In a message dated 11/11/07 8:33:20 P.M. Central Standard Time, matloff@cs.ucdavis.edu writes:
To: H-1B/L-1/offshoring e-newsletter 97
Readers will recall that a couple of weeks ago I commented on a
Businessweek Online article about a forthcoming study by the Urban
Institute on the state of science and math education in the U.S. The
theme of the study is that contrary to many claims made by various
parties, a close look at the data shows that American kids are doing
pretty well in science/math at the K-12 level, and that the colleges and
universities produce far more graduates in science/math than the economy
and society need.
I view the science/math "crisis" as manufactured for political ends (see
below), and I must say that the authors of the Urban Institute study
have done an excellent job. The analysis is very, very careful--itself
a rare commodity these days-- and includes a wealth of interesting
insights and details. Authors B. Lindsay Lowell and Hal Salzman are to
be commended.
In my previous comments on the study and its potential role in the H-1B
debate, http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Archive/UrbanInst.txt I pointed
out the negative claims seen constantly in the press are largely direct
or indirect plants by industry lobbyists and their proxies aimed at
pressuring Congress to expand the H-1B work visa program, and that most
of the educational issues are irrelevant to the H-1B issue (Microsoft
and Intel don't hire many math majors, for instance, so the issue of
math graduates is irrelevant). I also pointed out that the main points
of the UI study are not new, though the details seemed interesting based
on the summary I saw at the time.
Having now read the study, I comment on it here, and also on the
"debate" on NPR yesterday between one of the study's authors and Craig
Barrett, Chairman of Intel. By the way, you can access the full study
at www.urban.org/UploadedPDF/411562_Salzman_Science.pdf
Let's take the NPR show first. You can listen to it at
www.npr.org/templates/player/mediaPlayer.html?action=1&t=4&islist=
true&i+d=5&d=11-09-2007
As noted, all the breathless press reports on the alleged woes of
science/math education in the U.S. stem largely from direct or indirect
efforts of industry lobbyists to pressure Congress to increase the H-1B
visa cap. The indirect versions of this typically are funneled through
commissions stacked by industry representatives and their academic
allies, the latter having hidden vested interests of their own
concerning H-1B, as I've explained before. Not surprisingly, then, when
inviting UI study author Salzman to appear on yesterday's show, Talk of
the Nation host Ira Flatow also invited Intel Chairman Barrett to serve
as counterpoint. He also invited Shirley M. Malcom, head of education
and human resources at the American Association for the Advancement of
Science.
Salzman started the show off by giving a summary of the findings of his
study. Barrett responded quite predictably (the following is quite
close to verbatim, from notes I jotted down): "[Salzman is wrong in
saying we are producing plenty of science/math graduates.] Just look at
the numbers of H-1B visas we use to import foreign tech workers. We
wouldn't be doing that if we had an adequate supply here?...Look at the
graduate students in physical science and engineering. We have 60%
foreign nationals. Why would we have that if we had an excess supply of
domestic students?"
Of course, this is egregiously misleading. The reason companies like Intel
hire H-1Bs is not because they can't find qualified Americans but because
the H-1Bs serve as cheap labor, especially as a means to avoid hiring the
"expensive" over-40 Americans. This is well-documented, as readers of this
e-newsletter know; see http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/PrevWage.pdf for extensive
details and citations.
Following up on Barrett's comments on the large numbers of foreign
students in U.S. science/engineering PhD programs, Salzman said, "[So
many Americans get Bachelor's degrees in science/math but] only 1/3 go
on to graduate school. It puzzles us."
The answer is that this situation, in which relatively few Americans
pursue a graduate dgree, was, incredibly, a deliberate goal of our
National Science Foundation. And equally incredibly, the NSF pushed
Congress to enact the H-1B program in 1990 for this express purpose. In
the late 1980s, the NSF complained that PhD salaries were too high, and
proposed a solution to this "problem" in the form of importing a large
number of foreign students. The NSF noted that the resulting stagnant
salaries for PhDs would drive the American students away:
A growing influx of foreign PhDs into U.S. labor markets will hold
down the level of PhD salaries...[The Americans] will select
alternative career paths...[as] the effective premium for acquiring a
PhD may actually be negative.
