On July 28, 2011, Senator Chuck Schumer, a democrat from New York, opened a Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing on high-skill immigration with a call to staple a green card to the diploma of every foreign student who earns a degree in science, technology, engineering, or math—known collectively as a STEM degree—in the United States. “As we all know,” added Texas Republican John Cornyn, the subcommittee’s ranking member, “there is a scarcity of qualified people for many jobs, particularly those in high technology.”
The senators’ comments echo the conventional wisdom about America’s scientific labor force, repeated in countless media articles and broadcasts, and by business and political leaders all the way up to and including President Obama: we are failing to produce a sufficient quantity of scientists and engineers and therefore must import large numbers of foreigners to remain innovative and competitive. Just a pair of recent examples: a Washington Post op-ed on August 4, 2011, that explained how to “curb our engineering shortage” and a New York Times story on November 4, 2011, headlined “Why Science Majors Change Their Minds (It’s Just so Darn Hard),” that highlighted a call by “the president and industry groups” for “colleges to graduate 10,000 more engineers a year.”
But what “we all know,” as Senator Cornyn put it, turns out not to be true—and the perpetuation of this myth is discouraging Americans from pursuing scientific careers. Leading experts on the STEM workforce, including Richard Freeman of Harvard, Michael Teitelbaum of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Paula Stephan of Georgia State University, Hal Salzman of Rutgers, Lindsay Lowell of Georgetown, and Norman Matloff of the University of California-Davis, have said for years that the US produces ample numbers of excellent science students. In fact, according to the National Science Board’s authoritative publication Science and Engineering Indicators 2008, the country turns out three times as many STEM degrees as the economy can absorb into jobs related to their majors.
So what’s going on? Simply put, a desire for cheap, skilled labor, within the business world and academia, has fueled assertions—based on flimsy and distorted evidence—that American students lack the interest and ability to pursue careers in science and engineering, and has spurred policies that have flooded the market with foreign STEM workers. This has created a grim reality for the scientific and technical labor force: glutted job markets; few career jobs; low pay, long hours, and dismal job prospects for postdoctoral researchers in university labs; near indentured servitude for holders of temporary work visas.
Here’s what Ronil Hira, an engineer and a professor of public policy at Rochester Institute of Technology, told the senators at that July hearing:
Contrary to some of the discussion here this morning, the STEM job market is mired in a jobs recession…with unemployment rates…two to three times what we would expect at full employment….Loopholes have made it too easy to bring in cheaper foreign workers with ordinary skills…to directly substitute for, rather than complement, American workers. The programs are clearly displacing and denying opportunities to American workers.
Hira’s testimony got almost no media attention, coming as it did a week before the headline-hogging debt-ceiling deadline. But for many years reporters have repeated, without scrutiny, the assertions about shortages by representatives of industries and universities that employ large numbers of STEM workers, and thus have strong financial interests in keeping salaries down.
The public perception of a dearth of homegrown talent has shaped national policy, permitting companies and universities to import tens of thousands of foreign scientists and IT workers who toil for artificially low wages.
Even more damaging, the resulting oversupply has destroyed the incentives that used to attract many of America’s best students to science and technology careers. Importing PhDs and other highly skilled workers depresses the incomes of everyone in the affected fields, according to research by Harvard economist George Borjas. Raising the supply by just 10 percent through immigration lowers pay in a given field by 3 to 4 percent, he wrote in a 2006 paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research. As it is, more than half the postdocs working at American universities are foreigners on temporary visas.
If only the IT sector had ignored its libertarian leanings and unionized in the late 1990s, we might not even be having this discussion.
#1 Posted by Jonathan, CJR on Tue 17 Jan 2012 at 03:22 PM
I'm a scientist and technologist (bona fides at http://ralphhaygood.org/). I find the persistence of the myth that there is or soon will be a shortage of scientists, engineers, and mathematicians in the United States remarkable. The reasons for this persistence deserve some scrutiny, which this article begins to provide.
There's an aspect of the situation that the article doesn't mention but that is probably significant. It isn't just that many employers of technical personnel are greedy, it's also that they're impatient (which, admittedly, may be a manifestation of greed) and a bit stupid. When they bemoan their difficulties finding the people they want, what they're often bemoaning is really their difficulties finding people who have *exactly* the experience and skills they think they want, right now. Smart employers (e.g., Google, I'm told) recognize that what they really want is smart people who are accustomed to learning whatever they need to know in order to do whatever they need to do, but not-so-smart employers - the majority, I suspect - think it's a big deal that you haven't programmed in this particular language or performed that particular laboratory or statistical procedure. Possibly, the people making the decisions in such companies have never experienced the kind of intellectual challenge one experiences as a grad student, postdoc, or faculty member in a technical field trying to do original research, so they underestimate and undervalue the intellectual resourcefulness of the Ph.D.s who apply for jobs in their companies.
