As the economy struggles, we are told that education will be the key to renewed prosperity. So, I was quite surprised to read in the New York Times about a mother who was accused of over-investing in her daughter's college education, by borrowing to send her to NYU. After graduation, they realized the daughter's employment prospects fell well short of the income she would need to pay off her loans.
The article left the impression that the family's resources would have been better spent on some other investment, perhaps real estate, or T-bills.
NPR ran a similar story about five graduates of Georgetown Law School, who were struggling to find jobs. This spring, I talked to parents at Harvard Law School's graduation, who said their children had no job offers and would keep looking after graduation.
Huffington Post is running an on-going piece titled, "Majoring in Debt."
My education was the opposite of what we see now. I attended public universities that were heavily subsidized. At that time, public universities served as equalizing institutions -- gateways to economic security. I like to tease older audiences when I speak about this, asking anyone in the room to guess how much tuition cost at the University of California in 1968. Former residents of California will shout out $250 per quarter. We all smile when I say, "No, the campus fee was $232.50 per quarter -- tuition was free." (My out-of-state tuition was another $500 per quarter). Then, I personally thank all former residents of California, whose commitment to public education worked to my advantage.
In contrast, my two children have consumed about $500,000 in college education. They each had very good undergraduate and post-graduate programs. My family is 100% totally dedicated to education as a household strategy to secure our economic security. I'm in, as far as education goes.
In 1978, Proposition 13 passed in California, breaking the social contract which had provided heavily subsidized education. The cost of college has shifted to families. Great public universities in California and elsewhere have faded in quality, and tuition has become a barrier rather than a gateway to economic security.
The New York Times article accepts this downward trajectory by arguing that the mother over-invested in the daughter's education.
Consider this pull-out quote from the Times article, first from the mother, Cathryn Munna, then the daughter, Cortney:
"All we needed to do was get this education and get the good job. This is the thing that eats away at me, the naivete on my part."
But Cortney resists the idea that this is a tale of bad parenting. "To me, it would be an uncharitable reading," she said. "My mother has tried her best, and I don't blame her for anything in this."
Reading these statements, my head wants to explode. Naivete? Bad parenting? Blame the mother? What, for investing in her child's future?
The problem was not the investment Cortney's family made in her education. The problem is our dangerously low level of job creation.
What happened to the jobs Cortney was counting on?
Investment creates jobs. GE invests billions in China. Microsoft invests billions in India. Boeing invests billions in Russia. General Motors builds more cars in China than in America. We are making millions of new jobs -- just not in America.
It is no surprise that our economy is hollowing out. Look at the huge global oversupply of cheap labor, combined with mobility of capital, rapid transfer of technology out of the country, and trade policies that encourage investment offshore.
Our immigration policies also hurt domestic students. If Cortney had graduated in my field, physics, she could compete for her entry-level job with about 700,000 foreign temporary high-tech workers on H-1B visas. If she wanted an internship, she could compete with an additional 40- to 50,000 foreign students in the Optional Practical Training program. Incomprehensibly, Congress is considering making masters degrees in science and engineering a straight-line path to citizenship. Foreign students already make up 60 to 70% of many graduate programs in science and technology. Adding citizenship as an incentive to foreign students will displace even more domestic students from graduate programs.
The best job training is a job.
Education is part of the answer -- I am all for education. However, education, training and re-training do not cause new jobs to appear, particularly when new investment is heading overseas.
To capitalize on our social investment in education, we will need to create new jobs in our domestic economy. That means new trade policies, new policies for investment, economic development, R&D, education and immigration, and we will need a national industrial policy to coordinate new growth.
For 20 years corporations have had the ability to bypass US talent, giving foreign citizens exclusive access to compete for US job openings - 6 to 12 months before they fill the job.
When Americans are recruited 6 to 12 months out for job openings, we will then be competing against foreign citizens. Bright Future Jobs is lobbying for Durbin's H-1b and L-1 Reform bill (S.887). It will require companies to seek local talent, forcing them to post their US job openings on the DOL's website.
Guys, let's be rigorously honest with the American public. These corp visa programs are destroying the American Dream for science and technology grads whom we've paid dearly to educate, and displacing Americans from their jobs. Far from indenturing workers, these visa programs warehouse unemployed Indian techies in guest houses and Indian labor contractors are subjecting them to private bonding contracts requiring them to pay up to $10,000 to quit the company.
While we need to create jobs in the US, without restoring Equal Opportunity laws, this human tragedy will continue, providing an unfair competitive advantage to Indian offshore labor contractors to undercut their American competitors with unemployed, privately indentured foreign citizens.
I simply believe it is not fair to give foreign students a free ride when our own citizens are going into decades of debt to pay for college. In short, I'm not upset at you - but I am upset at my government.
The same is true of the many top ranked schools in the US who all appear to take in an unusually large number of foreign students and offer them cushy assistantships.
Purchased services by foreigners = jobs for college educated Americans.
By the way, there are 85,000 H-1Bs each year. Does it even make sense to compare the opportunities for freshly minted STEM graduates against the entire H-1B pool? Finally, the clincher: There are 10 million jobs in STEM. If you weren't trying to dishonestly pass off bogus statistics, why would you focus on 700,000 of them?
While we're on the topic of intellectual dishonesty, would this be a good time to mention that the article pertains to a girl getting a degree in "religious and women's studies". This very specific liberal arts niche is extremely untouched by all the foreigners you wish to vilify.
The annual H-1b cap is 85,000. However, nearly the same number are exempt from the cap (exactly how many varies year to year). So take that number and double it.
Finally, these aren't 1 year visas. They are 3 year visas with 3 year extensions - so 6 year visas. If you are applying for a greencard, you can extend an additional year, each year, until you obtain that.
My point is that we are competing with over one million workers on temporary visas at any given time. The year they arrived doesn't mean a whole lot when you are competing for a job. So, you aren't being honest with people in your own comments.
The H-1b visa was created to fill a skills shortage. It has outlived its purpose, and is now a liability to our country. In these economic times the H-1b visa is harming technology workers across this nation.
The primary contributer of H-1b worker is India. There are plenty of jobs in India, thanks to our unbalanced trade policy. So temporary workers from India can take comfort in knowing that they will have jobs when they go back. I believe the US government should pull the plug on the H-1b visa soon - especially if they want to create jobs here at home.
Assuming H-1B exemptions are equal to 85000 is so grossly wrong, I am tempted to not even respond. If you do some research, you'll find that a maximum of 120,000 H-1Bs are issued each year. This is NOT all NEW H-1Bs. It includes the very large number of renewals that have been necessitated by wasteful USCIS practices that have resulted in greencard backlogs. The actual number of exemptions is very likely fewer than a couple of thousand each year. You've just drunk the anti-H1B kool aid and appear to concoct stats that suit your fancy.
Your trade policy is indeed unbalanced. You import 600 billion more in goods than you export each year. You also export 150 billion more in services than you import. So while the American blue collar worker should be the one that is rightfully feeling stiffed, the US college graduate is posturing injustice even though he's chilling out on the gravy train.