Every one of my employees is a graduate of a U.S. Higher Education institution. As it turns out the vast majority are non-Americans. Why? Because the vast majority of students graduating from respected U.S. Computer Science and Math programs are not Americans.

If I go to a University and offer internships to their students, if they are good I will hire them when they graduate. I don't care where they come from. My concern is that they are hard working, innovative, responsible and can explain their thoughts in coherent English prose.

With an H-1B I am able to employ these individuals in this country where they will contribute to our economy through taxes, rent, retail shopping, etc. Without an H-1B I employ them from overseas where neither they nor I pay U.S. taxes and they do not contribute to the local economy through their day to day living. Another benefit of employing workers overseas is the savings as a result of national health care in just about every other developed nation.

Given the choice I would rather keep my employees in this country. However, I often must wonder, why do I care? I make more money by hiring exactly the same people when the U.S. government refuses to issue them a visa.

I'm not specifically against H1-B Visas. I am against the excuses used to support them though.
My question to you small business employer. Where did you go to school? How much did it cost you? How much debt did you have when you got out?
The problem with our current education system is that if it continues this way then many young people who want to be engineers and scientists won't be able to go to college and will never realize their promise.
You ask why should you care?
What innovations are you using in your business now that are making you more productive and profitable? What if the innovator who created those things never went to college and never realized their potential. Where would your, and many other busineses, be?

I agree with your conclusion. Republican administrations have been financing their political agendas at the expense of our educational system. We are entering a new era of the Haves and Have Not's. The upper class is stratifying their hold on upper management by the entry costs to Ivy League educational institutions and reducing labor costs with cheap foreign labor. But upper managements days are numbered as Chinese and Indian companies buy US companies to acquire management and marketing expertise, and brand identity. Once they master these management, marketing, and branding skills they will not need US upper management and replace them with their own nationals. It would be in the best interest of Corporate America to pressure Congress for dramatic increases in education or you can say Good-Bye to the middle class and then the upper class.

Jim,
I agree with you. The foreign engineers often receive a free education (India/China) in their home nation. When they come here, they are trained by US companies and then leave to start competing businesses in their home countries. American businesses want short term profits, but put little investment in future of their current people or in the next generation's education. And, they are sowing the seeds of their own destruction.

I have two degrees, for both I worked summers to pay for college and books. My daughter's college costs will amount to about $12000/year. I am prepared, but why have the costs increased so much? And why so many foreign teachers? Do we lack both the teachers and students to even maintain our current engineering levels?

Because of our current situation, I have discouraged both my children from pursuing engineering. I do not want them to enter a dead end job with no future and little wage appreciation, after spending so much money on an college education.

Also, I used to teach college at a local engineering school. The students, both male and female, were very hard working. But the schools teach very little practical knowledge and leave to the employers the task to retrain the graduates once they enter the job force. What a waste of productivity and money. Clearly, our education system is dysfunctional.

So I see two issues, the cost of education and the courses taught. Also, it is too easy for American businesses to run to congress and "demand" more visas without confronting the education establishment's poor performance.

I want to say that I have been looking for an avenue such as this to vent, my daughter a recent high school graduate, graduated #1 out of her class of 430 a GPA of 4.97, top student in Math, Science and top Engeineering student (she attended a pre-engineering specialty center) all four years of high school. She was student of the year her sophmore and senior. She was a member of the Student Launch Initiative, her team of six in her school was selected by NASA, to submit a proposal, build a rocket and fly to Huntsville Alabama to launch the rocket with NASA engineers. My point here is she only received a very few outside scholarships (they were in no way related to the field of engineering) she is attending UVA and did not receive a scholarship of any kind from the University, she applied for scholarships with the Society of Women Engnieers and received an alternate position (upon looking up the finalist, most of the names appeared to be foreign), she applied for SAE scholarship and was denied. I don't get it, she is a female going into Aerospace Engineering, a top student in high school, a scholar athlete, and yet it is not enough to get these scholarships. It is a very unfortunate situation, I raised her to do the best and to be well rounded so she would be looked at for scholarships. Thanks for the avenue to vent. I just want to say it is a crying shame, these kids are ours!, born, raised and bred in the United States.

