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Call it the collegiate equivalent of the gardener/tomato-harvester shortage. It's all because American women decided they wanted to be career women back in 1968.

In this education/economic cycle, with as many people sated by making their retirement living by franchising a Jack-in-the-Box, with the US economy essentially losing their otherwise potentially more effective brain-and/or-physically-oriented prowess to further wonders of (USA) nanotechnology, travelling the universe or feeding the world's population more efficiently, the pick-up for the slack growth in universities has had to come from foreign nationals, particularly the Chinese. These thereby soak up our best teachers' (well, such as they are) output, letting that well-educated potential fall off into the bit bucket in into the moneybags of the Chinese hierarchy.

I live in a big university town, and have long noted how the Chinese students' efforts are organized by their minders. They're all debriefed and directed in such a way as to spy out valuable information to a maximal efficiency. I won't hire them in my computer-related company any more, that's for sure!

The reference is to lowered fertility rates after the 1950's as the Great Generation ended their progeneration, and the small Silent Generation (mostly "war babies" and "Depression babies") took over, providing a much-reduced production of infants whom we now call the "X Generation", who were born from about 1965 to 1980.

This should have been the time of the greatest proliferation of the children of the Baby Boom, but instead they largely deferred childbearing until many of them were approaching their later and less fertile (and safe) years. Result: the "baby echo" was very reduced and didn't begin to reflect what the Boomers should have been capable of producing if they'd had kids at the same rate their parents (families in the '40's and '50's usually had 3-4 kids each).

Instead, because the women wanted to work, or because they were picky about mates because they were career/status-oriented, Boomer women married at a lower rate than their mothers' generation had, married much later, and had a much higher divorce rate ("I am woman, hear me roar", et cetera). Result: family formation sucked, families sucked, and everything has generally gone to hell in a basket because of the liberal influence, especially the "women's movement" influence.

Bereft of the ravings of Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan, Andrea Dworkin and Naomi Wolf and the rest of them, Boomer women would probably have been less family-oriented anyway because of the growing realization that women can do engineering, too, and because business would have continued to try to use women's labor as a wage-undermining alternative, gradually bringing more of them into the workforce. Competition for women's time from work has been the real slayer of family life and values IMHO, because the father/husband was already absent much of the time (in the 1920's, industrial workers, driven like slaves, pulled 12-hour shifts at hard labor in hazardous conditions and were very often barely able to function after a day spent in an open-hearth furnace, e.g.), and now the business community wanted the women to come to work, too. Leaving the kids at home (latchkey kids) to be babysat by television (values of the forum, materialistic and selfish).

With the dearth of children, business' appetite for foreign immigrant labor has gone up, both as a way to undercut wages and as a way to impose labor peace on the employer's terms in the workplace. As a result, blue-collar wages have stagnated in real, deflated terms in communities with a lot of immigrant labor. Night janitorial staff, in 1990, made $12/hr in New York, $10/hr in Pittsburgh, and $3.30/hr in Houston. Capiche?

Now it's spreading, and Andy Grove of Intel was just on Charlie Rose this week saying that he thinks U.S. workers' earning power is on the edge of an abyss, as management closes in on their goal of enforcing third-world wages (and first-world prices) on the country.