#2 Posted by Ralph Haygood, CJR on Tue 17 Jan 2012 at 04:06 PM
The Johnny-can't-do-science media myth isn't ubiquitous, of course. Back in July 2009, USA Today published a nice, long article by Greg Toppo and Dan Vergano, which challenged the notion of a "coming shortage of U.S. scientists and engineers, foretold for decades by corporate, government and education advocates."
#3 Posted by Curtis Brainard, CJR on Wed 18 Jan 2012 at 01:09 PM
The problem with this article is many faceted: the demand for STEM careers does not lay with PhD's, not all STEM degrees are created equaly, there is no one single univerally agreed upon defintion for what constitutes a STEM field.
While there may be an oversupply with some STEM disciplines (biology mainly), there still exists a shortage of qualified IT and engineering professionals without advanced degrees. The O&G industry is facing a sever shortage of engineers and pays top dollars to green college graduates .. you cant say the same for most any other profession that only requires a bachelors.
#4 Posted by Mike H, CJR on Thu 19 Jan 2012 at 12:23 AM
Robert Reich talked about this years ago:
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/1212-20.htm
"Two different groups of symbolic analysts are emerging: national and global. Most symbolic analysts still work within a national economy, manipulating various kinds of symbols with the aid of computers. They're at the core of their nations' middle class: accountants, engineers, lawyers, journalists and other university-trained professionals.
Yet a new group is emerging at the very top. They're CEOs and CFOs of global corporations, and partners and executives in global investment banks, law firms and consultancies. Unlike most national symbolic analysts, these global symbolic analysts conduct almost all their work in English, and share with one another an increasingly similar cosmopolitan culture.
Most global symbolic analysts have been educated at the same elite institutions America's Ivy League universities, Oxford, Cambridge, the London School of Economics or the University of California, Berkeley. They work in similar environments in glass-and-steel office towers in the world's largest cities, in jet planes and international-meeting resorts. And they feel as comfortable in New York, London or Geneva as they do in Hong Kong, Shanghai or Sydney. When they're not working and they tend to work very hard they live comfortably, and enjoy golf and first-class hotels. Their income and wealth far surpass those of national symbolic analysts."
The problem is that people are finding the lowest cost labor available for what used to be high skill/high value tasks. This is done through outsourcing labor to low wage companies, setting up foreign labs in low wage countries, and importing low wage labor to the host country. The question we should be asking is why are foreign professionals willing to work for lower compensation than their peers in the American market?
One reason? Education inflation. When a graduate is saddled with crushing student debt, one has to demand high compensation to offset debt and the living expenses associated with one's class. Foreign professionals do not have this debt and therefore can be more elastic in their salary demands and pursuits. There's an interesting discussion on the effects of student debt on choice here:
http://rortybomb.wordpress.com/2012/01/12/a-new-metaphor-for-student-debt-burdens-faculty-taxes/
#5 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Thu 19 Jan 2012 at 03:27 PM
Here's another good discussion on the costs of education resulting in debt:
http://m.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2012/01/cost-college-probably-going-keep-going
In the end, if the rewards/value of higher education are going to continue to erode, there will come a time when the costs of education are going to respond to market pressures for cheaper education. This will either come from increased market competition from lower cost foreign universities and distance education or it will come from a collapse in demand which accompanies the collapse in rewards/job security. What's the point of paying for top dollar education if it won't get you into the middle class? Especially if one also requires wealthy enough parents to bankroll the aquisition of relational capital necessary to secure those positions? Might as well avoid the debt and work at the Walmart, if these are the deals on the future table.
#6 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Thu 19 Jan 2012 at 04:05 PM
The low PhD and postdoc salaries in at least some of the STEM fields have little to do with oversupply of workers (of national or international type) and more to do with how much the government is able/willing to spend on science.
The salaries are indeed very low for PhD students and postdocs in the STEM fields, and in the medical/biological sciences they are even lower than the engineering PhD/postdocs. But the problem is not a simple supply and demand dynamics that can be fixed by reducing the number of international students/workers. The vast majority of PhD/postdoc level researchers, in the medical/biological sciences at least, are paid by government grants (e.g. NIH) not by private companies and universities. The government institutions providing the grants set limits to how much a PhD or a postdoc can be paid. The university/hospital research labs have very little flexibility on how much they can increase the salary of students and researchers at the PhD and postdoc levels. So unless the government grants and the institutions that provide them raise the ceiling for the maximum salary paid to a postdoc or a PhD student, the salaries won’t change, with or without international students/researchers. For the government to increase the salaries, it needs to increase its spending on science. This has much more to do with issues related to increasing taxes or dealing with the US deficit than the number of international workers.
