Date: Sun, 11 Nov 2007 18:27:57 -0800 From: Norm Matloff To: Norm Matloff Subject: UI report on science/math education To: H-1B/L-1/offshoring e-newsletter Readers will recall that a couple of weeks ago I commented on a Businessweek Online article about a forthcoming study by the Urban Institute on the state of science and math education in the U.S. The theme of the study is that contrary to many claims made by various parties, a close look at the data shows that American kids are doing pretty well in science/math at the K-12 level, and that the colleges and universities produce far more graduates in science/math than the economy and society need. I view the science/math "crisis" as manufactured for political ends (see below), and I must say that the authors of the Urban Institute study have done an excellent job. The analysis is very, very careful--itself a rare commodity these days-- and includes a wealth of interesting insights and details. Authors B. Lindsay Lowell and Hal Salzman are to be commended. In my previous comments on the study and its potential role in the H-1B debate, http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Archive/UrbanInst.txt I pointed out the negative claims seen constantly in the press are largely direct or indirect plants by industry lobbyists and their proxies aimed at pressuring Congress to expand the H-1B work visa program, and that most of the educational issues are irrelevant to the H-1B issue (Microsoft and Intel don't hire many math majors, for instance, so the issue of math graduates is irrelevant). I also pointed out that the main points of the UI study are not new, though the details seemed interesting based on the summary I saw at the time. Having now read the study, I comment on it here, and also on the "debate" on NPR yesterday between one of the study's authors and Craig Barrett, Chairman of Intel. By the way, you can access the full study at www.urban.org/UploadedPDF/411562_Salzman_Science.pdf Let's take the NPR show first. You can listen to it at www.npr.org/templates/player/mediaPlayer.html?action=1&t=4&islist= true&i+d=5&d=11-09-2007 or read the transcript at http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=16150041 As noted, all the breathless press reports on the alleged woes of science/math education in the U.S. stem largely from direct or indirect efforts of industry lobbyists to pressure Congress to increase the H-1B visa cap. The indirect versions of this typically are funneled through commissions stacked by industry representatives and their academic allies, the latter having hidden vested interests of their own concerning H-1B, as I've explained before. Not surprisingly, then, when inviting UI study author Salzman to appear on yesterday's show, Talk of the Nation host Ira Flatow also invited Intel Chairman Barrett to serve as counterpoint. He also invited Shirley M. Malcolm, head of education and human resources at the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Salzman started the show off by giving a summary of the findings of his study. Barrett responded quite predictably: "[Salzman's] main conclusisons fly in the face a lot of evidence to the contrary. Just look for example at the number of H-1B visas we use to import foreign tech workers. We wouldn't be doing that if we had an adequate supply here...Look at the graduate students in physical science and engineering. We have 60% foreign nationals. Why would we have that if we had an excess supply of domestic students?" Of course, this is egregiously misleading. The reason companies like Intel hire H-1Bs is not because they can't find qualified Americans but because the H-1Bs serve as cheap labor, especially as a means to avoid hiring the "expensive" over-40 Americans. This is well-documented, as readers of this e-newsletter know; see http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/PrevWage.pdf for extensive details and citations. Following up on Barrett's comments on the large numbers of foreign students in U.S. science/engineering PhD programs, Salzman said, "[So many Americans get Bachelor's degrees in science/math but] only 1/3 go on to graduate school. It puzzles us." The answer is that this situation, in which relatively few Americans pursue a graduate dgree, was, incredibly, a deliberate goal of our National Science Foundation. And equally incredibly, the NSF pushed Congress to enact the H-1B program in 1990 for this express purpose. In the late 1980s, the NSF complained that PhD salaries were too high, and proposed a solution to this "problem" in the form of importing a large number of foreign students. The NSF noted that the resulting stagnant salaries for PhDs would drive the American students away: A growing influx of foreign PhDs into U.S. labor markets will hold down the level of PhD salaries...[The Americans] will select alternative career paths...