it's their part in this scam to wring their hands and decry their fellow (male) citizens qualifications.
Over the past 18 months, I've looked at the IT job market. I wish I could write a book on it. I don't know about all STEM fields, but I know about software development.
YES - there is a shortage, of people with narrow, specific skills. Corporations have been buying vertical market packages over the past decade. And they're stuck with them. But they (1) won't pay the company that makes the package for consulting, and (2) won't train anyone. They want an instant expert with 5-10 years experience with packages you've never heard of. (Lawson? Didn't think so.) Not sure how anyone gets experience with these packages. If you're not a senior-level expert, get lost.
Most of these vertical market packages run on SQL Server, so SQL Server DBAs are in demand. For now. Until SaaS takes over and companies no longer have in-house databases. Again, if you're not a senior-level expert, get lost.
NO - there is not a shortage of commodity programmers, which means anything you can learn on your own. Even if you learn it, you'd need 5-10 years experience to even get a temp job. Again, if you're not a senior-level expert, get lost.
So there's apparently a glut of unemployed or underemployed programmers out there, because companies pick only the most senior and experienced people and have no interest in training anyone or hiring anyone with lesser experience.
I live in an area with a lot of high tech jobs (Salt Lake) and I can tell you that the competition is intense. I have been looking for a job for almost five months, with a Master's in engineering and no experience/internships (think that last bit is really screwing me atm), and I have received one interview total. Several of my applications were even auto rejected because I had 95% of the skills they wanted, but not 100%. The pool of applicants is so large that they don't have to care if you don't have absolutely everything they want. I was always told that engineering is a skill set that leads to easy employment, if you can make it through college. Turns out that was wildly inaccurate.
1. Refill your Lithium prescription.
2. Switch to Decaf.
3. Hire an escort and get laid
4. Use your life savings and hire some personal entertainment from your favorite porn stars.
5. Get a better hobby.
Dude, I have ignored your posts for a while, OK. I REALLY think you have an illness that needs to be addressed. This is NOT normal.
I don';t mean normal as in not wearing Khaki for business "informal Fridays" - I mean so far out of the norn as to mean a life threatening illness.
I have family members who are mentally ill. So, please understand, I come from understanding and sympathy - and a little smartassness to lighten the mood.
And for the rest of you Slashdotters - this guys is SCREAMING for HELP!
I wonder how many H1-B workers get jobs, because the hiring manager wants to hire someone from his/her own country. If a hiring manager is from India, China, etc., then what proportion of the people that (s)he hires are from India or China?
I've heard that IIT graduates who work in the US are supposed to somehow help other Indian workers get jobs, but I'm not sure that that's true. Does anyone know anything about that?
I do not argue that this research is correct about the overall STEM results but when you look at engineering the US is lacking (especially in electrical engineering). The problem started when many US companies in the 1980's decided to manufacture their products in Asia. Over time these Asian companies started hiring their own engineers so that they could design and manufacture their own electronics. Normally you would think US companies would fight these Asian companies new competition but instead they decided to get rid of their own engineers and let the Asian companies engineer their products. This has continued to this day and continues to be an issue. Electronic engineering is not the only issue there are other types of engineering that we have let go to other countries.
Why shouldn't companies hire the people who will get the job done for the cheapest price?
Do you think your job is some kind of country club where you are entitled to pick your compensation on your terms?
If you don't like hiring practices, go out, start your own company, take the risks, and hire people using your own selection process. Go ahead, hire the most expensive people you can find, I'm sure you'll do great against your competition!
Since when did we become such a socialist country that we think people are entitled, by right, to receive jobs created by others, at the wages of their choosing.
If you don't like the fact that other people are hungrier, more driven, work harder, and do it all for less, then maybe you should get up off your lazy ass and out compete them!
They're just not very productive relative to how much they expect to be paid.
there are 3.9 million jobs unfilled in the USA as per http://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/jolts.pdf .. why can’t these openings be filled by the unemployed? if the currently unemployed cannot fill these gaps, who will?
The OP was about STEM not SPAM
At current tax rates, that 1% in your scenario might pay so much in taxes that the 99% would still have more money then the status quo in post-tax and transfer terms.
