It has become quite clear that America has more high-tech college graduates than needed to fill high-tech jobs now and, importantly, the nation will keep producing many more such graduates than job openings in the future — so why the shrill calls from the industry that there is a shortage?
The table above deals with the future. Meanwhile, the Economic Policy Institute recently released a comprehensive study dealing with the supply and demand of STEM graduates showing similar findings in the immediate past. One of its findings was:
For every two students that U.S. colleges graduate with STEM degrees, only one is hired in a STEM job.
That study was by three experts in the field (Hal Salzman, a Rutgers professor, B. Lindsay Lowell, of Georgetown University, and Daniel Kuehn, who has worked with both the Urban Institute and EPI). It stated that "in computer and information science and in engineering, U.S. colleges graduate 50 percent more students than are hired into those fields each year."
It also found that "the annual inflows of guestworkers amount to one-third to one-half the number of all new IT job holders."
The debate revolves around two sets of initials: STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) graduates and workers and the H-1B temporary worker program that floods our labor markets with low-cost, docile, high-tech nonimmigrant graduates, mostly working in computer-related industries.
Why the demands, as supported by the Senate's Gang of Eight, from industry for huge increases in the number of H-1B workers? Is it a genuine shortage of talent, as the industry claims, or is it because, as the Wall Street Journal1 of all publications, put it, the firms want to continue to staff their operations "with Indian expatriates who earn significantly less than their American counterparts"? I think the Journal has it right.