[as] the effective premium for acquiring a PhD may actually be negative. (Eric Weinstein, How and Why Government, Universities, and Industry Create Domestic Labor Shortages of Scientists and High-Tech Workers}, NBER, MIT, 1998, http://nber.nber.org/~peat/PapersFolder/Papers/SG/NSF.html#SG ) Clearly, the NSF's projection/goal has now been realized. Then came the show's one phone caller. And he was right on point. The caller noted that his wife had a degree in the life sciences, but had finally bitten the bullet and quit graduate study to attend medical school. She had reached this decision by noting that what would face her as a PhD in the life sciences was a dismal future of low pay and poor job tenure--as opposed, of course, to a good income as a physician. He also noted that foreign students and H-1Bs (the postdocs) are happy to accept the low pay and poor job security because they get a green card out it, something that has high nonmonetary value to them. That summed things up perfectly. Barrett then responded in a predictable manner, stating, "It's illegal to underpay H-1Bs." Barrett was wrong here on two counts. First, the huge loopholes in the law make it easy to underpay H-1Bs yet be in full compliance with legal requirements. I've detailed how this is done in my writings on this issue; see for example http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/PrevWage.pdf But more importantly for the present context, Barrett missed the caller's point (maybe due to too much time with his handlers in rehearsing canned answers to "anticipated questions"). The caller wasn't saying that foreign-national postdocs get paid less than American ones; he was saying that due to the willingness of the foreign nationals to work for low pay, universities can keep postdoc pay very low, thus making it unattractive to Americans. It's sad that Salzman did not comment on Barrett's claim that H-1Bs aren't used for cheap labor. Salzman knows the claim to be false. The National Research Council, commissioned by Congress, hired Salzman to conduct research on H-1B pay and other issues, and his work is one of the studies I often cite on this issue. The NRC writes that "...based on interviews with some H-1B employers, Salzman reported that H-1B workers in jobs requiring lower levels of IT skill received lower wages, less senior job titles, smaller signing bonuses, and smaller pay and compensation increases than would be typical for the work they actually did." See my university law journal article for some more on this point (including the qualifier "lower levels"), http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/MichJLawReform.pdf Salzman has in fact been critical of the H-1B program, but to my great dismay, he is part of a group of researchers, including Richard Freeman, Ron Hira and Vivek Wadhwa, who have signed on to IEEE-USA's proposal to expand the employment-based green card program instead of increasing the H-1B cap. As I will explain below, these analysts are misguided, but I certainly understand why they take such a position. First, such a stance has the political advantage of projecting a pro-immigration ethos, important both in general political terms and also to mollify the industry. It is interesting, for instance, that in a Brookings working paper proposing a method to increase the number of American students pursuing doctorates, Freeman says, I present a policy--increasing the number and value of graduate fellowships in science and engineering--that can augment the supply of U.S. students in science and engineering without impairing access to immigrant scientists and engineers, That last clause alludes to the fact that the Hamilton Project, which funded Freeman's research, is largely a Wall Street operation founded by Robert Rubin, and is bent on getting those foreign workers. Note that former Fed Chair Alan Greenspan recently stated, quite explicitly, that these imported tech workers are "needed" in order to hold down wages. (See my analysis of the Bloomberg News article on Greenspan's remarks at http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Archive/GreenspanSaysH1BCheapLabor.txt ) The second reason some analysts find the fast-track green card idea so appealing is that it is tailor-made for the economist mentality: Since the H-1Bs are typically de facto indentured servants and thus subject to exploitation, the "solution" would seem to be to give them green cards and thus full mobility in the labor market. I have high respect for all of the analysts I mentioned above, but unfortunately their solution is wrong, a nonsolution, because it ignores an even more fundamental economic principle, the law of supply and demand. What they overlook is that H-1B is more than anything about AGE; it enables employers to hire young H-1Bs instead of older (age 40+) Americans. That is the biggest reason Intel, Microsoft et al want the foreign workers so much--and they don't care all that much whether they are H-1Bs or green card holders. Giving the foreign students--almost all of whom are young--green cards swells the youth labor market just like the H-1B program does, and thus is only slightly less harmful. Thus it is ironic that those calling for fast-track green cards, who I