(Eric Weinstein, How and Why Government, Universities, and Industry Create
Domestic Labor Shortages of Scientists and High-Tech Workers}, NBER, MIT,
1998, http://nber.nber.org/~peat/PapersFolder/Papers/SG/NSF.html#SG )
Clearly, the NSF's projection/goal has now been realized.
Then came the show's one phone caller. And he was right on point. The
caller noted that his wife had a degree in the life sciences, but had
finally bitten the bullet and quit graduate study to attend medical
school. She had reached this decision by noting that what would face
her as a PhD in the life sciences was a dismal future of low pay and
poor job tenure--as opposed, of course, to a good income as a physician.
He also noted that foreign students and H-1Bs (the postdocs) are happy
to accept the low pay and poor job security because they get a green
card out it, something that has high nonmonetary value to them.
That summed things up perfectly. Barrett then responded in a
predictable manner, stating, "It's illegal to underpay H-1Bs." Barrett
was wrong here on two counts. First, the huge loopholes in the law make
it easy to underpay H-1Bs yet be in full compliance with legal
requirements. I've detailed how this is done in my writings on this
issue; see for example http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/PrevWage.pdf
But more importantly for the present context, Barrett missed the
caller's point (maybe due to too much time with his handlers in
rehearsing canned answers to "anticipated questions"). The caller
wasn't saying that foreign-national postdocs get paid less than American
ones in those postdoc jobs; he was saying that due to the willingness of
the foreign nationals to work for low pay, universities can keep postdoc
pay very low, thus making it unattractive to Americans.
It's sad that Salzman did not comment on Barrett's claim that H-1Bs
aren't used for cheap labor. Salzman knows the claim to be false. The
National Research Council, commissioned by Congress, hired Salzman to
conduct research on the H-1B pay and other issues, and his work is one
of the studies I often cite on this issue. The NRC writes that
"...based on interviews with some H-1B employers, Salzman reported that
H-1B workers in jobs requiring lower levels of IT skill received lower
wages, less senior job titles, smaller signing bonuses, and smaller pay
and compensation increases than would be typical for the work they
actually did." See my university law journal article for some more on
this point (including the qualifier "lower levels"),
http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/MichJLawReform.pdf
Salzman has in fact been critical of the H-1B program, but to my great
dismay, he is part of a group of researchers, including Richard Freeman,
Ron Hira and Vivek Wadhwa, who have signed on to IEEE-USA's proposal to
expand the employment-based green card program instead of increasing the
H-1B cap. As I will explain below, these analysts are misguided, but I
certainly understand why they take such a position.
First, such a stance has the political advantage of projecting a
pro-immigration ethos, important both in general political terms and
also to mollify the industry. It is interesting, for instance, that in
a Brookings working paper proposing a method to increase the number of
American students pursuing doctorates, Freeman says,
I present a policy--increasing the number and value of graduate
fellowships in science and engineering--that can augment the
supply of U.S. students in science and engineering without impairing
access to immigrant scientists and engineers,
That last clause alludes to the fact that the Hamilton Project, which
funded Freeman's research, is largely a Wall Street operation founded
by Robert Rubin, and is bent on getting those foreign workers. Note
that former Fed Chair Alan Greenspan recently stated, quite explicitly,
that these imported tech workers are "needed" in order to hold down wages.
(See my analysis of the Bloomberg News article on Greenspan's remarks at
http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Archive/GreenspanSaysH1BCheapLabor.txt )
The second reason some analysis find the fast-track green card idea so
appealing is that it is tailor-made for the economist mentality: Since
the H-1Bs are typically de facto indentured servants and thus subject to
exploitation, the "solution" would seem to be to give them green cards
and thus full mobility in the labor market. I have high respect for all
of the analysts I mentioned above, but unfortunately their solution is
wrong, a nonsolution, because it ignores an even more fundamental
economic principle, the law of supply and demand.
