I was at a Capitol One office last summer talking to their engineers. It was over 90% H1-B visa holders.
Either they have to open foreign offices in other countries for talent or hire American citizens.
It'll be interesting to see how it plays out.
Instead we crank out liberal arts kids and other low value add degrees --I mean, nice to have well rounded education, but don't add to the economy as much as they could in other fields.
China isn't getting to where they are by having a bunch of kids graduating with humanities degrees, that's for sure.
It's a bit sad to see a country lose all its talent and potential due to bad economics and politics. If Russia just tried a little harder to open up, they would have the potential to be contenders. But the brain drain certainly does not help their cause.
Becoming highly educated in STEM isn't just low-value-add, it destroys value: a smart person wastes years of his life and productive capacity training for a research position he'll never get, then (optimistically) gets a programming or finance job which barely (if at all) leverages a few of his undergrad classes.
The economy, and basic human compassion, require that we stop wasting these people's youth and loading them up with debt. We need drastic cuts to STEM programs until we're producing graduates at somewhere near the rate at which we're hiring them.
That, or a massive investment in private sector R&D and public grant writing such that the output of the existing STEM education machine can find decent, relevant work.
Who knows, maybe the administration is right, we have a glut and need to restrict outside pressure in those fields.
Engineers (real ones, not programmers) have a reliable path to middle-class life, I suppose, but this is mostly due to their scarcity. There's enough demand for new bridges, cars, and airplanes to sustain the profession, but not a ravenous expansion.
That leaves technology. Where is technology education? There are some trade schools that will teach you to administer and support Microsoft and Cisco business-oriented products for a decent lower-midde-class life, though they are slowly being eaten by The Cloud. And then there's Computer Science, which is a precursor to working as a programmer only because we lack more direct pedagogical methods.
To be honest you don't need to be rubber stamped by academia to do research. Companies should have started to realise that.
People should aim for STEM degrees, but there's no need to burn years on a PhD.
Russian/China system builds on a competitive hierarchy of exams to basically classify people into buckets according to their intelligence level. Even though it may be good on a national scale, it is indeed a cruel system to individuals. Your confidence or personality is least of this system's concern, and living a micro society where score is literally everything and the ones with low score will be looked down upon by teachers and peers alike and being told constantly low score meaning no future, I doubt such system will be welcomed here by American society for, you know, greater good.
Disclaimer: survivor of such system, not really miss it though. It almost destroys my love for science, which only recovers many years later.
No one defends the making of unwarranted perjorative conclusions from low scores other than as a measure of competence in the subject tested.
From the Politico article the legislation would "increase the number of green cards — which allow for permanent residency in the U.S. — that are granted on the basis of merit to foreigners in a series of categories including outstanding professors and researchers, those holding advanced degrees, and those with extraordinary ability in a particular field."
1: http://www.politico.com/story/2017/07/12/trump-legal-immigra...