If that's the letter he sent to your department would you hire him? He probably did his degree in ethnomusicology or some other field that is basically not hiring since there are no interested students. I almost did my degree in French but people said there are no jobs in French. If there are, it would mean you are teaching 1st grade French to 20-year olds for the rest of your life. It wouldn't be like you're reading novels and talking about them in French.
I feel for this guy. On the other hand he's young, he can shave, he has a wedding ring, and his pants fit and are reasonably new. He has a decent haircut. His fingernails are clean and well-groomed. He looks reasonably bright and confident. Something here doesn't add up. The good thing is it might warn people off from the academic gravy train especially if you can't write in complete sentences or use a known citation method. Most importantly you have to be in a field that's hiring. English and mathematics are still mandatory in most of the 6000 colleges. I would choose one of those if you want to land a job. This guy might have been in Tibetan language, or in some other area where only two departments exist. Try finding a job in Finnish. In America there are only four or five schools that offer it, and each of these schools only have two or three people.
Rather than stand outside like this I would take another job outside my field rather than waiting for some serial killer to pick me up and chain me up in his basement while I twist macaroni in exchange for bread crumbs. Where is the logic in this man?
34 comments:
Of all the fields in which one could earn a Ph.D., I am wondering which one would be the least likely to lead to any form of remuneration whatsoever. I think it's Tibetan languages but the CIA might want that. Maybe it's some area of research for which there is no funding, such as Lyme Disease.
Some area of art history, perhaps? Like, pottery of Belize? (Is there any pottery made in Belize?)
Postmodern poetry is very likely to result in no position unless you also happen to be a famous practitioner of postmodern poetry.
Contemporary poetry is a lost cause in terms of finding a position as a scholar of it.
I think you could really put yourself out of the market by working on any form of contemporary Christian poetry.
Unless it's poetry of the untouchables in India. Then you're talking a bit when it comes to global literature, etc.
You have to watch the trends.
This guy in the picture just didn't watch the trends, if you ask me. Why isn't he better at marketing himself? It's a real mystery to me.
Maybe he's a model who's been planted.
There is a level of learned helplessness in this photograph is there not? Doesn't it make you just sick?
Kirby,
Do a little searching on Google. Turns out that the image was a staged photo shoot for "The Scientist," for the article Are We Training Too Many Scientists?
A note on the same site explains: A scientist hits the streets. Quick version: the person holding the sign is Kevin Duffy, who in real life is a regional manager for Astra Zeneca. I suspect he's working for a lot more than food.
Hook, line, sinker, rod, reel.
I knew it!
Nice find. I knew something was fishy. It says only 38% of PhDs are getting tenured jobs in science. In Europe the pool is limited to those they can place. Is this better? I'm in favor competition. Plus thu s means there is employment possibilities for mad scientists who will work for whatever Al Qaeda pays them meaning we still get to increase the efficacy of our drones..
I think scientists should work for capability of using their knowledge to its utmost.
I do have a friend and former contributor here who hets shipped from postdoc to postdoc. I also have LOTS of friends in English who never got jobs at all or went to work at Microsoft. They are making reams of money writing something at Microsoft. I don't know what they do there.
Now even the sciences are asking for a bailout?
Thos first came through my Facebook feed. One of the limitatons of the Kindle is that searching by image across the Web isn't something I know how to do. I did say in paragraph three that w all the anomalies -- the ring the haircut the new pants the confident look on the face that this didn't add up. It turns out they were using a metaphor about homelessness to describe the difficulty of getting a tenure track job. Food insecurity is a long way from lack of tenure and having tenure doesn't necessarily mean all your bills are paid. I Alston's. sensed something about the confidence w which the letters were drawn as being unlikely to have been drawn by a homeless man. To me the mst jarring thing was the yous th and the gold ring but the pants too seemed too new. The cardboard also looked too new. My browsing capability is still limited on this device. I've gotten better w the keyboard thoough.
Kirby,
A brief search suggests that the least remunerative degrees are anthropology and archaeology, cf., The 10 Worst College Majors. Of course, the referenced article considers undergraduate programs, but it seems to me that the employment difficulties at the bachelorate level are likely predictive of difficulties at the Ph.D. level. But the full list the flavor of a tour through the humanities.
