Date: Tue, 10 May 2005 21:41:31 -0700 From: Norm Matloff To: Norm Matloff Subject: my CNet op-ed To: H-1B/L-1/offshoring e-newsletter As I mentioned before, after I critiqued a recent CNet article, http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Archive/ACMProgContest.txt CNet graciously invited me to convert my critique into an op-ed. I'm enclosing it below. CNet made a few minor editing changes, which is fine, but in a couple of those cases I've restored my original wording below. (The word _Shanghai_, which the editor substituted for _Shanghainese_, changes the meaning.) Norm http://news.com.com/2102-1007_3-5700858.html?tag=st.util.print Johnny can so program By Norm Matloff http://news.com.com/Johnny+can+so+program/2010-1007_3-5700858.html Story last modified Tue May 10 04:00:00 PDT 2005 "America is slipping!" It's become a standard lead, guaranteed to grab readers' attention. Add in a few alarmist quotes from self-serving lobbyists with hidden agendas, along with the obligatory conclusion that "Education is the answer," and you've got the economic horror movie that Americans love so much to watch. CNET News.com has got this formula down pat. Its piece, Can Johnny still program?, laments that in the annual collegiate programming contest held by the Association for Computing Machinery, the best that any American team could do this year was a miserable 17th place. The United States hasn't won a world championship since 1997--"an ominous sign for the U.S. tech industry," News.com fears. "Oh my god," readers must have thought. "How could the quality of American computer-science students have sunk so quickly in the short time span of just eight years?" It's an absurd conclusion, of course, but readers have been conditioned to believe any claim, no matter how outlandish, about the decline of the U.S. educational system. But let's see what News.com didn't tell you. Start with what it means statistically to perform well in this contest today. News.com didn't tell you that the number of teams competing has grown nearly sevenfold from 1994 through 2005. In other words, for a team to finish at, say, third place, in 1994 would be equivalent to finishing 21st this year. So a hypothetical team that News.com would have lauded in 1994 would now be dismissed as having badly "slipped" in 2005, even though it would be of the same quality. The American showing in the ACM contest does not mean that the U.S. is losing its technological mettle. Second, News.com seems to have forgotten the history of the Olympics. Long before Olympic athletes from all countries became quasiprofessionals, the Eastern European countries were seeing to it that training for the Games was their athletes' full-time job, giving them a major advantage over other nations' athletes. Some nations, or some individual universities, make similar time commitments in the ACM contest. Xu Jun, a public-affairs officer at the school which fielded this year's first-place team in the programming contest, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, put it in Olympian terms: "All their time was spent in preparation except for their class work." A faculty colleague of mine who is a veteran coach in the ACM contest estimates that many foreign teams devote at least 10 times the amount of time to practice as do American teams. Xu's statement suggests that the factor is much greater than 10. As someone who married into a Shanghainese family, I congratulate the bright, dedicated members of the winning Jiaoda team, which also took first place in 2002. But it would be wrong to view their victories as measures of general superiority over other schools, let alone other nations. Indeed, a number of ethnic-Chinese universities that are considered far more prestigious than Jiaoda weren't in even the top 10, such as Peking University (11th place), Tsinghua University (13th place) and National Taiwan University (Honorable Mention, below 30th place). In a companion editorial, News.com Executive Editor Charles Cooper repeated the lobbyists' favorite example, the seemingly poor showing of American kids at the grade-school level on international math and science tests. Yet it has been repeatedly pointed out by education experts that differences in test scores are primarily due to America's struggle to deal with a social underclass. Consider the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study eighth-grade science test, for instance, and the scores achieved by Colorado, Connecticut, Iowa, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska North Dakota, Oregon, Utah, Vermont, Wisconsin and Wyoming. Had these states--none of which has a substantial underclass--been treated as separate nations, each of them would have been outscored only by Singapore. (China, the nation that produced the ACM contest winner this year, has refused to participate in TIMMS.) So the American showing in the ACM contest does not mean that the U.S. is losing its technological mettle. To News.com's credit, after I brought some of these points to its attention, it did include them in a follow-up piece on April 19. But it is a shame that News.com did not cover the real threat to American technological competitiveness--a threat that comes from the very entities News.com quoted as saying that the contest means America is doomed. The earlier CNET article, for instance, quoted Jim Foley, chairman of the Computing Research Association, David Patterson of the ACM and former Intel CEO Craig Barrett, all of whose organizations have hidden agendas in playing the education card. And those interests, I contend, form the real technological threat to the states. Here's why: In the late 1990s, the computer industry claimed a desperate labor shortage. No independent study ever confirmed that shortage, but the hidden agenda behind the shrill shortage claims was to push Congress to increase the yearly cap on the H-1B work visa program, which enabled industry to import cut-rate engineers from abroad. Government data show, for instance, that Intel, which claims that its H-1Bs have master's degrees and Ph.D.s, pays them far less than the national medians for engineers with these degrees. University computer science departments used the "labor shortage" claims to get more faculty, more doctoral students, and more research dollars from Congress and industry. Since research funding and Ph.D. production are key to prestige in universities, the claims of a labor shortage were manna from Heaven, and a number of prominent academics rushed to publicly support the industry's push to expand the H-1B program to remedy the "labor shortage." University computer science departments used the "labor shortage" claims to get more faculty, more doctoral students, and more research dollars from Congress and industry. To be sure, research should indeed be an integral part of a university's work. But academics long ago abandoned the noble notion of scholarship for the less noble goal of empire building, a transition that should have been better covered in News.com's interviews with Foley et al. Congress, openly admitting that it was responding to industry campaign donations rather than the popular will, complied by increasing the H-1B cap in 1998 and 2000, the latter action coming at the time the mass layoffs began. This past December, despite a continuing abysmal tech labor market, Congress enacted another expansion of the program. Contrary to these parties' putative goal of maintaining American technological competitiveness, H-1B has brought great harm. How can American engineers compete with cheap, imported labor? And now the industry, notably including Barrett, is promoting the offshoring of tech work (in which the H-1B program also plays a key role), obviously even more harmful to maintaining America's technological skills. And yet these guys now have the nerve to make the claim that the solution to all the layoffs of engineers is to have our educational system produce more engineers. Sadly, News.com never questions such "Alice in Wonderland" claims. Nor does News.com challenge the rich hypocrisy of those whom it quotes. Foley, who now cites the results of the programming contest as signifying America's decline, told the same News.com reporter last August, "It does not make sense to become a programmer...(because) programming jobs will continue to go offshore." No, Johnny's ability to program hasn't slipped. What has slipped, though, is his respect for our cherished major American institutions--industry, academia, Congress and, most sadly, the press. Copyright ©1995-2005 CNET Networks, Inc. All rights reserved.