Students opting out

" Companies are getting very very specific in the kind of skills that are needed for a job and are not willing to training existing candidates - this is a big issue.
At the same time, I don't understand how things will improve. It is a simple fact -
It is not possible to reap 100% profits for shareholders and pay high salaries. The tech industry is now mature and new grads do not get the kind of jobs they used to.
I don;t have a job that is as cool as what my advisor got when he was a new grad.
The undergrad students take a look at this and refuse to believe and work bottom-up. They believe they are American college grad and so by default they should have the coolest jobs - I have seen this happen a lot in interviews.
Fixing h1bs is necessary as many consultants are blatantly lying on their resumes when it comes to experience. But believing that this is going to fix calculus knowledge in teenagers is just not right. Undergrads a baffled by calculus - this is not a problem created by h1bs !!
I would not say the same thing about graduate students - they work hard and know their stuff and ARE EMPLOYED.
Please move past the golden era that the guys who graduated in 1980s had - the job profiles have changed based on the maturity of the industry and wages have adjusted to reflect the level of automation now available in the industry. Hard work will pay but - just saying that i have a degree is not going to cut it any longer "

" Great commentary!

It is all about cheap labor at the cost of American jobs!

Want more?
Then you must view this shocking video:
"How NOT to Hire an American Worker"
www.youtube.com/programmersguild

and for more go to this website for news Korporate AmeriKa (sic) does want you to know.

www.eng-i.com/E-Newsletters.htm "

" Far more US citizens have been earning STEM degrees than employers have been hiring.

Employment of production workers in software publishing (developing software products as opposed to body shopping, consulting, contracting, services, solutions, temping...) has been stagnant for about 9 years while hundreds of thousands of US citizens have earned the related degrees, and more hundreds of thousands of autodidactic US citizens have learned what is needed to do these jobs.
http://www.kermitrose.com/images/SWProdDev.jpg

Guest-workers have now repeatedly been shown to be directly and indirectly displacing bright -- even gifted -- knowledgeable, industrious, experienced US citizens, most of whom are more capable than the vast majority of guest-workers, that DoL classify to be roughly on a par with interns or apprentices. With very few exceptions these guest-workers are not the best nor the brightest.

It has also been shown through repeated federal and academic studies that the biggest single motivation for bringing in guest-workers is that they are cheap, that they have always been paid below the local market compensation. Indeed, when Peter House argued for increasing numbers of student visas and creating the H-1B program, he (a) completely made up the projected "shortage", and (b) noted that one aim was to flood the market with cheap labor to drive down compensation and this would discourage US citizens from studying for the affected fields. It has indeed accomplished this.

"A growing influx of foreign PhDs into U.S. labor markets will hold down the level of PhD salaries to the extent that foreign students are attracted to U.S. doctoral programs as a way of immigrating to the U.S.A. A related point is that for this group the PhD salary premium is much higher [than it is for Americans], because it is based on BS-level pay in students' home nations versus PhD-level pay in the U.S.A... [If] doctoral studies are failing to appeal to a large (or growing) percentage of the best citizen baccalaureates, then a key issue is pay... A number of [the Americans] will select alternative career paths... For these baccalaureates, the effective premium for acquiring a PhD may actually be negative."
http://www.nber.org/~peat/PapersFolder/Papers/SG/NSF.html
http://www.nber.org/~peat/ReadingsFolder/PrimarySources/TimeLine.html
Policy and Research Analysis Division of the NSF
http://www.ucop.edu/ucophome/pres/comments/numbers.html

"A decade after lambasting the National Science Foundation (NSF) for botching a study of the science job market, Congress has asked the agency to once again take on the politically risky task of predicting how many high-tech workers the United States will need over the next decade... Nonetheless, such projections can spark a political fire-storm, as NSF learned after a 1987 study, led by Peter House, warned of a coming 'shortfall' of several hundred thousand scientists. After the forecast proved false, law-makers questioned the agency's reputation for dispassionate analysis (Science, 1992 February 14, p. 788)."
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/vol282/issue5395/s-scope.dtl
1998-12-04 vol 282 issue 5395

Gene Nelson
http://psyche.uthct.edu/nes/wwwboard/messages/53.html

Studies by researchers from RAND Corporation, Stanford, Urban Institute, Harvard, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Georgetown, Rochester Institute of Technology, UC Davis, and Duke have reported that we have continually been producing far more STEM (science, tech, engineering, math) workers than we've been employing in these fields. As you can see from looking at numbers of US citizen graduates and even the extravagant employment demand projections from BLS, there was no shortage, there is no shortage, and no credible evidence of impending shortage of capable STEM workers has been presented. "

" In the IT industry, what is not required, is merit or college credentials, but someone who can rig the job for you. It works most of the times, when you have some one known in an organization, a friend or relative, who can rig the interview and subsequently the job for you. Having clout works wonders in the industry. "