As for Lyme disease, current NIH funding is about $28M/year. This is almost 5x what it is spending on climate change research, although the two problems are clearly linked.
It says only 38% of PhDs are getting tenured jobs in science
I'm surprised the number is that high. The point being that there are a heck of a lot of industry jobs in the sciences, and they often pay better. Of course, the (relative) intellectual freedom that comes with a faculty job makes these desirable jobs, and so there's a lot of competition for them. The postdoc system can be brutal for those folks who hang onto the dream too long.
Do you think it's personality that makes the diff between those who are employed on the tenure track and those who aren't? By this I mean likability?
This county was once immune to Lyme. Warmer winters have made us vulnerable.
The helicopter gunship option remains my favorite. Armageddon!
What is the best college major?
More like can't get a job in his field. The unemployment rate for over 25+college degree is something insane like 3%.
Buck up, Chuck. I wish I were teaching in a college, too.
I always find it amusing when American companies bitch about our not having enough foreign graduate student visas, used by Asians (primarily) to snatch advanced degrees from our colleges and universities and then take the best jobs.
Are those tech jobs jobs "Americans won't do"?
Our educational system has been completely corrupted by the marketplace.
Our institutions of higher learning now all routinely court out of state and foreign students, to get that higher tuition. When these foreign students graduate and find jobs, they emigrate here or simply melt into the landscape or have a marriage of convenience. Or they take their expertise back to their native country. We keep hearing how we need to pour more money into our public schools--but this ends up educating illegals and foreign students from abroad. It's a big rip-off.
We keep hearing about how Americans can't find work because the corporations and businesses won't hire them, either because they're "overqualified" or are "too expensive." They say Americans "can't compete" but what that really means is that they can get foreign graduates to work for less. A substandard tech salary here in America is probably four times what the Indians can earn back home.
So we keep off-shoring jobs and blaming the American work-force. It's all their fault. They won't get the right degrees, or they won't work for less, or they insist on health care and pensions and baseline workplace safety. "American government regulation is killing American industry." Right. It's really just an excuse.
Go to college. Get a degree. Then get in the unemployment line.
The backbone of American prosperity in the post-War period was based on American manufacturing jobs. The idea was that if we could export American capitalism abroad, the whole world would enter a new period of general improvement in standard of living, and "raise all boats." But the reality was that smart money found cheap labor outside America, and then exploited that to produce goods they could sell in America for five times what they could get elsewhere. Tariff and tax policies fostered this arrangement. It began with toys in Japan. Then it moved to cars and household goods. The big three in Detroit lost market share. Their cars didn't work as well, and they were poorly managed. So they blamed the workers. This happened throughout the American business and manufacturing sectors.
What seems perfectly obvious over the last 20 years is that America can't "educate itself" out of this crisis. There NEVER are enough professional level jobs to absorb all the graduates who are turned out each year. So Ph.D's in physics end up cutting carrots in Chez Panisse, and English majors man the phone banks in the solicitation racket.
Increasingly, we've been subsidizing foreigners to get their educations here, so that our own (largely overeducated) population can do substandard "service sector" jobs.
At any given time, only a small minority of the populace can hold professional and high tech employment. The majority lives off of mid- and lower level positions. Those are the jobs we've been sending abroad in unprecedented numbers.
So we don't want unskilled and untrained and uneducated foreigners coming here, but the immigrant lobby keeps conjuring up with excuses about how we must welcome unskilled and untrained and uneducated (and sick and criminal and non-English speaking) Latino refugees from Central and South America and Asia and the Pacific because they bring energy and variety and new ideas into our society. This is good for us. We're a nation of immigrants. Come one, come all. Bullshit.
It's important to remember that Lyme Disease is a Communist plot.
The key to our salvation is buried in our most secret and embarrassing personal details. The danger in mounting these web identities is that they are largely fictional, or partly fictional, creations. Kirby mixes the true and untrue, the valid and bogus, creating an absurd puppet identity--something we all do to a degree. But he deliberately distorts it through mugging and posing and hamming it up, spewing out offensive sewer water with the perfume, thinking to keep his readers guessing. After a while, none of it integrates into sense. It's all a game, but one with a subtext of radical right hate.