What they overlook is that H-1B is more than anything about AGE; it
enables employers to hire young H-1Bs instead of older (age 40+)
Americans. That is the biggest reason Intel, Microsoft et al want the
foreign workers so much--and they don't care all that much whether they
are H-1Bs or green card holders. Giving the foreign students--almost
all of whom are young--green cards swells the youth labor market just
like the H-1B program does, and thus is only slightly less harmful.
Thus it is ironic that those calling for fast-track green cards, whom I
believe are mostly my fellow political liberals, are supporting
legislation that would serve as a vehicle for age discrimination just as
much as the H-1B program does. (I'm using the term "age discrimination"
in a colloquial sense, not a legal one. At least on the federal level,
it is legal to shun older workers for younger ones if the latter cost
less.)
Back to the show: Then Barrett gave another canned answer to the caller:
"Intel, Microsoft and other firms hire hundreds of PhDs each year, at
above-average salaries." That phrase "above average" is an industry
lobbyist favorite, meaning "above the average salary made by all workers
in all occupations in the U.S." Of course, it's completely misleading.
The comparison shouldn't be to what a baker or truck driver makes; it
should be to what others with high levels of education can make. And
the caller's point was that his wife can make far more as a physician
than she can as a PhD biologist.
The same is true for Barrett's own firm, if it's anything like
Microsoft. At Microsoft, a new PhD in computer science makes about
$90K, while Microsoft pays newly-minted lawyers $140K. And the gap
grows after that.
Again, keep in mind that this discrepancy is exactly what the NSF
planned.
The UI report points out:
...research finds that the real wages in S&E occupations declined
over the past two decades...
Malcom made an important point about postdocs. PhD scientists these
days must go through a succession of postdoc position to even have hope
of finding a permanent position. In the old days, they would do just
one postdoc stint, for a couple of years. Malcom pointed out that this
is direct evidence of an oversupply of PhDs in all the postdoc-oriented
fields.
Salzman also contended that the international test scores don't
necessarily tell us the direction in which our own schools should go.
"Singapore is number one in those international school rankings, but
we're creative. Do we want to have a rote-memory system like
Singapore's? I don't think so." Of course I fully agree with him.
The UI study found that overall American kids are doing well, not always
at the very top, but certainly in a good range, and that American
students often did better ACROSS subjects. For example, the authors
remark
...percentages of fourth-grade students at or above the high
achievement benchmark in science ranged from 27 perce in Scotland to
49 percent in Japan. In the United States, 45 percent of students
reached the high benchmark in science The percentages of students
meeting the advanced benchmark in science ranged from 5 percent in
Scotland to 15 percent in England (with Japan at 12 percent).
Barrett retorted that this isn't good enough; the U.S. needs to be
consistently at the TOP. The UI study questioned that assertion (see also
an excellent piece in a recent issue of the American Prospect, at
www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=schools_as_scapegoats),
saying for instance,
Does the level of panic about lagging U.S. performance, and
characterizations of a student population falling dramatically behind
those in other countries correspond to actual performance differences
of a few percentage points? Or perhaps more to the point, what,
exactly, does a 1.7 percentage point gap mean? Even using the
normalized scores, the gap is only 0.17 of one standard deviation.
Does this really represent a threat to the nation's science,
engineering, or innovation capacity? Is a country with a 62 percent
correct response rate versus a 64 percent correct response rate at a
disadvantage in producing leading-edge technology, pioneering
science, or delivering efficient services or production? There is no
empirical basis for drawing such conclusions, so it seems the answer
is just assumed. Normalized scores are a useful metric for
representing a population distribution but they do not necessarily
provide any insight into the importance of the differences, and
seldom is the magnitude of the score differences analyzed.
