Do you have any evidence at all that suggests that foreign people with advanced degrees are paid less than American born people with advanced degrees?
Good question. I'd say the fools are John and Jane Q. Public. Why? Because they holler about how education is the most important thing, how our children are our greatest resource, and then raise not a peep when the leaders at the state level cut funding for schools. Why? Because it lowers their taxes! Yay! Never mind that their kids aren't learning a darn thing. Never mind that we're mortgaging our future in favor of a small chunk of change today. Lower taxes! Yay! Leaders only do what they do because we let them. Until more parents are truly committed, like you are Deck, to getting the best education for their child, no matter the cost, we will continue having this problem.
I can't speak for anywhere else, but if I were to leave my engineering firm and join a Calgary-based one, and work here permanently, I could get a 30-40% raise. If I didn't have pretty significant ties to Texas, I'd do it in a heartbeat. (Even with those ties, I'm holding on to the possibility.) Now, non-technical people in the same firms don't make nearly as much as they do in Texas, but "brainpower" jobs are rewarded at a much higher level here. Typically, the only places that I can get paid that much are pretty crappy places. Of course, loads of oil and very favorable corporate tax structure enables that.
How am I the ignorant one here? You make the claim that universities are admitting foreign students so they can drive down wages. When I asked for some evidence, you gave a completely irrelevant response. You also showed yourself to be unaware of the fact that foreign graduate students are paid when doing research and teaching and that they are actually paid the same amount as their American counterparts.
Actually, there can be some wage discrimination against foreign workers, mostly because companies can use the "we'll help you apply for a green card" type of favor in return for a lesser salary. At least I know a couple of family friends who were in such situations. Not to mention the fact that when you introduce more potential hires to a pool, the overall wage has to go down. For example, engineers are in short supply in the US. Hence engineers are paid at a premium by companies. But if they are no longer in short supply, there would be no need for companies to place a premium on their salary. Overall, salaries would decrease regardless of where the extra labor force comes from. But I don't think that's the problem. I think the issue here is that there simply aren't enough qualified domestic employees fit for such jobs. If American companies want 10,000 qualified mechanical engineers, and only 5,000 Americans fit the bill, what do you do with with the other 5,000? Should companies simply hire non-qualified personnel because importing foreign labor drives the salary down? In terms of helping the country maintain it's technological advantage, you have to resort to importing skilled labor.
See, I don't think such labor matter much in terms of maintaining US supremacy in the technology race. Especially because no matter how qualified Americans would be, they're still not going to be able to compete with foreigners from "less costly" countries handling similar jobs. Countries that American companies have basically moved to lower cost. Granted, while this may be good to US as a whole(which is what I'm arguing), this may not be good for American citizens. Cutting edge technology, regardless of which individual or group develop them, ultimately bring huge profits to the companies they work for and their shareholders. But such people aren't the ones with a high school diploma looking for a decent job. So I guess there has to be a distinction made here.
Is America getting dumber and dumber? Maybe. But don't overlook the fact that so many bright young Americans opt to pursue cool careers in humanities. I did wonder where smart Americans went while I was in Engineering school. Now I know where they are. America is not losing brainpower, but needs to guide brainpower a little better. Justice Scalia on too many lawyers in America http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2009/10/01/scalia-we-are-devoting-too-many-of-our-best-minds-to-lawyering/ "I mean lawyers, after all, don’t produce anything. They enable other people to produce and to go on with their lives efficiently and in an atmosphere of freedom. That’s important, but it doesn’t put food on the table and there have to be other people who are doing that. And I worry that we are devoting too many of our very best minds to this enterprise."
Certainly. What are the most difficult schools to get into in America? Med, dental, Law and MBA. For example, most kids would probably forgo the opportunity to acquire mechanical Engineering PHD at Stanford, which probably isn't as selective as top or even second tier med or law school. Engineer is equivalent of nerd, deeply inscribed in the mainstream culture. Not many kids here want to grow up being an Engineer. On the other hand, being a musician is cool, a marketer is cool, lawyer is powerful and wealthy, doctor is respected, etc. So maybe that kind of mentality has to change.
