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Actually there is one career which is looking very good. Nursing and Pharmaceuticals. Especially nursing. My mom, who has been retired for about 3 years now, was offered $10000 to come back part time, two days a week. Those RN's wanting to work full time were being offered $20k.

But you're right about our country throwing away its talent. And those freepers on here who proclaim it's capitalism at its finest, I respond that it is corrupted capitalism run amok. Corporations have shafted engineers so long and so hard that nary a student is willing to enter into the field. Why should they when they see engineers get laid off at forty while lawyers and other professions make out like bandits? Why should they go through the effort of slugging through semesters of differential equations and electromagnetics when it is clear that American companies do not value home-grown talent?

Profit's the name of the game. Corporations have already made their loyalties clear; and those loyalties are NOT with America. CEOs and Boards loyalty is for profit and personal gain, even at the cost of endangering America. Corporate attitude is best summed up by another two of our 'great American' companies (Loral and Hughes) selling out to the Chinese - after all, it's all about the bottom line, right?

There are probably a few career fields that will have relatively stable supply-demand situations. Health care is probably one, because as long as people age and get sick, there'll be a need for doctors, nurses, and aides. There will be a need for morticians because nobody gets out of this alive. So as long as everyone doesn't rush out to nursing, medical, or mortician school, the industries will be on an even keel.

But people in the other technical fields are getting slaughtered, especially the older workers. I've seen companies demand a 25% increase in profits each year from their divisions, and when they don't make it, the bean counters just do a head count, and start lopping what they consider excess heads. Invariably, the axe falls on those with the e-cubed sysndrome: educated, experienced, and expensive. So they're out pounding the pavement in their fifties, with not even an entry-level offer to be found. And once those people leave their fields, their expertise is gone, often forever, because that kind of talent, too long dormant, eventually decays. I saw essentially the nation's entire reserve of intellectual resources in breeder reactor technology thrown away when Clinton's anti-nuclear goons cancelled the IFR project at Idaho. All that expertise in fuels technology, reprocessing, neutron transport, sodium coolant technology, and many other fields was thrown away because all those people were given the gate. They all left the business. Hazel O'Leary was DOE secretary at the time and she made a big deal of "no net loss of jobs at INEL". Right. They threw away all the expertise in the technical fields and hired forklift operators to bulldoze all the buildings those projects occupied. Its not a pretty sight out there.