Education Must Begin at Home

Granted, a country's potential for entrepreneurial ingenuity and technical innovation can't be measured simply with standardized tests of high schoolers. Regulatory and tax policies, individual initiative, creativity and work ethic, and any number of other factors are also critical to success. But the OECD study should at least give us pause that our next wave of workers doesn't have the technical grounding of their counterparts in most of the rising industrial powers. No wonder, as noted in this column last month, that immigrants and foreign nationals are earning an ever-larger percentage of the math, science and engineering degrees awarded by U.S. colleges and universities. Foreign-born individuals now account for at least half of our country's engineering Ph.D students, for instance.

Most of the readers who responded to that earlier column are less than concerned about this trend. They argue that fewer American students are concentrating on the "hard sciences" because they see their friends and relatives struggling in those fields. Because there are fewer technical jobs to be had, or they're less interesting than they once were, students are gravitating toward other professions—basic demand and supply.

Readers argue that foreign students, especially those from developing countries, are flocking to U.S. technical colleges only to break into the relatively attractive U.S. job market. Once they're in, they're exploited to the detriment of American IT pros. (One reader characterized the H1-B visa program, whereby foreign nationals are granted temporary work status in the United States, as a form of indentured servitude—more on that later.)

Most respondents want the U.S. government to shut foreigners out completely to free up work for unemployed Americans. Why encourage American students to become technologists and foreigners to seek U.S. tech employment, they argue, when jobs are so scarce here?

All are fair points. The end game can't be to flood the domestic market with entry-level workers. The goal must be to create a thriving domestic market for IT innovation and career opportunity. But let's also keep in mind that while tech unemployment is a painful fact of life for many Americans, it's not a permanent situation—unless we try to fix it with measures that will make matters worse. Any market that isn't constantly fed a steady diet of fresh talent and ideas is destined to wither away. Math, science and engineering education isn't a spigot that can be turned off and on to irrigate the latest employment opportunity. It's a long-term investment in this country's future that requires promotion and management. The more smart, talented people we can prepare for tech professions, the more jobs they will create once they're in positions of entrepreneurship and authority.Consider some of the truly moribund economies of the industrialized world: Japan, France, Germany. They greatly curtail the free flow of goods, services and labor. In those countries, government regulations make it difficult to lose your job. But they make it even harder for the unemployed—at national rates topping 10 percent—to find one. So the country stagnates, despite above average education systems.

Meantime, foreigners and immigrants in the United States are creating more IT jobs than they're "stealing." How many Silicon Valley CTOs, for instance, hail from abroad? How many tech company founders? The best and brightest foreign nationals closed out of U.S. tech jobs will find or create opportunities back home or elsewhere abroad—maybe not in Japan, France and Germany, but in places like India, China and Eastern Europe that welcome them with open arms. And if you think cheap offshore IT outsourcing is hurting your employment opportunities now, just wait till U.S.-based employers have the added incentive to head abroad because they can't get the skills they want in the States.Tech employment isn't a zero-sum game: Every technologist graduated or granted working papers doesn't threaten someone else's job; every job filled isn't a job lost.

One reader maintains that U.S. tech employers who are calling for more investment in tech education and a more open labor market simply want a deeper pool of overqualified candidates to choose from. But who defines "overqualified?" In the New York-based IT department of one high-profile Internet company, for instance, at least 85 percent of the professionals are foreign-born—not because they're any cheaper than U.S.-born IT pros, says a hiring manager at the company, but because they're the most highly trained and skilled people available. They're evidently acquiring skills U.S.-born IT pros aren't.

No question, the H1-B visa program is flawed. Despite the government stipulation that employers must pay these workers the prevailing wage for their fields and show they aren't passing over qualified American workers, some U.S. companies are flouting the rules. One former H1-B visa holder who came to the United States in 1998 with a master's degree in computer applications and four years of experience with Oracle technologies says she was paid a much lower salary than her American peers, by a company that assumed it could hold her captive for two years. (She left early on for a company offering better pay and green card sponsorship, despite the first employer's threats to sue her.) Others relate similar tales of H1-B exploitation.

But the answer is to crack down on companies that abuse the visa program, not to seal off our borders. Don't ignore the fact that foreign-born workers are often exceedingly motivated and talented and productive, not just cheap.And like any job market, the U.S. tech market is cyclical: It bounces back. The U.S. economy created 2.23 million jobs in 2004, the largest annual gain since 1999, the Labor Department reported this month. The largest gains (546,000 new jobs) came in "professional and business services" like IT. In fact, according to the Labor Department (LINK TO http:bls.gov), by 2010 the U.S. economy will support far more jobs than it can fill, mostly because of demographic changes. Jobs in information security, network and database administration, software engineering, system analysis, business intelligence and other IT fields are expected to be in shortest supply.

Let's cultivate people for those jobs now rather than choke off the market with shortsighted, restrictive policies.

Rob Preston is editor in chief of Network Computing. Write to him at [email protected].