To: H-1B/L-1/offshoring e-newsletter Wed Jan 8 18:47:00 PST 2014 Happy New Year, everyone. I haven't had much to comment on recently, but now have two items, one concerning the latest NACE report and the other involving a recent DOL announcement about the training programs funded by the H-1B user fees. This latter, at http://www.fiercecio.com/story/h-1b-visa-fees-fund-new-stem-training-programs/2014-01-03 is a can of worms, so I'll leave it for a different post. So, let's look at NACE, the National Association for Colleges and Employers, an organization that tracks starting salaries and other data concerning jobs for new graduates. I've cited their data many times in the past. The summary of the latest NACE report, just out today, is at http://www.naceweb.org/s01082014/salary-survey-class-of-2013.aspx It shows that starting salary for new Computer Science majors is DOWN a bit, -0.2%. That's a minuscule change, of course, subject to sampling variation, but it certainly doesn't jibe with the industry lobbyists' claims of a desperate labor shortage. Furthermore, NACE points out that their last survey, in September, new CS grads had already found a -2.5% change: http://www.naceweb.org/uploadedFiles/Content/static-assets/downloads/executive-summary/2014-january-salary-survey-executive-summary.pdf They did say that in the current survey, some subfields of CS actually had an increase, but only 0.5%. This once again shows, as have past NACE reports, that we simply don't have a shortage of new CS grads. And yet, Senator Moran has, ironically, added an amendment to the bill on unemployment benefits that would give an automatic green card to all foreign STEM students with new graduate degrees: https://www.numbersusa.com/content/news/january-8-2014/sen-jerry-moran-introduces-amendment-increase-legal-immigration-numbers.html Even more ironically, Moran's green cards would be conditional on the foreign student finding work within a year. If we have a desperate STEM labor shortage, why do these students need a year to find a job? Norm Archived at http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Archive/NACEJan2014.txt