Date: Thu, 30 Mar 2006 23:09:59 -0800 From: Norm Matloff To: Norm Matloff Subject: Master's degree starting salaries show erosion too To: H-1B/L-1/offshoring e-newsletter Yesterday I posted an article by the chief economist of BusinessWeek, showing that (inflation-adjusted) starting salaries for those with Bachelor's degrees in tech fields were substantially lower in 2005 than in 2001. For instance, starting salaries for new Bachelor's graduates in Computer Engineering were 12.0% lower in 2005 than in 2001, with a 12.7% deficit in the case of Computer Science graduates, and a 10.2 fall in the case of Electrical Engineering. See http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Archive/StartingSalaryErosionBach.txt This obviously belies the industry lobbyists' claim that there is a tech labor shortage. I decided to do the corresponding analysis for Master's degrees. This is important, because the industry has been insisting that it has a dire shortage of engineers with postgraduate degrees. As a result of the industry's claim, the Senate bill (actually, two bills, by Specter and Frist, which are very similar in this aspect) would create a new F-4 visa for foreign students who get Master's degrees and PhDs in tech fields at U.S. universities, leading to essentially automatic green cards for the students. Here is what I found for average starting salaries for new Master's graduates in Fall 2005, compared to Fall 2001: field % change, 2001 to 2005 Computer Science -6.6 Computer Engineering -13.7 Electrical Engineering -9.4 Again, this is flatly antithetical to the "shortage" premise of the proposed F-4 visa. It also contradicts the much-heralded recent ACM study's claim that the job market in computer science is better today than at the height of the dot-com boom (http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/ACMStudy.txt). [Methods: I used the same sources as did the BusinessWeek article, namely data from the National Association of Colleges and Employers for the salaries, and BLS data on CPI for adjusting for inflation. I did not have PhD data available.] One would think that these numbers alone would make Congress reject out of hand the Specter/Frist proposals on expanding H-1B and establishing an F-4 visa. Norm