The subtext of this stream, for instance, is to show that people who don't find work are lazy and selfish and cursed with sin. The poor are immoral and stupid and damned to hell, where they belong. Meanwhile, Kirby's got tenure, so this proves he's thrifty, hard-working, and virtuous. Clean-living, pompous, and sanctimonious. When you get YOUR pink-slip, Kirby, they'll be waiting for you at the welfare department. There you'll be, hat in hand, undergoing your own terrifying initiation and rebirth. "Oh, god, what did I do to deserve this?"
How's the New York State budget look these days? Are you safe? Could you work in a high school if you had to? At the local hamburger stand? Maybe you could collect tick samples from the hardwood forests, or hire out as a deer "harvester" for the state park service. It's honest upstanding people like you that make this country great. Let freedom ring!
"Do you think it's personality that makes the diff between those who are employed on the tenure track and those who aren't? By this I mean likability?"
I think the reason you're working, Kirby, is that you're such a likable guy. I think employers should consider likability in their hiring.
Education
Prior experience
Ethnic background
Likability
I think likability should replace race as a categorical imperative in hiring.
Charm is the secret ingredient. That, and a kind of naive innocence. Aw shucks.
Likability, the new criterion of excellence.
Willy Loman was big on the importance of being likable. Arthur Miller? Not so much.
The greatest myth of all time is that the rich are mean and hateful. It's something that Marx invented. Anyone who knows rich people knows that they are kind. That's how they got rich. People like them. Also, they understand themselves and other people quite effectively and are at pains to make a product that is effective, so that people want it.
The left believes that if they just take over the means of production that they too can be rich. They do this, and the government gobbles up industry, and low-rent products appear on the market. Just think of the whole idea of "government candy."
You know it would taste ridiculously bad.
Obama, who couldn't run a 7-11, thinks he can run the global economy. He can run it into the ground, but he can't make anything run smoothly and efficiently.
It's not that he isn't likeable. He's quite likeable, but totally incompetent in every possible area. But he has inherited the great myths of the left and he knows how to work them.
But the great myths of the left are all wrong.
Even within mythology itself they are wrong. Marja Gimbutas concocted the whole idea of "sky gods" (bad) and "earth gods" (good). She claims the good earth god people were overrun by the bad sky god people. And so we need to get rid of Christianity and convert to Wicca.
The only problem is that
a. the sky god people don't exist in the archeological record
b. the earth god people have a terrible history of dictatorship
The left's other huge dichotomy: the free market is bad, and is run by bad people, and it hurts and starves everyone, is far worse than the idea of a government monopoly on business, in which the government decides what can be made and at what price.
Many people fall for these simple dichotomies even though a very simple check on the record would reveal that they had nothing to do with reality, and that they were fantasies concocted by loopy leftists.
This blog exists partially to slowly insert some sanity into the avant-garde via economic and mythological theory. It's slow for me because I am slow.
But when leftists start to scream I know that I am getting through. The process of demystification is painful.
What we want is capability.
We want to increase that in ourselves and in everyone around, from family, to student, to friend, and even to foes.
What So Proudly We Hail!
There is the sense now that government should mak.e jobs available for Ph.D.'s in addition to all the other handicapped disabled and put upon. The picture initially really bothered me, but I was myself the victim of a right-wing conspiracy via Facebook, as the picture was lifted out of its original context and put to use in yet another discourse entirely. This guy looks ridiculous to right-wingers because he looks like a soft humanities candidate who is a big whiner. I knew something was amiss but I couldn't figure out what. He had new pants, nice hair and a wedding ring. Something didn't add up. Also, the cardboard was new. I knew this was fake, but I didn't know how or why or what.
Stu courageously discovered that it was a made-up photo-op of a science candidate who hasn't found work, but the actual picture is of a well-employed person who actually is quite competent. I wouldn't know. 6 papers in science would be a lot, so it didn't make sense that he wouldn't find a job. I do think there might be some very comptent people who are just mean. I wondered if this was the case. We had a guy in my Ph.D. program who was probably smarter than everyone else (he actually knew a lot about Hegel, among other things) but he tended to bite people on the shorts whenever he talked and this drove people away from him. But I also think he hadn't published anything (publishing in scholarship is not like publishing in the newspaper, as the standards are extremely high -- and often require a year or more put into a paper -- sometimes several or many years before it's just right).