If business wants a better pool of technical graduates, they need to help generate a demand. To do that, you need to actually hire a couple recent graduates. Create some entry level positions that don't require 2 to 5 years of prior work experience.

The best and brightest are searching for jobs years before graduation. They change majors if there is no market for their skills.

These days it seems as if off shore consulting companies only ones hiring recent grads.

I agree completely with Mike and Tim C. above. In my field, environmental chemistry, colleges teach a lot of theory but little practical skills. Recent chemistry graduates must be told that when they get a laboratory job, they won't be delving into ligand field theory, hypothesizing some new wonder drug and then synthesizing an analyzing it. They will be setting up equipment for others and washing glassware in many labs. In practical terms they will be a set of hands, so I would recommend that they concentrate on the practical skills they will need.

Let’s take example of my Indian friend “Mohan” who is working in a Fortune 500 company as a senior manager. He is a native of India. He earned B.E. in Electronics Engineering from IIT Delhi and M.S. in EE from Georgia Tech.
- He worked his ass off to get into IIT Delhi (Ivy League equivalents) of the country. He was among top 5000 out of 1,000,000 applicants. His parents barely make $ 12,500 per year. The cost of tuition and books in IIT is around $3000 – 4000 per year. He borrows money from his parents and/or takes a loan from the bank. After 4 years he comes to the USA on F1 visa for 2 years of graduate studies.
- He is admitted into GeorgiaTech. Average cost of attending GA Tech is around $20,000 per year. So, he needs around $40,000. But, he doesn’t have any money. His parents are barely making enough to pay mortgage on the house. But, he is smart and is not afraid to take risks in life. So, he takes loan from a local bank at 13-15% interest rate. But, he is hard working too. He works 60 hours a week at a gas station and makes $420 /week all the while he is studying in Graduate school. He makes around $20,000 per year while attending graduate school. Most of the money goes into paying bills and some goes into paying interest on the loan.

To sum it up; he is smart (he went to IIT/GA Tech), brave (takes huge amount of loans), optimist (he lands in an unknown country where he never has been) and hardworking (worked 60 hours a week on gas station plus 12 hours of course work).
He is the one, average American kids are competing against for a job.
Fact sheet: Every year more than 70,000 Indian students attend graduate schools in the US. Most of them end up being hired by a Fortune 500 company in the US. Only 65,000 H1 visas are issues every year. So, there is no way they are going to create huge unemployment in the US.

I came to the US with a "practically free" undergrad degree with India. I got a graduate degree in engineering from an American University and entered the work force with a low debt because I had various forms of aid like graduate assistantships, scholarships, etc. I hit a dead-end eventually and left the field forever. I got a business degree and found much more rewarding work elsewhere. My daughter was a Siemens Westinghouse semifinalist and entered a prestigious university as an engineering major. She has a co-op job so she is getting an excellent education and valuable practical experience as well. She is half way through undergraduate school and has realized that she has already incurred too much debt. She is bright and has many options available. She thinks she will not make enough money as an engineer to pay those loans and enjoy a good quality life. She is about to change her major. This is why America doesn't produce enough engineers to meet its needs. The best people see no reason to be engineers if it pays so little and costs so much. The foreign graduates become engineers because it doesn't cost them as much.

The reason why education is so expensive...when you give it away for free based on race or socio-economic reasons then the cost gets shifted to the rest of us trying to get an eduation!

