To: H-1B/L-1/offshoring e-newsletter Sun Nov 24 22:44:17 PST 2013 The Chronicle of Higher Education, a weekly newspaper on university issues, recently ran an article titled "The STEM Crisis: Reality or Myth?" It ran in the November 11 edition, by Michael Aft, and though the CHE Web site is subscriber-only (I'm a longtime subscriber), you can read the piece in its entirety at http://www.rit.edu/news/pdfs/CHE_Hira.pdf Someone asked me yesterday whether I was planning to discuss the article here in my e-newsletter. I answered no; it doesn't say anything new, it doesn't disclose the vested interests some of the people quoted in the article have concerning the topic of a STEM labor shortage, and anyway, the article is not publicly available. Anft's piece is good overall. The content is not new to readers of this e-newsletter, but it's something that CHE readers are woefully ignorant of. So, my hat is off to the author. But I consider the problem of not fully divulging the vested interest information to be major--it says that Atkinson gets 60% of his funding from the tech industry, but doesn't mention that Carnevale gets 15% of his funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. (This 15% figure is from Mike Anft, personal communication with me.) Believe me, as an academic I know that 15% is not something that can be ignored, especially given that it was probably much more than 15% for the STEM report Carnevale's outfit wrote. In the past I've pointed to statements in the report which I view as problematic. I also object to the article's implication that STEM graduate programs would be decimated if, hypothetically, the F-1 foreign student visa program were canceled. I've gone through this argument many times here and elsewhere, and thus will spare you readers the details. If you need me to refresh your memory, just sent me an e-mail query. Well, then, why am I commenting now? The reason is that an alert reader pointed me this evening to a Harvard professor's blog, http://harry-lewis.blogspot.com/2013/11/the-crisis-crisis.html in which the professor decides that he too should comment on whether there is a STEM shortage. Fine, the more opinions the merrier, but this passage was quite irksome: "Even the contrarian article cited above, which is behind a paywall in the Carbuncle of Higher Education (as a friend calls it), acknowledges the shortfall in computer and information science." I've read through the CHE article several times, and, correct me if I'm wrong, but from what I see, NOWHERE does the article say anything of the kind. Later, the author makes the typical error in reasoning: Since the job market for new, young college CS grads is excellent, "therefore" we must have a shortage in the CS field. The truth is the opposite: Tech employers consider the age 35+ CS worker too expensive, in both wages and benefits, and thus turn to the new grads. During the last year or so, various Silicon Valley employers have even blurted this out to the press at times. The odd thing about this is that I'm actually in the middle ground on this. Every time I write that the job market is currently strong for new CS grads, I hear dissenting views from some readers. I should point out (again) that (a) students with GPAs below 3.0 have a hard time even getting an interview but (b) they probably shouldn't be hired anyway, at least not for core technical positions. Getting back to the professor's blog, he closes by saying "On a national level, is there really a critical undersupply of STEM professionals or just a problem of retraining one kind of engineer to work in another area? I tend to think there really is an undersupply and the mythologizing rhetoric about the shortfall may be being fed by anti-immigration money. But I can't claim to be sure, and the crisis rhetoric makes me less sure, not more." "Mythologizing rhetoric"? Good grief, the man just closed a blog posting that consisted solely of rhetoric, no data about STEM at all. What a typical academic! (Especially a Harvard one.) And of course, there is tons of data showing that his speculations are wrong. And I'd sure like to know more about that "anti-immigration money"; the immigration reform organization spend far less than the industry lobbyists do, I'm sure, and in any case those organizations focus mainly on the issue of unauthorized immigrants. Norm Archived at http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Archive/STEMCrisisRealityMyth.txt