6 in a competent humanities field would be a lot, too. I was essentially hired in my first outing with only two papers extant: one on Edward Lear in a journal called Victorian Poetry (the flagship of the field), and one on P.G. Wodehouse (they are both still cited quite often within humor studies, but this second one actually appeared in a journal called Humor, which is also the flagship of the field). By frequent citations I mean about once a year but in good books that come out from places like Oxford and Cambridge.
Since then I've published three books within the field of literary criticism (mostly within humor studies but where humor studies meets the avant-garde). These books are also cited -- in books that come out in various countries around the world, but mostly within humor studies and within avant-garde studies.
Is this an area in which most people can find work? Stu also cites the Kiplinger study of least-remunerated majors. There is also a Forbes study to this effect. But clear communication is also something that all businesses want. If you're going to be a high school principal or a doctor or a scientist you need to be able to write well and humor is no small part of this and plus you should be up to date. But there is no field called the Humorous Avant-garde. It doesn't really exist and there are no jobs in this area, so I also have to be able to teach freshman composition to students who might ask me when we're reading a Corso poem "How is it that a butterfly can represent something besides itself?" This is very hard to answer and I have to be kind. My job is to explain the whole realm of symbolic communication and to try to get students to enter this area and to discuss it well. It's not easy to do, and some just actually can't get it, but most can.
A supple ability for symbolic communication is what wins elections, too. All the Republican candidates were wooden compared to Obama. Obama can dance with images and symbols. None of the current top Republicans can do this. Romney was just way too wooden. The right is significantly worse in this area than the left.
It was Bush's crack about the woodpile that won him the second election. I think
Obama won when he said that we are no longer using bayonettes (not strictly true, but he connected with America when he said it).
Reagan won when he said to Mondale that he didn't mind it when Mondale went after the elderly. I forget the exact quote. Reagan was inside of Hollywood and he knew how to communicate. It was a neat spin.
Humor also drives the entertainment industry. No one knows quite what it is, but humor and tragedy are still important and effective vehicles of communication.
It's almost very important to see how they work and be able to employ them for yourself if you want to remain employed. The man with the sign was communicating like a bum. I really doubted the reality of the whole endeavor. No one in the humanities would communicate with a cardboard sign. It's just too wooden.
Government generally can't think in terms of poetry or humor. Imagine "government humor" or "government drama." What comes to mind is something wooden. Government can ban humor and poetry (mostly because government knows it cannot compete with it). This is why communist regimes go after the poets and humorists first.
Only individuals can make things like poetry and humor must less an exciting new product.
One of my problems with science is that the metaphors generally strike me as wooden. I did read Dawkins' book against poetry. Yes science is more accurate, but it's so wooden. Need it be so wooden?
Woodenit be better if science also learned to use humor and imagination and more supple language? Woodenit? Woodenit be better if the government had someone who not only could use symbolic communication but also understood something about Hayekian economics?
We can now move to fairy tales and to religious faith. One of Christ's strengths is His command of metaphorical language. This is also one of Paul's strengths. They can move mountains with their words.
This is what has turned on two billion people.
Luther was no slouch. St. Thomas was no slouch.
Dawkins was quite bitter that the pretty girls at his college chose the humanities, and that science was left on the cutting room floor. There are many kinds of wealth. The ability to speak and understand symbolic language is not an easy thing even if someone can make it look easy.
ML King was so effective because of his relative command of speech. It wasn't his complaints that mattered, it was how he communicated them. The other guy -- Malcolm X -- came out of a far more violent and lunatic tradition -- and didn't get as far.
There is no Malcolm X Day.
You get a day if you communicate effectively.
The people from nonfunctional traditions like the Communists and the others (Islam) have to ban their rivals because they know they can't compete.
In a free market the best rises to the top.
Jesus is the best. Anyone not familiar with this tradition is severely handicapped and so can only attempt to ban it from the discourse. Some use the fraudulent notion that there is a "wall" between church and state.
That's what the First Amendment doesn't say.
Curtis,
I earned a Ph.D. in Mathematics at the University of Illinois, and my first job was as instructor of mathematics (a de facto teaching postdoc) at the University of Chicago. A couple of years later, I became a founding member of the Computer Science Department at the University of Chicago, where I have held professorial rank since 1983, and which I served as chairman for 9 years (1997-2003, 2006-2009). I say this to establish my bono fides when it comes to talking about the economics of graduate programs in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) departments.
