A recent college grad may not be able to actually do the work that these universities are looking for.
Part of this is we broke the pipelines in United States to domestically produce such talent. Foreign student visas made these jobs extremely unattractive for domestic students with options because of low pay + debt load while making them extremely attractive to foreign students because until recently, many people around the world were willing to do whatever for US visa.
+ most countries don’t crush their graduates with nearly the same debt
+ PhDs abroad can be quicker to get making lower pay acceptable
Look at it this way. Except at the tippy top, employers aren’t looking to hire “the best.” They decide what the role is worth, and then select from the pool of people willing to work for that level of pay. A de facto path to U.S. citizenship for someone and their kids is basically a form of non-cash compensation for H1Bs. So even if the cash pay is the same, the foreigner worker is getting more value than the American worker. The effect is the same as if the government kicked in an extra $50,000 a year (or whatever) to the paycheck of foreign workers but not American workers. So if the role pays $100,000, it will draw a pool of foreign workers as if it pays $150,000 a year. So, at every level of job, the American worker is competing with more qualified and motivated foreign workers, because the job simply is worth more to those workers.
For a long time, I faulted Americans who didn’t teach their kids to “learn to work 16 hours a day” like my dad taught me. But I have kids of my own now, and they don’t have the mentality of someone who is a generation away from having to take a boat to school during monsoon season. And that’s probably a good thing that we should want as a society.
Here, you equate "American families" to "white families." Your source (below) says that Hispanic and black student enrollment didn't change, just white enrollment. Maybe there are other factors?
"First off, no statistical relationship existed during those years between Asian American student enrollment and that of students from other groups, such as African Americans or Hispanics"
> they don’t have the mentality of someone who is a generation away from having to take a boat to school during monsoon season.
Are Asian immigrants in the California suburbs (the location of your source study) coming from this type of poverty?
EDIT: As has become traditional, rayiner edited the original post when it was proven completely false. Here is the article that "proved" their point: https://www.the74million.org/article/fear-of-competition-res...
This is really egregious internet-style arguing.
> Here, you equate "American families" to "white families." Your source (below) says that Hispanic and black student enrollment didn't change, just white enrollment. Maybe there are other factors
The article says that there was no “statistically significant relationship” for other races. That doesn’t mean you can infer that people from other races didn’t move away. It could be that there simply weren’t enough hispanic and black families in the sample to draw an inference. The study looked only at affluent school districts in California. There’s not a lot of black and hispanic students in those school districts to begin with. And the white families are much more likely to be wealthier and have more freedom to move.
I suspect the trend would hold true for affluent native-born black and hispanic families too. There’s just very few school districts where you have affluent asians living alongside affluent black or hispanic people. In fact, I’m not aware of any. I live in a county with a lot of affluent black people, adjacent to the most affluent black-majority county. My daughter is the only Asian in her class, which is otherwise about 70-30 white/black.
> Are Asian immigrants in the California suburbs (the location of your source study) coming from this type of poverty
My dad’s family was actually affluent landowners. That’s just what most of Asia was like until very recently. My sister in law is Taiwanese. The communists killed much of her extended family during the revolution.
It could be that, but the study itself doesn't show that at all. It actually shows the opposite. Hispanics were, by far, the largest subset of students in the study. In the Central Cities area of the study, Asian and black student population was about even.
These days I think it's clear your dad had it right. Your stance seems to be that protectionist and isolationist policies will keep citizens safe from international competition, but how long will that last in a Capitalistic society? And how will that prepare them for the future when the competition inevitably arrives.
And lo and behold, the ultimate competition is already here and it's not even foreign people, it's AI that is even cheaper than foreign people!
Monsoon season is here, we should all be looking for our boats.
In theory, you could trust USCIS to identify areas that have real need. But that process hasn’t been reliable in decades: https://spectrum.ieee.org/stem-crisis-as-myth-gets-yet-anoth... (“Salzman spoke of the latest data on STEM graduates and jobs, reiterating that STEM programs turn out at least 50 percent more IT graduates every year than there are U.S. job openings. He also said that if the H-1B program is ramped up to the numbers that are being advocated (up from 85 000 to 185 000), that worker oversupply could possibly increase to the 90 percent mark or more.”). Note this article was written before the impacts of AI, etc., started being felt. So things are even worse now.