But even if Barrett is correct, then why is he advocating policies that
encourage America's best and brightest science students to NOT go into
science, as I discussed above? Indeed, the UI authors make this point
too:
...IT executives calling for greatly increasing, or even completely
removing, numerical caps on foreign worker visas (e.g. the H-1B) may
be sending strong signals to students and current workers about
diminished career opportunities. Human capital is a long-term
investment and potential S&E students read all the tea leaves before
investing. We have conducted interviews with current managers and
engineers who believe that there is little future in entry-level
engineering jobs in many industries, and IT in particular.
This last statement contrasts greatly with the "study" put out by the
ACM, saying that press accounts of the demise of the field have been
greatly exaggerated. The ACM report was highly biased; its president
stated before the study began that the goal was to convince students to
major in IT fields by showing that the job market is robust, and one
member of the study group has spoken out that dissent was dismissed as
"anti-industry." The report engages in statistical sleight of hand and
is misleading in umpteen different ways (see my analysis at
http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Archive/ACMStudy.txt ). But here the UI
authors went straight to the source and asked the hiring managers what
they thought of future prospects for the job market. The managers
responded negatively, as they have when I've talked with them myself.
Now, I do have some comments on the study itself. I won't go through a
list of the main points of the study, which are summarized well in the UI
blurb enclosed below, but there are some interesting special points
here.
Right there on the first page, there is the startling remark,
Graduate schools have an ample pool of qualified four-year graduates
to draw from but seem unable or unwilling to do so.
"Unwilling"? What do the authors have in mind here? Presumably this is
an allusion to the point made so often by the industry lobbyists
(including Barrett above) that there are large proportions of foreign
students in U.S. PhD programs. The UI authors' point is, I suppose,
that there are so many international students interested in pursuing
graduate study in the U.S. that the graduate programs simply don't want
to spend the time, effort and especially money (in the form of more
generous graduate research assistantships) to attract the Americans.
Once again, it boils down to an issue of cheap foreign labor.
Another claim constantly made by the industry lobbyists is that we are
going to "lose" the foreign students to our competitors, the latter term
referring to the European Union. The UI authors comment:
We will not address this latter concern in depth, but suffice it to
say that [although] the competition for S&E students is growing
worldwide, the potential supply from abroad remains strong, and it is
unclear that the United States must retain the greatest share of the
global student body to remain competitive. More to the point, the
United States will retain the lion's share of the global student body
under almost any future scenario, and it is unclear that a race to
retain a numerical majority will ensure that the United States
retains the best and the brightest students.
As I explained above, the primary concern ought to be that we are losing
our own best and brightest scinece students, not losing them to other
countries but to more lucrative fields outside of science. Moreover, as
shown, the nonlucrative nature of science careers is a direct
consequence of bringing in so many people from abroad. So, to worry
that we are not bringing ENOUGH people from abroad is to get it exactly
backwards.
I have always strongly supported bringing in the best and the brightest
from around the world, but only a small proportion of our foreign
students in science and engineering are in that category. I discuss
this in detail in my university law journal article at the above link.
Interestingly, the UI authors seem to realize that the tech industry
lobbyists are playing games with the data, for example by looking at the
number of graduates in ALL science/engineering disciplines, when the
industry hires mainly in only a few of those areas. They say,
We focus here on the aggregate level and ALL science/engineering
degrees in order to evaluate the broad based assertion that all S&E
output is in decline.
All in all, the UI people have produced an excellent study. Those of
you readers who are researchers and journalists would find that it is
well worth reading. The UI summary follows below.
Norm
http://www.urban.org/publications/411562.html
Into the Eye of the Storm
Assessing the Evidence on Science and Engineering Education, Quality, and
Workforce Demand
Author(s): B. Lindsay Lowell, Harold Salzman
Other Availability: PDF | Printer-Friendly Page
Posted to Web: October 29, 2007
Permanent Link: http://www.urban.org/url.cfm?ID=411562
The nonpartisan Urban Institute publishes studies, reports, and books on
timely topics worthy of public consideration. The views expressed are those
of the authors and should not be attributed to the Urban Institute, its
trustees, or its funders.