Very interesting article. Yes, here in Europe it costs almost nothing to study, which is the way it should be. There is not such a high difference in quality from one University to another, Names don't matter that much as in the US.
I count myself to be a global citizen, have lived quite some time in the US and traveled far and wide. It opens up your mind amazingly. What is happening with the ecucation system in the US is very very dangerous indeed.
Must I remind everybody what makes a country great? What makes it rich and working and competitive in the world? What is the most important of it all?
EDUCATION!!!
The only reason why the USA is so powerful now is that the founding fathers realized the need for a 1. CHEAP (or free) 2. high quality, 3. accesible to anyone education system.
Check out any country that is rich and you will find, that it boasts a high quality low cost education system. Yes, the cost is payed by taxes, by the people. But it pays!
Example Switzerland: average education is very high here, schools are mostly free, teachers get payed a lot by the state (hence high motivation and high skills to teach). When workers enter the work cycle, they produce high quality high margin products that can be exported to the world in general (biotech, pharma, high tech, banking, insurance) at a high price (which the world will pay). These companies and the individuals, with their high income, pay taxes and finance the system. Taxes are not that high here really and the level of education is rising every year.
Any country cutting off money from their education system will decline for the same reasons and fall behind the international community. Must I remind you that we live in a information age, where knowledge is everything? Know how, how to build better cars, build better displays, faster CPUs, beat cancer... The country that will host the company (and provide the needed high educated schientists) that will defeat cancer is going to get a lot of money from taxes from that company. Every cent put in education by the government pays many fold. I don't get what these people are thinking when they reduce funding.
Stop it now, it is a dangerous process!
This from a person that cares deeply about the US.

I agree that college educations are becoming too expensive for middle-class people like myself. My preferred solution is to pay engineers and scentists better so they could pay back those huge student loans. Doctors, dentists and lawyers all manage to pay off their loans because what they make when they graduate allows them to do so. You don't have to raise my taxes, which are too high already, thereby making it even harder for me to send my kids to college, in order to further subsidize colleges and universities which are too heavily subsidized to begin with. Just pay us what we're REALLY worth, not what some HR drone or greedy CEO thinks they can get away with paying us. Otherwise, watch the number of American-born science and engineering graduates sink ever lower.

another factor is age discrimination, if you have a short career lifetime and high student debt, why go into engineering? I say, choose a more financially and personally rewarding field with a longer career life and lower debt.

Remember people, in the corporate realm, we are human resources, not human beings.

A report earlier this year said IT enrollment in Colleges across the US are down 50%. That is not an educational system problem. It is a problem with IT as a career choice IMO.
Students are simply not choosing IT as a career. And I don't blame them, due to IT as a career choice today sucks. Why should a young person choose IT, with all the OT/weekends, first to get laidoff, beeps/calls about down servers 24/7x7 days a week, when you can choose a business field where the work day ends when you leave the office (mostly) and rarely work weekends? Not to mention the constant need to go to training to just keep a job, not to get ahead like most other fields.

Nirav Bhavsar's indian friend 'Mohan' broke the law by working 60 hours a week at a gas station while on an F-1 visa. He should not be rewarded with a job but punished with deportation.

As should every H1B applicant that lies on their resume or the employeer that hires H1B staff at lower wages than the American candidates.

Beyond that H1B employees are necessary to maintain our competetive posture. While allowing our students cheaper access to education is part of the solution there are many other aspects to the problem such as lack of role models in schools, the stigma of being a 'geek', lack of practical experience during college education, etc.

The H1B employees are not just educated at next to free rates but they are encouraged from a young age to excel in math/science PLUS they arrive here to compete with some (no matter how limited) experience from their native countires.

Lastly, in a nod to Nirav - when it comes to hiring on H1B I will always prefer a US-university graduate over a foreign-only-educated person anyday! :)

The H-1B Visas are a non issue.
Major Companies can and do regularly get visas (without quotas) to transfer employees internally from overseas operations, and you can do this for years.
I used to do that even as a very small business.
The issue is, just like most agree here, the outrageous and inhibiting cost to the student.
It starts at the very beginning.
Even though it cost over 200K per year and per classroom to educate my elementary attending children, the teachers most certainly don't see nearly enough of that money, and those prefab buildings could not cost that much either (and no we don't live in some place out in the middle of nowhere, this is Orange County, California).

Where is all the money going then?
Administration and Overhead.

So obviously having the Unions run the show has not worked. There are way too many rules, and administrators of those rules.
Unless we want keep our school system go the way of the Fords and GM's we better cut the Unions out of it now.