"Might" and "if" are the most important words in your post. We also might have world peaces next year, but I'm not holding my breath. With capital gains rates capped at 15%, the average billionaire pays a lower marginal tax rate than I do. That does not bode well for your hypothesis.
That's incorrect. You are quoting the Long Term Capital Gains Federal Rate and ignoring the state rate, and that fact that both the fed and the state will go after AMT and tax as ordinary income as a short term capitol gain.
So all the FaceBook millionaires and billionaires Pay about 50% on their realized stock value at IPO time when they effectively realized the gain. In addition, FaceBook IPO'ed at $38 and immediately dropped to $25, and the employee lockup period was long enough that in order to pay the taxes, it was required to borrow against future value of the stock.
So basically they are paying $19/share in tax on something that's currently only worth $25/share -- effectively a 76% tax rate.
I understand why there are lockup periods, but you need to understand why lockup periods+ AMT is evil.
And yes, you can get out of the state portion of that if you realized the income when you were working in Nevada, Washington, Texas, or some other state with no state income tax, but realize also that RSUs, which have replaced ISOs, mean you realize the value, at grant time and you can be damned sure if you were working in California at the time of the grant, California is going to come after you for their share of the time amortized appreciation in value that you "realized" before moving to one of those states.
At least in the tech fields (News For Nerds, Stuff That Matters ring a bell?), most of the people getting these options don't start out rich in the first place, so these are usurious tax rates for these people.
It's no wonder Eduardo Saverin did his citizenship ploy; it saved him a heck of a lot more than the $100M that was being widely reported at the time, it was closer to $1.5B - that's 3 times what Larry Ellison paid for Lanai, the 6th larges Hawaiian island.
Lots of people seem to be missing the point here. It's easy to be cynical and point out that companies must be doing it so they can get away with paying less for desperate H1B workers. These people do not work for tech companies trying to hire good people. There is no shortage of candidates with STEM backgrounds and education, which is all this study seems to say. I have done literally hundreds of interviews at a large tech company for software/systems engineers, and meet an endless supply of STEM candidates all the time. The problem is that the vast majority of them do not meet our hiring bar. If you need to hire 100 software engineers, but can only 50 that meet the company's high hiring standards, that kind of sounds like a shortage to me. Sure, we can hire 50 mediocre software engineers to get to 100, but why would I want to do that? I'd much rather see better STEM education and H1B flexibility (in that order) so that I can fill those other 50 positions with good people.
Apparently I didn't make the joke ridiculous enough for you to get it.
Apparently not, I'm still not getting it. But I'll accept your "good faith" attempt at humor...
A conspiracy [wikipedia.org] is (by definition) an agreement between two or more people to commit a crime in the future.
Broaden your horizens beyond the Wikipedia Bible. You've referenced "Conspiracy (Crime)". But the "Conspiracy Theory" entry says:
A conspiracy theory is an explanatory proposition that accuses a person, group or organization of having caused or covered up an event or phenomenon of great social, political, or economic impact... The term "conspiracy theory" is used to indicate a narrative genre that includes a broad selection of (not necessarily related) arguments for the existence of grand conspiracies.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Look at the exorbitant rates of CEOs. Clearly there is a shortage and we need to import more CEOs until the salaries reach a reasonable level.
but a shortage of graduates with 5+ years of experience in exactly what the recruiters want, even though the given technology is barely (if) that old
From the linked article:
"in the CS case the former foreign students appear to be somewhat less talented on average, as indicated by their lower wages, than the Americans."
doesn't anyone else find it strange that in order to support the assertion that "H1-B workers are less talented but hired only because they're cheaper", a study using the lower wage of H1-B workers as evidence of having less talent was presented?
Sounds circular to me.
The reasoning in this article is false:
"Basic dynamics of supply and demand would dictate that if there were a domestic labor shortage, wages should have risen."
I worked side by side with non-domestic workers in out-sourcing contracts. My non-domestic colleagues were hired by their out-sourcing companies at sub-standard wages, far below mine. The argument that a shortage of domestic labor should result in inflated wages is false, because the presumed shortage in domestic labor was more than amply filled by non-domestic labor.