believe are mostly my fellow political liberals, are supporting legislation that would serve as a vehicle for age discrimination just as much as the H-1B program does. (I'm using the term "age discrimination" in a colloquial sense, not a legal one. At least on the federal level, it is legal to shun older workers in favor of younger ones if the latter cost less. The H-1B program then expands the young sector of the labor market, making it perfectly legal to hire young H-1Bs in lieu of older Americans.) Back to the show: Next Barrett gave another canned answer to the caller: "...a company like Intel or a Microsoft or Cisco, pick any of the high-tech companies, we hire at Intel hundreds and hundreds of Ph.D.s each year, who do exciting work and make above-average wages. I think there's huge opportunity in these fields. That phrase "above average" is an industry lobbyist favorite, meaning "above the average salary made by all workers in all occupations in the U.S." Of course, it's completely misleading. The comparison shouldn't be to what a baker or truck driver makes; it should be to what others with high levels of education can make. And the caller's point was that his wife can make far more as a physician than she can as a PhD biologist. Based on what various sources have told me, Barrett's claim that Intel hires "hundreds and hundreds of PhDs each year" is simply incorrect. At Microsoft, a new PhD in computer science makes about $90K (an Intel official told me the range is $90-110K for a new engineering PhD), while Microsoft pays newly-minted lawyers $140K. And the gap grows after that. Again, keep in mind that this discrepancy is exactly what the NSF planned. In this light, note that the UI report points out: ...research finds that the real wages in S&E occupations declined over the past two decades... Malcolm made an important point about postdocs. PhD scientists these days must go through a succession of postdoc position to even have hope of finding a permanent position. In the old days, they would do just one postdoc stint, for a couple of years. Malcolm pointed out that this is direct evidence of an oversupply of PhDs in all the postdoc-oriented fields. Salzman also contended that the international test scores don't necessarily tell us the direction in which our own schools should go. "Singapore is number one in those international school rankings, but we're creative. Do we want to have a rote-memory system like Singapore's? I don't think so." Of course I fully agree with him. The UI study found that overall American kids are doing well, not always at the very top, but certainly in a good range, and that American students often did better ACROSS subjects. For example, the authors remark ...percentages of fourth-grade students at or above the high achievement benchmark in science ranged from 27 perce in Scotland to 49 percent in Japan. In the United States, 45 percent of students reached the high benchmark in science. The percentages of students meeting the advanced benchmark in science ranged from 5 percent in Scotland to 15 percent in England (with Japan at 12 percent). Barrett retorted that this isn't good enough; the U.S. needs to be consistently at the TOP. The UI study questioned that assertion (see also an excellent piece in a recent issue of the American Prospect, at www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=schools_as_scapegoats), saying for instance, Does the level of panic about lagging U.S. performance, and characterizations of a student population falling dramatically behind those in other countries correspond to actual performance differences of a few percentage points? Or perhaps more to the point, what, exactly, does a 1.7 percentage point gap mean? Even using the normalized scores, the gap is only 0.17 of one standard deviation. Does this really represent a threat to the nation's science, engineering, or innovation capacity? Is a country with a 62 percent correct response rate versus a 64 percent correct response rate at a disadvantage in producing leading-edge technology, pioneering science, or delivering efficient services or production? There is no empirical basis for drawing such conclusions, so it seems the answer is just assumed. Normalized scores are a useful metric for representing a population distribution but they do not necessarily provide any insight into the importance of the differences, and seldom is the magnitude of the score differences analyzed. But even if Barrett is correct, then why is he advocating policies that encourage America's best and brightest science students to NOT go into science, as I discussed above? Indeed, the UI authors make this point too: ...IT executives calling for greatly increasing, or even completely removing, numerical caps on foreign worker visas (e.g. the H-1B) may be sending strong signals to students and current workers about diminished career opportunities. Human capital is a long-term investment and potential S&E students read all the tea leaves before investing. We have conducted interviews with current