International PhD/postdocs are not “imported” for cost-effective purposes. There are actually big disincentives to hire international scientists. Many of the grants that pay the PhD/postdoc salaries have restrictions that they can only sponsor US citizens. This means that the principal investigator at a research lab has a lot less funding available to pay international workers. The universities themselves have to pay visa fees. With all this, and with pretty much standardized salaries, given a US and a non-US worker with comparable skills, the US PhD/postdoc will be much more cost-effective. At least when it comes to academic research labs where research is sponsored by government grants.
Regarding the incentives to facilitate the process of giving green cards to post-PhD/postdoc scientists, this is not simply a question of shortage of STEM workers but reaping some return on an investment on the side of the US government. A PhD takes about 5-6 years, and frequently this is followed by a postdoctoral training, which takes another 2-5 yrs. Most of this time, scientists are paid by government grants and by the time a scientist has finished his or her training, the government has been investing in this person for 5-10 years. If the person leaves at the end of this period to join a lab in another country, this is not the best return on investment for the US. It will hardly ever be the case that a green card will be ‘stapled’ to the PhD diploma but making the process easier will only benefit everyone. There are many green cards “stapled” for smaller achievements.
As for the question of why we (US and non-US science PhDs and postdocs alike) are willing to work the long hours for such low salaries after spending years in post-college training – we sometimes ask ourselves that too. But, trying to find a solution in a place that most likely will provide none and will instead hinder the exchange of scientific ideas and the possibility for collaboration, is simply not wise.
#7 Posted by MP, CJR on Thu 19 Jan 2012 at 08:45 PM
I wish this article had come out in a "popular press" outlet so that it could reach a wider audience, but if it educates the journalists who read CJR, then it has done some good. I have a PhD in chemistry, which I thought would provide me with a good solid middle-class career, working on practical research projects in private industry. Unfortunately, I graduated in the mid-1980s, when downsizing was all the rage. I did two postdocs, followed by two industry jobs that lasted less than 3 years each, with several months of unemployment between each position. (I never did earn a base salary of more than about $65,000, which is a pretty modest return on an investment of 8.5 years of college.) After the last pink slip, and after being unemployed for almost 2 years, I left lab work and went into science writing. I have been employed steadily for 15 years, and companies seek me out, rather than the other way around. During one conversation with Madeleine Jacobs, the editor of Chemical and Engineering News at the time, I challenged her assertion that we needed to get more young people to declare chemistry majors. When I asked her if she had kept track of the ever-shrinking size of her magazine's classified ads for job openings and the ever-growing ratio of job seekers to job recruiters at the American Chemical Society's job fairs, she looked surprised, and admitted that no, she hadn't thought to do that. "We need more scientists" is more a statement of dogma than a provable fact.
#8 Posted by N McGuire, CJR on Fri 27 Jan 2012 at 01:05 PM
Where is John Doerr's credibility when he told a generation of MBA students he did the right thing in firing Steve Jobs? John Doerr should ask Kit Wong why Chinese engineers only sought venture capital when they were out of work and he told them to start restaurants to learn entrepreneurship as they rejected him whent they had safe jobs. Foreign students can be bright, but faculty exaggerate their brilliance because foreign students are servile in doing work and favors for faculty and not demanding that professors actually earn their tuition keep. Moreover, faculty like that foreign students are either afraid, complicit or morally ambivalent about the immoral grantgrubbing behavior of professors. In many cases they are more likely to share the professors' anti-Americanism than American students.
#9 Posted by Jack Reylan, CJR on Wed 1 Feb 2012 at 10:12 AM
I'm pleased to learn that Beryl Lieff Benderly recently won the Iris Molotsky Award for Excellence in Coverage of Higher Education for this article.
The political corruption that serves as a foundation for policies that substitute young, imported workers who labor under conditions similar to indentured servitude via the controversial H-1B Visa program is documented in the PDF version of my 2007 investigative article, "The Greedy Gates Immigration Gambit."
#10 Posted by Dr. Gene Nelson, CJR on Fri 2 Mar 2012 at 02:21 PM
Also, keep in mind: the foreign national anticipates receiving a huge bonus after a few years at no cost to the employer -a green card. The American worker is put at an unfair economic disadvantage right there.
Basically what we have is Washington enacting laws at the behest of industry that discriminates against Americans and undermines the future of young people. Why pursue a demanding college major when your government is assuring your job goes to a foreigner?
#11 Posted by Wanda Berger, CJR on Fri 2 Mar 2012 at 02:27 PM
To "MP" who thinks NIH is the primary reason postdoc salaries are low:
Don't be silly.
