BECAUSE I WANT PEOPLE TO WAKE UP. THE CHILDREN OF MY FELLOW AMERICANS ARE NO LONGER COMPETING AGAINST THE KID IN THE NEXT ROW. THEY ARE COMPETING AGAINST A KID HALFWAY ACROSS THE COUNTRY OR HALFWAY AROUND THE WORLD.
Their parents have told them lies that "everything will always more or less be okay and remain the same." And nothing could be more remote from the truth. They have somehow forgotten the American Dream of "work your butt off and you can make it." This has been replaced by "it's a free ride because you're an American."
I think you are speaking an unfortunate truth in terms of competition.
Unfortunately, it's becoming more dream than reality. I've known many people who have worked their "butt off" all their lives and have been thrown away like yesterday's newspaper because Sanjay Bobaganoosh in Bangalore will work for 10 cents on the dollar and the company managers will sell out their US employees in a heartbeat to put that difference on the quarterly bottom line (not in any savings to the customer). To add insult to injury, you have people like you find here on FR, "free" marketeers and "traders" and the like, who will turn around and spit in the guy's face and tell him "it's his fault" for choosing the wrong field, or being lazy, or "expecting" a job, or expecting him to start his own business, or imply that he's looking for "government assistance", when nothing could be further from the truth.
The truth is that this country is selling it's seed corn on the market to the highest foreign bidder to put more money on the short-term profit statements, at the expense of long-term development of infrastructure and intellectual capital. We not only lose what took generations to build, we lose the future, because students in this country can see the writing on the wall. Why spend your youth getting a technical education when some corporate hack like Carly Fiorina can sell you out to some slave labor in Indonesia? Why take all that time and effort studying a "hard sciences" subject when you can get rich quick going to business school and become a corporate officer specializing in outsourcing and downsizing, or a lawyer suing the pants off of individuals or legitimate businesses?
Seeing as you don't even have the consideration to post your home state, how can we but wonder where the hell you're coming from and for whom you speak.
I think everybody on this thread needs to read, "Rich Dad Poor Dad" by Robert T. Kiyosaki (a former USMMA grad like me).