Arnold Schwarzenegger tried exactly that and unfortunately the Unions are far to big of a contributor of the Democratic side of the story.

What we are seeing are the direct results of Affirmative Action, one of the most racists things I had to get accustomed to when moving here to the US. If every weakest member of a society is helped to the degree where the average member can no longer compete, then the whole thing had to come down. Today, if you are an average student and your parent have an average income and you are White or Asian (as the majority is), you are seriously out of luck.

So instead of locking students out of the process by limiting who gets in, we must make space for them and then some.

It is not that the money is not there.
Over 200K per classroom would be plenty if the school actually got there hands on it.

So why not let every student make the call where the money goes.
I am talking about vouchers.
If we can't fix the system we have now (and after having tried for many years without much success), lets build up a parallel (i.e. private) one, and over time the existing one will disappear or change to justify its existence.
If Unions and Democrats were truly interested in the teachers and students they would embrace the voucher concept. The teachers would get the jobs they loathe, the students the education they need and want, companies the workforce they require and at the end of the day the government the taxes they need without raising them or come up with new ones.

If you live here and pay taxes here, your children should have an inherited right to get the best education possible (any kind of quota is simply a misguided political ploy). GPA and disciplinary action should be the only deciding factors.

What I don't understand is, I always though the democrats are the ones fighting for the benefit of the small man and everyone, yet it seems they do everything they can to hurt the small man.

Th

Swissman2:

Don't blame affirmative action. It's really income levels. If you are rich, you can pay full tuition at an Ivy League college. If you are poor, you get a few grants and many massive loans. If you are in the middle class, you make too much for needs-based scholarships, grants and tax deductions.

I'm an African American middle class IT worker. I make just enough to qualify my daughter to pay full tuition. This is the case for many of her friends - black, white, or asian.

Fortunately we are near the local university and she lives at home, so we save on dorm expenses.

The single parent mentioned in the article is hit with another obstacle. The tax deductions and credits are based on income and filing status. Joint filers are allowed to make twice the income of some filing as head of household before the deductions phase out.

From the IRS ?The amount of your Hope credit for 2006 is gradually reduced (phased out) if your modified adjusted gross income (MAGI) is between $45,000 and $55,000 ($90,000 and $110,000 if you file a joint return). You cannot claim a credit if your MAGI is $55,000 or more ($110,000 or more if you file a joint return). This is an increase from the 2005 limits of $43,000 and $53,000 ($87,000 and $107,000 if filing a joint return).?

This is also the case for the Lifetime Learning Credit.

Example:
A single parent with a one or more college aged children and an income of $55k can?t take the Hope or Lifetime Learning Credit credits.
A married couple with no children, one spouse working, one spouse taking classes and an income of $90k can take the credits.

Lots of good points made in both the article and the comments. Jim's point is that the cost of a high-tech education has become prohibitive. As the parent of a college student (and another soon to start), I couldn't agree more. With costs soaring, a student and his/her parents MUST take into account the earnings potential of a particular career versus the cost of pursuing it. Americans aren't stupid. They see that current government policies providing many thousands of non-immigrant visas (such as H-1B and L-1) and encouraging offshoring (with substantial tax breaks) put strong downward pressure on the earnings potential of science, engineering, mathematics, and computer science (“hi-tech”) careers. Many of our best and brightest, with multiple career options, quite reasonably choose careers in law, medicine, or Wall Street finance. It's no coincidence that many of those fields boast aggressive and well-financed lobbying organizations (such as the American Medical Association and the American Bar Association) that have succeeded in controlling entry to the profession and placing strict limits on foreign competition. With the resulting high earnings potential, students in these fields can justify the high cost of their education in a way that American students in other fields cannot.

Foreign students see a hi-tech education as a springboard to a better life in their own countries (as an offshore employee) or as a ticket to escape their home countries for a better life in America, so many of their best and brightest pursue these careers. With the current immigration laws permitting virtually unlimited "chain migration" of relatives, the cost of an American education, assuming it improves the chances for permanent residence in the United States, doesn't look quite so prohibitive when compared to what the foreign student stands to gain for self and family.