To a first approximation, no one pays tuition in Ph.D. programs in STEM fields. Instead, the tuition is paid for them out of research assistantships, teaching assistantships, and fellowships. These funding sources reimburse tuition at rates determined by their University's negotiations with the cognizant funding agency (usually NIH or NSF) over indirect cost recovery rates.
What happened with foriegn Ph.D. students in the 80's and 90's was largely a consequence of simple economics. Technology (Computer Science, Chemistry) and Engineering oriented fields tend to self-select at the undergraduate level for students with a careerist mentality who are interested in maximizing lifetime earnings. For the best CS undergraduates in the 80's and 90's, the case for graduate school was a weak one. It involved degree program that was demanding, typically took five to six years to complete, and offered compensation prospects that were not predictably better than they had with their BS. So most of the best went into industry, working for MicroSoft, Google, Apple, etc. This meant a catastrophic decline in the number of high quality of US applicants to CS Ph.D. programs. Naturally, the programs looked for the strongest students, and the first population that presented itself was the Indian. Here, there was a long-established tradition of mathematics, excellence in teaching (especially at the IITs), and means for vetting (in the all-India exams). Successful experiences with Indian students gave us the experience to deal with students from the PRC, where the challenges were greater.
Since '01, there has been a swing back towards US students, a factor of fewer competing opportunities, and the growth in institutions in India and China that are capable of training Ph.D. students in Computer Science to the highest levels.
The issue in technology was never that American's were too lazy to work, it's that the opportunities for them in the workforce were so great as to moot the Ph.D. as a plausible next step.
Curtis,
Likability, the new criterion of excellence.
This has not been my experience of academe.
Kirby,
The greatest myth of all time is that the rich are mean and hateful. It's something that Marx invented.
Ridiculous. Stories of mean rich folk go back a long way. Do you want me to start citing parables?
Kirby,
6 papers in science would be a lot, so it didn't make sense that he wouldn't find a job.
Depends on the disciple, and it depends on the papers. I've been known to claim that when chemists go to the bathroom, they publish the paper. I've seen CVs with literally hundreds of papers. There's a well-known concept that I've never bought into called the LPU -- "least publishable unit" -- advanced by people who think a lot of little papers are better than a few outstanding ones.
I do think there might be some very comptent people who are just mean
OK, let me get this right. Sir James has participated here for how long? And you think there might be some very competent mean people? Your powers of observation astound me, but not in a good way.
But I mean in the Humanities, Stu. We're not mean.
Overzealous and overwrought and mindless Marxists, yes, but just plain mean? That's rare.
I never saw JADL as just plain mean because he was only mean to me once, and he apologized soon after, and said it was because I had attacked Catholicism, and if I stopped, he would stop.
I stopped.
I mean, it's been done.
"And you think there might be some very competent mean people? Your powers of observation astound me, but not in a good way."
That is mean! Meanie!
kirby you better not be using any of my jokes in your humor studies citiations my intellectual property is invaluable but $100 a shot will be fine just stick a big bill in the mail i'll be happy and i'll put most of it in the collection basket anyway...i have a master's degree in theology but i spend most of my conscious time playing guitar to the angels and saints
in the 70s and into the 80s psychology was the most sought after college major everyone being into themselves then and found well you can actually study yourself and get a degree in it which was really an evolutionary push forward when so many people were saying i think i am very phuqqed up therefore i am...but 90% of these psychowackos got jobs in the marketting field and the commercial messaging field and they've been phuqqing with people's minds ever since commercial america being little more than a venue for subliminal sodomy...so what...so capitalism can really really work...deception is the key idea
science is OK as a foundation but if our goal is not philosophy then i think people are just playing with themselves in a cognitive way
lost as we are in a quagmire of hypercognitive impertinencies...
let me see...
do i have anything else to say....
i guess not...