The text below is an excerpt from the complete document. Read the full paper
in PDF format.
_________________________________________________________________
Abstract
Recent policy reports claim the United States is falling behind other
nations in science and math education and graduating insufficient numbers of
scientists and engineers. Review of the evidence and analysis of actual
graduation rates and workforce needs does not find support for these claims.
U.S. student performance rankings are comparable to other leading nations
and colleges graduate far more scientists and engineers than are hired each
year. Instead, the evidence suggests targeted education improvements are
needed for the lowest performers and demand-side factors may be insufficient
to attract qualified college graduates.
_________________________________________________________________
Introduction
Policymakers and industry leaders are once again concerned about the
adequacy of the science and engineering (S&E) workforce. A growing number of
reports claim that a lack of sufficient numbers of scientists and engineers
entering the workforce is threatening the United States' economic health and
dominant position in global innovation. The primary causes of an impending
workforce shortage, it is argued, are the mediocre preparation of domestic
students in the educational pipeline and an ongoing decline in their
interest in pursuing S&E careers. To address the assumed crisis, the
consensus recommendation of business groups, public policymakers, and
educators is to expand and improve science and math education from
kindergarten through college, and to more aggressively court foreign S&E
students and workers.
This paper examines the assumptions about the state of the educational
pipeline and the purported workforce shortages. Despite this nearly
universal support for upgrading science and math education, our review of
the data leads us to conclude that, while the educational pipeline would
benefit from improvements, it is not as dysfunctional as believed. Today's
American high school students actually test as well or better than students
two decades ago. Further, today's students take more science and math
classes, and a large number of students with strong science and math
backgrounds graduate from U.S. high schools and start college in S&E fields
of study. Graduate schools have an ample pool of qualified four-year
graduates to draw from but seem unable or unwilling to do so. Surprisingly
few of the many students who start along the path toward S&E careers take
the next steps to remain in an S&E career. If there is a problem, it is not
one of too few S&E qualified college graduates but, rather, the inability of
S&E firms to attract qualified graduates. The pool of graduates with an S&E
degree exceeds the number of S&E job openings each year, even though
employers may not be as successful as they would like in attracting or
retaining graduates into an S&E career.
The various policy reports focusing on increasing the science and math
preparation at the K–12 level almost uniformly fail to ask the question our
analysis suggests—has the increase in the absolute numbers of secondary
school graduates and the increase in their math and science performance
levels provided an adequate number of domestic S&E college majors?
The pool of S&E-qualified secondary and postsecondary graduates is several
times larger than the number of annual job openings. The flow of secondary
school students up through the S&E pipeline, when it reaches the labor
market, supplies occupations that make up only about a twentieth of all
workers. So even if there were deficiencies in students' average science and
math performance, such deficiencies would not necessarily deplete the
requisite supply of S&E college majors. Even if modal test scores or
course-taking was by some measure low, the size of the graduating student
body is so large that there would still be a sufficient number of students
who test above average and who are fully qualified for the relatively small
number of S&E jobs. While improving average math and science education at
the K–12 level may be warranted for other reasons, such a strategy may not
be the most efficient means of supplying the S&E workforce.
Our analysis at the aggregate level does not find a shortage of potential
S&E students or workers. However, this conclusion is put forth with one
caveat: the analysis of all S&E students and workers may not apply equally
to the trends and problems faced in specific fields or by domestic minority
groups. A fine-grained analysis of specific industries, occupations, and
populations is needed to identify the weakness in the U.S. education system.
We are, indeed, conducting this level of analysis for future reports. The
S&E world includes a broad range of knowledge, types of related jobs, and a
great diversity of students and workers with academic performance and
employment trends different from the overall averages. A better
understanding of S&E workforce demand and education and workforce
development will identify areas where public and private policy could be
most effectively targeted.
(End of excerpt. The entire paper is available in PDF format.)