When you consider the respective issues for American and foreign students, it should not surprise anyone that an increasingly large portion of hi-tech graduates from American institutions are foreign-born.

Hiring companies love the H-1B visa, because it provides them with motivated employees who are effectively indentured servants. Although the H-1B is explicitly a TEMPORARY visa, every H-1B holder wants that "green card" that gives him or her PERMANENT U.S. residence. To get it, he or she must be sponsored by an employer and maintain continuous employment. The length of time it takes to get a green card is about the same as the duration of the H-1B (with authorized renewals), and if an H-1B holder changes jobs, the green card application process starts over. If the holder is fired, he or she, by law, has a very limited amount of time to find another sponsor or must leave the country (or, alternatively, become an illegal visa overstayer subject to deportation). This means that the H-1B holder must basically do whatever the employer wants and cannot change jobs no matter how poorly treated or poorly paid. Employers know this and ruthlessly exploit the situation by, among other tactics, paying H-1B visa holders substantially less than a comparable American worker. Cheap, motivated, docile labor--what could be better!

Last summer, during the debate over immigration reform, employer groups, such as the Chamber of Commerce, were thrilled with proposals to increase the number of H-1B visas until they found out that some lawmakers wanted to do away with the employer-sponsorship requirement. Then they did a 180-degree turn and insisted that most of those visas must remain employment-based. As far as I'm concerned, this is compelling evidence that employers view the H-1B primarily as a cheap-labor conduit, regardless of how vigorously they deny it.

Temporary visas like the H-1B are intended by law to provide short-term relief for domestic labor shortages, not a continuous infusion of foreign workers. But when you consider what motivates each interest group, it's clear to me that they are NEVER going to agree on what constitutes "enough", regardless of how many hi-tech graduates we produce and whether or not those graduates are American or foreign-born. I suggest we look at more objective measures to determine if there is truly a shortage. Considering wages as the "price" of labor, if there were truly a shortage we would expect real wages in hi-tech occupations to be rising. But instead, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, they are falling and have been falling for most of this decade. If the intention is to stabilize the market, and thus encourage more American participation, BLS statistics indicate a surplus rather than a shortage. Of course, you can slice and dice the "market" in any number of ways to exaggerate a "shortage" or a "surplus" in any particular specialized area or geographic location. What I'm saying is that objective measures indicate that we have an aggregate surplus. Being an American myself, I'd prefer to see that surplus handled by reducing the number of foreigners and offering greater opportunities to Americans.

Once wages are stabilized to the point where they are at least matching the rate of inflation, we can evaluate whether we need to invite more foreign-born workers, and how many. We have to get rid of the de-facto indentured servitude by giving the foreign worker the right to change jobs freely for the duration of the visa. Allow them to apply for permanent residence and work freely in this country for as long as the application is in process. Provide for a minimum "probationary" time period to weed out fraudsters, criminals, and deadbeats. And while we're at it, let's make clear that the invitation applies to that single individual only. No more chain migration of assorted relatives, even if permanent residence is granted. Perhaps we can make an exception for a spouse and their minor children.

I’ll touch briefly on the offshoring issue by noting that it is a significant factor in the downward earnings pressure in hi-tech careers. Furthermore, and contrary to the view that H-1B visas are an alternative to offshoring, these visas actually facilitate offshoring by bringing foreign workers here who later return home and take the work with them. I suggest that fewer H-1B visas might actually mean less offshoring, not more.

In an October 31, 2003, article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, by Paul Simon, the late U.S. senator from Illinois. He wrote, �The GI Bill�s education benefits made a huge difference in the lives of millions of veterans who otherwise would not have gone to college � and it enriched the nation immeasurably. We would not have our high standard of living in the United States if the GI Bill had not been enacted.�

Simon went on to list the benefits from the GI Bill: �It produced 450,000 engineers, 240,000 accountants, 238,000 teachers, 91,000 scientists, 60,000 physicians, 17,000 journalists, and untold numbers of dentists and members of the clergy.�

Who could possibly doubt that it was a good investment?