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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.)"
... 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
You couldn't be more incorrect.
Back 30 years ago when my parents graduated from College with math degrees, they had multiple job offers from big companies to do computer programming. They would get the necessary training to fill in any holes of knowledge they had.
Now, companies have given up on any sort of training programs like that.
Now companies want experience to get a job but you can't get a job without experience.
I say give them the H1B workers. Those companies will be worse off because of it. I work with these guys and the quality suffers greatly. Some companies are smarter than to go that route. In many cases, 1 good non-H1B IT guy can do something 100 H1B workers can't. There are exceptions...
Whatever happened to the "you have to pay an H1B worker what you would pay a non-H1B worker"? And that you "have to prove you can't find a non-H1B worker"? Do they just say they can't find them because the price is too high? Do they pay a "contractor" the same rate as a non-H1B, which pays the H1B a very low rate, and gives a kickback to the company?
The typical way it works goes like this:
1) Talk to the recruiting firm and locate the H1-B worker you want to hire
2) Figure out (or create) a very precise skill set for that worker
3) Tailor a job posting to those exact requirements
4) Post job in local newspaper and wait a few weeks
5) Legally disqualify 95% of the applicants that don't match those exact requirements
6) Call a few in for interviews that do come close to matching - then disqualify them for other made-up reasons (not a good fit for our culture is a good one)
7) Claim that you can't fill the job with native talent and hire H1-B worker at fraction of price you'd have to pay a native worker