We should stop listening to institutions (corporate or academic alike) demanding quality at the lowest compensation bound possible, leveraging visas for labor to accomplish this. Pay the talent, develop the talent, or go without the talent.
It's usually companies who hide behind 'we use data from HR to ensure we pay market rate'.
Paying market rate doesn't make people change jobs.
Untenured position in Florida - I'm guessing the pay was not great, no?
But I am guessing that Florida is, in general, not the most desirable place for academics to be.
First, Florida killed tenure. You get reviews every 5 years and can be fired if they don't like what they see.
Second, Stop WOKE, means that Florida gets a say in what I teach.
So Florida took away the most important (and for many maybe only) attractive part of the job: academic freedom.
Almost half of Florida faculty are trying to leave. So yeah. Of course they get the bottom of the barrel. That's all that's left for them. With the ability to get a job almost anywhere else in the world you'd have to have extreme circumstances to consider Florida.
I’d add that Florida higher education pays below average vs. nationally and the state is dealing with some serious cost of living issues at the moment (e.g. insurance).
It’s kinda like it’s the purpose of these laws to dismantle public higher education.
The host interjected, “Well, we have plenty of talented people here.”
“No, you don’t,” the president replied. “No, you don’t have certain talents and people have to learn.”
Why are universities not creating a talent pool for their self-sustainment? Many of us have had to suffer through college lectures of dubious real-world application and near-incomprehensible accents. I am not alone when I realized that I could just enter the tech world with self-study, self-promotion, and applying to open positions.
They say, "those who can, do - those who can't, teach", and I believe it. Maybe the real question is: Are universities going the way of the physical newspaper, the personal blog, the dinosaur...?
So instead of getting the credentials required to authoritatively say what does and does not have real world applications, you dropped out, removing yourself from a qualified labor pool? Do you think the deep engineering knowledge and practices to solve hard problems is overrated?
There are no credentials required.
>authoritatively say
Experience beats credentials.
>qualified labor pool
No degree required outside of a HR checklist. CS students are not necessarily qualified outside of academia in the real world. H-1B just means you jumped through the hoops of credentialism to be a "qualified" candidate. Many universities require you to have a CS degree to work as an tech employee, so they shut out many qualified candidates. Their loss, and eventual downfall.
>Do you think the deep engineering knowledge and practices to solve hard problems is overrated?
Yes, extremely overrated. The emergence of AI is at least proof that "deep engineering knowledge" can be easily summoned by a prompt. The practices are on their way to automation. The hard work has been done.
The weather-climate might be nice, but the political climate is less so.
And frankly, depending on the time of year and where you are in Florida, the weather climate is atrocious, too.
> and near-incomprehensible accents.
Where do you work that none of your coworkers have accents?
How did you make this jump?
From here; the implication seems to be that it's only in college lectures that people are faced with strong accents.
This is a fair take but maybe a pause is just a pause. Considering how big of problem visa abuse is in education in multiple countries, these organizations taking a break to review things and start to take it seriously is probably a good thing.
This is how you end up with fewer citizens who are qualified to teach other citizens.
Don't change the subject, do you agree the US political system should prioritize the interests of Americans over foreigners?
In example, who's going to teach Americans how to run chip fabs?
Why stop at nationality. California for Californians! Pretty bad take.
I don't know what to make of that, it's like we are left wing in theory but right wing in practice.
It's just plain human to support outcomes that benefit one's self, family, friends, or community (especially if they are suffering, or losing what they were once afforded by their country or ancestors); even if you might have voted the other way if you were observing from outside, where you have the luxury to make more neutral decisions based on the big picture and long timeline.
As long as the delta isn't too gross, of course - there's where the subjectivity really comes in (How much benefit? How much harm? What does it mean to "deserve" something? Where is the line between simply deciding how your own country operates and harming others unnecessarily?)
That being said it isn’t like these people are necessarily aligned on any other issues. What might your Black or Persian friends think of gay people for example?
I’ve never seen a MAGA hat arguing for more (or any) H1Bs - quite the opposite.
Adding to OPs point, Trump did a major immigration push, yet a major push to punish companies/employees who create the demand that immigrants were filling was not part of that. Imagine launching a 50+ billion dollar drug war, but only going after drug users.