muchos nieves aqui
jh
OK kirby and stu we've had about enough of this slapping each other in the face this has gone on long enough in fact if i'm not mistaken this whole long banter between you 2 gDdmN lutherans has been nothing but slappin one another in the face for what now 5 yrs have we been at this 5 yrs is this a long freaking conversation or what who's counting siWWy Wabbut if you two guys are going to fight you must fight fair we'll have to go through a weapons discernment conference or something words are one thing but flaming pits and vigilante cognition is going a little too far so just settle down hey this parenting stuff is OK you 2 damn kids shut UP o no that was my house we had a big family and it was tyrannical in ways i will not begin to divulge...let's just say i sought refuge in books and many other things for a long long time and we won't go into that either in fact the past is often akin to flatulence
we should all meet somewhere on 12 20 2012 and see what massive galactic universal implosion will take place
infinity dream
jh
We're from synods that aren't talking but at least we're talking. We even exchange emails which are different from the shrapnel we exchange here in terms of the insights invopved and that has also gone on for five years or more.
What did Paul's spiritual mentor say to Paul about Jesus. If it's of God nothing can stop it and if it's of man nothing can save it so why are we even arguing about it?
This goes for marriage and also whatever is happening with global warming. I think one may be more godly than tthe other but may have them reversed. I love the warming trend in spite of Lyme. It's warmer here in December every year. God is shining his warmth on me in particular in thanks for my blog. I tried to reduce opposition to the Republicans for 8 years and God warmed this clime up as a result.
Tough lemons for those who want Greenland to remain white. I'm for a variety of hues there and increasing love toward Inuit lawns. I intuit that God's love of the Danish and their colonies is increasing His warmth. I wonder what Pat Robertson thinks.
My intuition about the Inuits is that they are for more warming. It's a cold world but God's warmth is excellent and if the warmth be only of man or men then time will tell. Meanwhile there's a meanwhile in which the fires of hell are invoked but maybe we should withhold judgment for a spell.
Stu:
Your greater knowledge of the technical Ph.D. programs outstrips my amateur's.
What we saw here in California was Indians and Chinese and Koreans and Japanese and Indonesians coming in droves, scholarshipped and subsidized by American corporations to get degrees which (it was presumed) they would use here in America. This meant that American computer science majors, for instance, had to "compete" with foreigners who actually were paying less to attend school here than our own citizens. Whether they stayed and took jobs from Americans, or went home to the mother country--either way it was a rip-off of the American university system. And they worked for less, which was why the corporations wanted more of them through visiting student visas.
In our public elementary and secondary schools, we were overwhelmed by non-english speaking kids. The crushing burden of conducting bi- or tri-lingual classes for kids whose families had a tenuous grasp on legality and sufficiency nearly sank us. Our academic performance plummeted. We poured more and more down that sink-hole.
Then the "Dream Act" reared its ugly head.
I discovered that there were huge housing projects (5-8 thousand strong) in the South Bay occupied exclusively by Indian and other Southeast Asians, ghetto-ized and isolated, working in or near Silicon Valley. Some were saving to return home with a nest-egg; others were pursuing legal (or illegal) citizenship. No one I've ever talked with seemed to know about this.
When I worked for HEW, we kept seeing new immigrant groups being added to the SSI and local welfare rolls through targeted "exception" entitlements. Filipinos, Taiwanese, Pacific Islanders, Vietnamese, Africans, Latino "political refugees" etc.
In the early '90's, I traveled with my cousin, a photojournalist, to southern Arizona and New Mexico. He'd co-authored a book on illegal immigration. We visited several of his rancher friends along the international border. They told us that they were forced to supply illegals crossing their land with food and provisions, lest their handlers vandalize or destroy their properties. It was extortion. The American authorities looked the other way--did nothing.
Americans are tired of giving hand-outs to foreigners. Our government uses perks and special favors to select groups, or goes "soft" on enforcement, to foster or protect "delicate" relationships (for instance, with Mexico). This comprises a huge percentage of our social welfare system, paid for by Americans, and given away by our government in our name.
It's one reason why "public" schools and universities and colleges are being denied unlimited funding. People are seeing that 1) post-secondary education isn't serving our employment market and 2) a lot of the benefits are going to foreigners and 3) our country gets nothing in return for the largesse.
Every time we have a war or assist in disaster relief, the floodgates open and tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands are shipped back here for preferential relocation and special benefit entitlement. I have no doubt that many thousands of Iraqis and Afghans have been brought here, with little publicity, under the media radar. It's almost as if, as with the CIA, funding is kept strictly secret, so our government can conduct this give-away without citizens' awareness. A little like the way we "hide" our dead soldiers when they're brought back for burial.
