Recent replies to "Education: Are we training too many scientists?"

Reply from Brendan Maher

Brendan Maher — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 12:35:00 -0000

The group Tapping America’s Potential released a progress report on their stated goals to double the number of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) graduates by 2015. You can find it here. In an Associated Press story running today, Accenture CEO William Green called the notion that market forces would dictate STEM undergraduate enrollment without taxpayer-funded incentives, “Nonsense.”

Reply from Stephen Landess

Stephen Landess — Mon, 05 May 2008 22:50:00 -0000

It has been the policy of the National Science Foundation since 1990 to increase the number of foreign students at U.S. schools in order to lower the salaries of of university researchers.

The “Johnny can’t do math’ argument being played by college administrators and high-tech industry lobbyists just carries this perverse logic to new heights.

And now, by adminstration fiat, under ‘emergency’ rules, we have Michael Chertoff extending the OPT period for foreign students on F-1 visas to 29 months, which is a de-facto increase in the H-1B visa…

Will the last American technologist please turn out the lights?

Reply from Donna Conroy

Donna Conroy — Fri, 02 May 2008 22:37:48 -0000

What we need to do is restore Equal Employment Opportunity to the H-1B visa-hiring program so that employers are required to seek local talent. Tech professionals now face want ads that call for H-1B only.

We can do that by lobbying Congress to pass S1035.

In a letter dated April 1, 2008 Senators Durbin and Grassley, who had introduced bipartisan legislation last year to prevent H-1B and L-1 Visa abuses, wrote to the top 25 recipients of H-1B visas in 2007 stating, “Most companies can explicitly discriminate against American workers by recruiting and hiring only H-1B visa holders. As the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) has said: “H-1B workers may be hired even when a qualified U.S. worker wants the job, and a U.S. worker can be displaced from the job in favor of a foreign worker.”

Legal discrimination always creates an oversupply of qualified professionals, as Salzman and Lowell’s report suggests.

Reply from Tuomas Terävä

Tuomas Terävä — Fri, 02 May 2008 08:19:47 -0000

The article suggests that good performance in school causes students to kill themselves. Or perhaps the causation is the other way around, who knows.

Apparently the claim was based on an extensive study of statistics and correlations which, among other things, tell that in Finland the number of suicides is far smaller than in, say, Alaska (18 vs. 23 per 100 000). Thus I’m inclined to believe that Alaska must have the best educational system in the USA or perhaps in the whole world.

Alaska has also a two-times-higher murder rate than Finland, which makes things a bit confusing. Why does a world-class education in Alaska make people kill each other but not so much in Finland?