managers and engineers who believe that there is little future in entry-level engineering jobs in many industries, and IT in particular. I must add, though, that a fast-track green card program would likewise diminished career opportunities and send the wrong signals to U.S. students. The last statement in the above quote, on the authors' interviews with manager, contrasts greatly with the "study" put out by the ACM, which asserted that press accounts of the demise of the field have been greatly exaggerated. The ACM report was highly biased; its president stated BEFORE the study began that the goal was to convince students to major in IT fields by showing that the job market is robust, and one member of the study group has spoken out that any dissent during the study was dismissed as "anti-industry." The report engages in statistical sleight of hand and is misleading in umpteen different ways (see my analysis at http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Archive/ACMStudy.txt ). But here the UI authors went straight to the source and asked the hiring managers what they thought of future prospects for the job market. The managers responded negatively, as they have when I've talked with them myself. Now, I do have my own comments on the study. I won't go through a list of the main points of the work, which are summarized well in the UI blurb enclosed below, but there are some interesting special points here. Right there on the first page, there is the startling remark, Graduate schools have an ample pool of qualified four-year graduates to draw from but seem unable or unwilling to do so. "Unwilling"? What do the authors have in mind here? Presumably this is an allusion to the point made so often by the industry lobbyists (including Barrett above) that there are large proportions of foreign students in U.S. PhD programs. The UI authors' point is, I suppose, that there are so many international students interested in pursuing graduate study in the U.S. that the graduate programs simply don't want to spend the time, effort and especially money (in the form of more generous graduate research assistantships) to attract the Americans. Once again, it boils down to an issue of cheap foreign labor. Another claim constantly made by the industry lobbyists is that we are going to "lose" the foreign students to our competitors, the latter term referring to the European Union. The UI authors comment: We will not address this latter concern in depth, but suffice it to say that [although] the competition for S&E students is growing worldwide, the potential supply from abroad remains strong, and it is unclear that the United States must retain the greatest share of the global student body to remain competitive. More to the point, the United States will retain the lion's share of the global student body under almost any future scenario, and it is unclear that a race to retain a numerical majority will ensure that the United States retains the best and the brightest students. Fine, but as I explained above, the primary concern ought to be that we are losing our own best and brightest scinece students, as they gravitate to more lucrative fields outside of science. Moreover, as shown, the nonlucrative nature of science careers is a direct consequence of bringing in so many people from abroad. So, to worry that we are not bringing ENOUGH people from abroad is to get it exactly backwards. I have always strongly supported bringing in the best and the brightest from around the world, but only a small proportion of our foreign students in science and engineering are in that category. I discuss this in detail in my university law journal article at the above link. Interestingly, the UI authors seem to realize that the tech industry lobbyists are playing games with the data, for example by looking at the number of graduates in ALL science/engineering disciplines, when the industry hires mainly in only a few of those areas. They say, We focus here on the aggregate level and ALL science/engineering degrees in order to evaluate the broad based assertion that all S&E output is in decline. All in all, the UI people have produced an excellent study. Those of you readers who are researchers and journalists would find that it is well worth reading. The UI summary follows below. Norm http://www.urban.org/publications/411562.html Into the Eye of the Storm Assessing the Evidence on Science and Engineering Education, Quality, and Workforce Demand Author(s): B. Lindsay Lowell, Harold Salzman Other Availability: PDF | Printer-Friendly Page Posted to Web: October 29, 2007 Permanent Link: http://www.urban.org/url.cfm?ID=411562 The nonpartisan Urban Institute publishes studies, reports, and books on timely topics worthy of public consideration. The views expressed are those of the authors and should not be attributed to the Urban Institute, its trustees, or its funders. The text below is an excerpt from the complete document. Read the full paper in PDF format. _________________________________________________________________ Abstract Recent policy reports claim the United States is falling behind other nations in science and math education and graduating insufficient numbers of scientists and engineers. Review of the evidence and analysis of actual graduation rates and workforce needs does not find support for these claims. U.S. student performance rankings are comparable to other leading nations and colleges graduate far more scientists and engineers than are hired each year. Instead, the evidence suggests targeted education improvements are needed for the lowest performers and demand-side factors may be insufficient to attract qualified college graduates. _________________________________________________________________ Introduction Policymakers and industry leaders are once again concerned about the adequacy of the science and engineering (S&E) workforce. A growing number of reports claim that a lack of sufficient numbers of scientists and engineers entering the workforce is threatening the United States' economic health and dominant position in global innovation. The primary causes of an impending workforce shortage, it is argued, are the mediocre preparation of domestic students in the educational pipeline and an ongoing decline in their interest in pursuing S&E careers. To address the assumed crisis, the consensus recommendation of business groups, public policymakers, and educators is to expand and improve science and math education from kindergarten through college, and to more aggressively court foreign S&E students and workers. This paper examines the assumptions about the state of the educational pipeline and the purported workforce shortages. Despite this nearly universal support for upgrading science and math education, our review of the data leads us to conclude that, while the educational pipeline would benefit from improvements, it is not as dysfunctional as believed. Today's American high school students actually test as well or better than students two decades ago. Further, today's students take more science and math classes, and a large number of students with strong science and math backgrounds graduate from U.S. high schools and start college in S&E fields of study. Graduate schools have an ample pool of qualified four-year graduates to draw from but seem unable or unwilling to do so. Surprisingly few of the many students who start along the path toward S&E careers take the next steps to remain in an S&E career. If there is a problem, it is not one of too few S&E qualified college graduates but, rather, the inability of S&E firms to attract qualified graduates. The pool of graduates with an S&E degree exceeds the number of S&E job openings each year, even though employers may not be as successful as they would like in attracting or retaining graduates into an S&E career. The various policy reports focusing on increasing the science and math preparation at the K–12 level almost uniformly fail to ask the question our analysis suggests—has the increase in the absolute numbers of secondary school graduates and the increase in their math and science performance levels provided an adequate number of domestic S&E college majors? The pool of S&E-qualified secondary and postsecondary graduates is several times larger than the number of annual job openings. The flow of secondary school students up through the S&E pipeline, when it reaches the labor market, supplies occupations that make up only about a twentieth of all workers. So even if there were deficiencies in students' average science and math performance, such deficiencies would not necessarily deplete the requisite supply of S&E college majors. Even if modal test scores or course-taking was by some measure low, the size of the graduating student body is so large that there would still be a sufficient number of students who test above average and who are fully qualified for the relatively small number of S&E jobs. While improving average math and science education at the K–12 level may be warranted for other reasons, such a strategy may not be the most efficient means of supplying the S&E workforce. Our analysis at the aggregate level does not find a shortage of potential S&E students or workers. However, this conclusion is put forth with one caveat: the analysis of all S&E students and workers may not apply equally to the trends and problems faced in specific fields or by domestic minority groups. A fine-grained analysis of specific industries, occupations, and populations is needed to identify the weakness in the U.S. education system. We are, indeed, conducting this level of analysis for future reports. The S&E world includes a broad range of knowledge, types of related jobs, and a great diversity of students and workers with academic performance and employment trends different from the overall averages. A better understanding of S&E workforce demand and education and workforce development will identify areas where public and private policy could be most effectively targeted. (End of excerpt. The entire paper is available in PDF format.)