When you bring these people here and give them stuff, they get cocky. It's a free ride, and they can hardly believe it. It's like Disneyland. Money grows on trees.
Curtis,
What we saw here in California was Indians and Chinese and Koreans and Japanese and Indonesians coming in droves, scholarshipped and subsidized by American corporations to get degrees which (it was presumed) they would use here in America
Hmm. I don't doubt that the California experience was a bit different, but I think there's a certain amount of misunderstanding involved. FWIW, I've seen very few Indonesians here. We've tended to get more Eastern Europeans, Israelis, and Iranians, arguably because of the better mathematics pipelines there.
Again, I saw few foreign students in the undergraduate program. That said, the program does look more diverse today than it used to, mostly due to the assimilated children of that big cadre of Indians and Chinese that came in the 80's and 90's. [It's hard for me to cope with the notion that our incoming Freshmen were born during the Clinton administration. Where did the time go?!]
I didn't see a lot of corporate scholarships. Not none, but not a lot. Of course, Chicago is a more theoretical place, and even more so then than now, so it's possible that the schools with deeper benches in systems/networking saw more of these. But what I'm suspecting is that that there's a bit of a misunderstanding, in that corporations most certainly sponsored IIT grads (and maybe Bejing U. and Academic Sinica grads) for H1Bs, especially in the late 90's, but not scholarships per se, except possibly in MS programs (a distinct case, as this would mean employees whose value to the company was already established).
For the most part, this was all happening in an environment when corporate hiring in CS and related fields was insatiable. Indeed, the demand for CS Ph.D.'s from industrial labs and lab-like enterprises (e.g., AT&T Research, Lucent, Microsoft Research, Google, NEC Research) was so great that there was a real concern that they were "eating the seed corn" for the discipline -- hiring so many of the best and brightest that faculty positions in CS were begging throughout the 90's. It was not unusual, e.g., for programs to have 20-25% of their faculty lines in CS/CSE unfilled.
Where contention arose was when the dotcom boom collapsed. This reversed the flow into of the labs (AT&T Research especially), which meant that there was suddenly a glut of high-quality Ph.D's, resulting in the sudden expansion of CS postdoc programs and other half-way houses. Likewise, at the bachelor's level, there were suddenly a lot of people out of work, large cadres coming out of the undergraduate programs (folks who started during the boom years), and this hit at a time when the outsourcing movement was really gaining traction. I don't doubt that there was a lot of resentment then, but this largely sorted itself out at the bachelors level between 2001 and 2004, a period that saw tremendous contraction in the size of CS undergraduate programs. E.g., my department saw about a 60% reduction in undergraduate enrollments, and it's only been in the last year that we've recovered to late '90's level.
These days, we're tipping back into the more jobs than people regime, the growth of undergraduate programs notwithstanding. At the same time, the opportunities for Indian and Chinese citizens within their own countries have expanded tremendously. I expect continued fight over H1Bs for the tech industry, but less practical consequence, simply because of a collapse in the supply of capable foreign workers who feel a need to move here.
Anyway, it seems to me that the drivers in CS/IT were and are purely economic -- the rise and fall in the demand and supply for a particular kind of trained labor, and the very deep pipeline (beginning with rigorous mathematical instruction in the primary grades) required to build it. Just to be clear on this point, we really are in the situation where it takes 16-20 years of initial training to prepare people for entry level positions in a 40 year career.
Why is it that American companies continually complain about a lack of appropriate talent, while qualified and trained American graduates and unemployed professionals can't find work?
How is it that American technological development and invention and research results in employment and improved margins for overseas manufacturing?
Throughout the 1990s', Americans were told to work harder and smarter, and they did. Their reward? They were told to train their foreign replacements, in preparation for their own firing and laying-off.
If NAFTA is such a great agreement, how is it that it has resulted in loss of jobs in America, and exploitation of third world workers? The equation seems designed to cause hardship in both countries, to the benefit of a few cut-throat entrepeneurs. And the corruption of government officials is limitless. People become pawns in the shifting boardgame of international financial exploitation.
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