U.S. demand for foreign skilled-worker visas surpassed the entire year’s mandated supply within five days, prompting the government to say it will award them through a lottery.
Source: Demand for H1-B Skilled-Worker Visas Forces Agency Into Lottery – WSJ
I wrote…
To paraphrase, “It’s the flood of certification, and paucity of education, stupid.” In other words, don’t give me statistics on Americans with degrees, give me statistics on Americans with education.
A few places like MIT, Carnegie-Mellon, etc…actually educate students, but look even slightly below that and you’ll find what are almost diploma mills.
Don’t believe me? Go to my blog and read “A Tale Out of School”. It details (with documentation) my experience with administrators at Washington U. in St. Louis.
I was trying to help engineering students develop the skills they needed. (I was using standards close to MIT’s for these gifted students.) while the math chair was trying to coerce me into teaching them in a “cookbook” way so that the Eng. School couldn’t “wrest” the course away. Meanwhile, the Eng. school wanted “retention” – even if students cheated. (See the email from the Eng. Dean of Academic Integrity. Really.)
It’s all about the money.
Before you slam US engineering education (you were talking about 2 year technical school I imagine), the foreign student usually have lower quality education unless they went to US for grad school. They are cheap programming and testing labor. Profit is the only thing driving the visa – they are not bringing any new skills, just digital slave labor – at least till they break out of their sponsorship agreement and then another visa is needed for the bed t entry to the tech worker ponzi scheme.
I don’t disagree with you that companies try to maximize profit.
My point was exactly that I wasn’t talking about 2 year technical schools. I was talking about schools like Washington University in St. Louis – an “elite” school.
They have gifted students who could become outstanding engineers.
According their own data , the 25-75 percentile Math SAT range for the freshman class in 2011 was 710-790, and the Reading range was 680-750. Assuming that the range for the Engineering students was at the low end, they were more than qualified to learn more than a “cookbook” course in dif. eqns.
I also believe that Wash. U. is not so unusual in trying to keep their “consumers” happy with easy courses.
Those easy courses lead to graduates who conclude that, since they can hardly do any of the MIT homework problems, and made an “A” in the cookbook course, something must be wrong with the MIT material.
Would you want to hire such a person? That is, someone with only a “cookbook” knowledge of one of the most essential math courses for engineering, but with the (ingrained) belief that if they can’t solve the problem, then something must be wrong with the problem?
I hope you will read “A Tale Out of School” and the accompanying documents.
I thank you for your comment, and the opportunity for me to clarify my comment.