2 things. First as you say in past generations there's always been a massive brain drain in our favor from immigration. First from Europe then from Asia. Think of all the companies like google that wouldn't exist if not for recent immigration. Second, as long as people still want to come to America we'll be fine. In large measure what really matters isn't the raw number of engineers but that we still have the best universities at the top end where the best grad students want to come to and which produce innovators and thought leaders for businesses. Conversely, when people stop wanting to come to the US, that's when we'll know we're truly in decline. The main issue with immigration, of course is that people who come here and contribute, are going to want a piece of the pie. Sooner or later America is going to start looking even less white than it is now and we're going to have to make places at the table for more and more Indian, Asian, South American etc faces. Honestly for some people that might be more disturbing than the idea of being a 2nd rate (but still prosperous) power much as Great Britain has turned into the past 100 years. The US is huge and will be a power for hundreds of years even in decline, the question is do we need to be #1 and beat China? Or are people so half assed that they're okay with being a regional power and not the superpower? The thing is, we couldn't match China or India in engineering students no matter what we did. 2 companies Foxxcon and BYD train 100,000s of thousands of engineers by themselves. In the 60s Kennedy mandated a large increase in the numbers of graduating engineers and physicists specifically to contribute to the Space Race... meaning more $$$ to endow engineering departments but also relaxing racist immigration laws and allowing Korean, Taiwanese, Indian etc grad students to come here en mass. That sort of political will and the foresight probably no longer exists but even if the government were willing to spend less in Iraq and Israel and spend more in education we could never match the numbers of Asian countries. Either way we need a strategy to deal with the fact that we have fewer engineers than our rivals. Finally keep in mind that this phenomena doesn't exist only in the US. Most people dont become engineers in the US BECAUSE IT DOESN'T AS PAY WELL as being a banker douchebag or an Facebook/google drone. I was listening to a story in NPR how India is facing a massive shortage of structural engineers. For hundreds of years among the most prestigious jobs on the Subcontinent attracting the best minds were the engineers who built the rails, roads and bridges for the British Raj and the Indian Republic, but in the past decade there's something like a 1 in 4 shortage of these types of engineers since the best minds all want to get into lucrative software engineering or customer support for foreign companies. That means a large portion of the structural infrastructure that India needs for its economy literally can't be built because of a lack of expert manpower. Eventually as these other countries develop, engineering will become less attractive to their students as well.
Agree with a lot of that. I don't know if the parenting itself now is bad or worse, but for sure divorced or single parents affects kids because responsibility piled onto 1 person. Numerous studies show kids do better in 2 parent households. We have far less 2 parent households than before. Coincidence with lagging education? Kids need us. Though sadly, society's attitudes is we don't need or WANT them. The "cool" thing...whats the usual saying that involves that word? - "Too Cool for SCHOOL" Its meant to be a silly phrase that rhymes, its nothing directly to do with school. But it might as WELL be. I really think the "cool" thing is a big factor in increased apathy. You can have material possessions and money and still be intelligent all at the same time. But since IMAGE and likability are things rated so highly, possessions and money is all you need to attain that status. That and "street" smarts posing as intelligence. Almost like "Liberal" and "Conservative", there's a similar divide of "Cool" and "Nerdy", except with far more people getting into the Cool. People from lower areas don't try to overachieve through education, they try to overachieve through fame and money and cool culture. And in the US once you make lots of money, you're automatically considered "classy", something indicative of intelligence. You basically buy intelligence, or the notion of having it. With "coolthought" any concept originating before 1960 is antiquated. Such as Family Values. (Ya know, the attitude of "Are we supposed to be like.... Leeeaave It To Beaver or something?"). Instead of everyone just trying to be "epic", maybe its better learning whats made us good before and if those things can apply into the "modern" world now.
Ah, how the tides have turned. The American middle class never had a chance of competing with China and India, and a lot of the affluent kids don't have the hunger to nurture their potential because things came too easy for them. Fields like engineering, medicine, supply chain/logistics are just not for sexually active people so it's understandable how they've been overlooked. No one wants to be a nerd. You're forced into it after society has broken you down. So maybe in the coming years we'll see more intelligent Americans diverting their resources towards these fields since the finance, marketing and law industries are at capacity. Maybe the American culture will re-adapt the good old values of hard work, reading, diligence, etc. instead of pleading ignorance to activities that expand their comfort zones and spending their lives trying to one up the next guy in this grimy rat race at the cost of improving themselves from within. All these "you're not on my level" attitudes are useless if you can't take certain failures in stride. No one is right or wrong here, but a new mentality is needed.
This country was founded upon cheap labor. First by the slaves, then immigrants from eastern europe and Ireland, and now immigrants from Mexico. We "outsource" jobs, not because we do not have qualified people here to fill positions but because the labor is much cheaper.
Again this does nothing to prove your claim that foreigners living in the US with advanced degrees obtained in the US make less money for the same work than Americans. I'm going to drop it here because meh actually posted a couple of examples of how this could be true a few posts above. Perhaps you should go back and read his post to see how people can actually provide some support that relates directly to a particular claim (although his was still anecdotal) instead of making broad generalizations and calling people ignorant when you're asked to provide evidence.