The NIH salary guidelines are responsive to market forces [and they have been raised periodically before when it was found necessary].
Salaries are set at the minimum they need to be in order to be competitive with other options for graduates, and keep the postdoc slots filled. As long as graduates have few other better options, and the applications for slots keep flowing in from all corners [including outside U.S.] there is no reason for salaries to be raised.
#12 Posted by SteveA, CJR on Sat 3 Mar 2012 at 12:15 PM
There is a shortage of skilled workers in SOME technical areas, such as Computer Science grads for heavy software positions like Software Engineering. These positions require much more training than just learning specific languages. They involve more refined aspects of programming such as datatypes, algorithms, code analysis, understanding of real-time system problems (race conditions, deadlock, etc.).
#13 Posted by Glenn, CJR on Wed 19 Sep 2012 at 12:07 AM
Glenn, do the statistics exist to back this up? Namely, soaring salaries.
#14 Posted by Barry, CJR on Wed 19 Sep 2012 at 01:05 PM
Glenn wrote:
"They involve more refined aspects of programming such as datatypes, algorithms, code analysis, understanding of real-time system problems (race conditions, deadlock, etc.)."
These examples you quote are very simple and can easily be understood after two weeks training by any high school graduate with a SAT math/verbal skills of 500 each.
There are millions of underemployed U.S. programmers with many years of real-world experience who are out of IT work due to the importation of H-1B workers who they have had to train.
#15 Posted by Marla, CJR on Mon 24 Sep 2012 at 06:58 AM
"In fact, according to the National Science Board’s authoritative publication Science and Engineering Indicators 2008, the country turns out three times as many STEM degrees as the economy can absorb into jobs related to their majors."
That report at : http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/seind08/c3/c3s2.htm says "Across all fields of S&E degrees in 2003, there was a 4.7% unemployment rate for bachelor’s degree holders who received their degrees in the previous 1–5 years." Please clarify how a "4.7% unemployment rate" translates into "three times as many STEM degrees as the economy can absorb into jobs related to their majors". Or, perhaps you have a specific citation as to the basis for the "three times" statement.
#16 Posted by Bart Schuster, Arrive2.net, CJR on Tue 16 Oct 2012 at 09:05 PM
Steve Jobs told Obama that the reason Apple can't manufacture in the US is that the 100,000 person technical assembly workforce needs 30,000 engineers to support and manage it.
#17 Posted by TMJ, CJR on Fri 26 Oct 2012 at 04:30 PM
There is no shortage of scientists. Articles encouraging young people into the sciences infuriate me.
NSF, AAAS etc should not sponsor such articles. I spit chips every time I see another Upcoming-Shortage-of-Scientists article sponsored by the Australian Academy of Science.
I am an Australian PhD, I graduated from The University of Sydney which is a world top 100 university. I worked as a post-doc in the US for 5 years (Cornell & Washington State).
I could write for hours on this topic but three statistics basically say it all.
(1) I have published over 65 papers in international journals. Nearly all are first authored and about 1/2 are single authored. I have never had a real job: only contracts and adjunct work.
(2) I have applied for about 250 to 300 academic positions: I have been interviewed 3 times. I actually got one of the jobs, a 3-year non-tenure track contract lecturing position.
(3) The last entry level tenure-track position I applied for in Australia had 400 applicants. How can an appointment from such a pool of applicants be a rational process?
Let the next starry-eyed highschool student you meet who wants to become a scientist digest those 3 points.
#18 Posted by Dr Raymond J. Ritchie, CJR on Sat 3 Nov 2012 at 04:34 AM
I note Glenn has not provided anything to back up his claim. I don't mean to be harsh on him (actually, I do), but this is the norm. If challenged on the broad STEM claim, people will make some narrow claim, usually coming down to the claim that they can't get whom they want at their firm. During a recession.
None of these people have ever presented any facts to back their claim of not being able to find good people.
#19 Posted by Barry, CJR on Tue 12 Feb 2013 at 02:52 PM
"That report at : http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/seind08/c3/c3s2.htm says "Across all fields of S&E degrees in 2003, there was a 4.7% unemployment rate for bachelor’s degree holders who received their degrees in the previous 1–5 years." Please clarify how a "4.7% unemployment rate" translates into "three times as many STEM degrees as the economy can absorb into jobs related to their majors". Or, perhaps you have a specific citation as to the basis for the "three times" statement. "
Bart, because that unemployment rate (or rather, 1 minus the unemployment rate) includes people holding any job. If you got a BS/Master's/Ph.D. in any STEM field, you can probably get some sort of job, even if at a 7-11. And certainly will, since otherwise you'll be living in a cardboard box in an alley.
#20 Posted by Barry, CJR on Tue 12 Feb 2013 at 03:34 PM