Should Holders of Degree from Premier US Schools Have a Higher GC Preference

[bvsamrat]

I agree with abc once again. Frankly most of the reserach in top Indian universities does not match with top versities US(I said most -did not say ' not all'). Though there are some brilliant individuals present in India as everywhere and most of the others are riding on thier names. IIT students gained the respect in US some years back as they were brillant and did some good work and became professors, businessmen and excelled all around.Now may not be many. Why an IIT student in CS, who can easily get to any top 10 university,, should stay here - but with uncertain future?

This will not change unless some sops are given to these bright individuals because it will be beneficial to the US economy to get the best and not the rest.

Agreed. And it could be top 100 global unis or something like the way Denmark does it. Why leave out great unis like Cambridge or Ecole Polytechnique or Tsinghua? Sadly India still doesn't have anything in the top 100.

[abcx13]

I agree with abc once again. Frankly most of the reserach in top Indian universities does not match with top versities US(I said most -did not say ' not all'). Though there are some brilliant individuals present in India as everywhere and most of the others are riding on thier names. IIT students gained the respect in US some years back as they were brillant and did some good work and became professors, businessmen and excelled all around.Now may not be many. Why an IIT student in CS, who can easily get to any top 10 university,, should stay here - but with uncertain future?

This will not change unless some sops are given to these bright individuals because it will be beneficial to the US economy to get the best and not the rest.

Couple of interesting speeches by Narayana Murthy about how the quality of IIT students and the number of PhDs has DECLINED over the years:

http://articles.timesofindia.indiati...arayana-murthy
http://www.indiaeducationreview.com/...arayana-murthy

It's ironic that he's the one raising the alarm considering that his company, one of the largest Indian IT employers/bodyshoppers, offers zilch in the way of research opportunities for top CS graduates.

I have relatives and family friends who went to IITs and IIMs in the 70s and 80s without preparing for any entrance exams or taking any coaching. Some even had poor English but interestingly, nearly all speak excellent English today and some even settled overseas. Anecdotally, from what I've seen of my classmates/friends who've gotten into IIT and what I've heard from these alums who often interact with current students, the batches now are nowhere near what they used to be. I also have school friends who've gotten into Pilani and IIM without any coaching (in the past 5-10 yrs) and these people are legitimately smart. But sadly most people going to IIT these days are ratta-maroing every type of sample problem so that they are prepared when it shows up on the test. It's almost like the test is selecting for people who LACK the ability to think innovatively and creatively. In fact, I'm somewhat surprised it took Murthy so long to realize or maybe he didn't want to say it while still running Infy.

BTW, open challenge to anyone, can you find an article about innovations from Indian IT shops? I'm genuinely curious if my view is wrong but I've never read anything that would suggest otherwise.

[abcx13]

I agree with abc once again. Frankly most of the reserach in top Indian universities does not match with top versities US(I said most -did not say ' not all'). Though there are some brilliant individuals present in India as everywhere and most of the others are riding on thier names.

Very true. In the field that I got my MS in (biotech), I never saw ANY research from India though there was lots from Indian faculty in the US. The CS building was always teeming with Indians from India (very few Indian undergrads; mostly PhD and MS guys were super smart even when they didn't go to IIT for undergrad) but other engineering disciplines, such as biotech, hardly had any Indian students.

[Jonty Rhodes]

30 or 100 is immaterial, hence I originally stated "pick your favorite number". 30 was my favorite. What would be the best is a STEM category *without country caps* to begin with. I have no problem if it included 100 universities or more.

I agree. The number is immaterial. I think Top 100 universities and STEM category without country caps makes perfect sense. I just feel that they need to include Medicine in the STEM category also, making M stand for both Math and Medicine. I have a Masters in a Public Health. I have an MD in Internal Medicine. Essentially, that's double Masters but I am not sure if MPH or MD can count as a STEM degree or not. If it does not, I can't be considered a STEM graduate and would not benefit from it.

[abcx13]

I agree. The number is immaterial. I think Top 100 universities and STEM category without country caps makes perfect sense. I just feel that they need to include Medicine in the STEM category also, making M stand for both Math and Medicine. I have a Masters in a Public Health. I have an MD in Internal Medicine. Essentially, that's double Masters but I am not sure if MPH or MD can count as a STEM degree or not. If it does not, I can't be considered a STEM graduate and would not benefit from it.

I always assumed STEM included Medicine. If it doesn't, it most certainly should! (The one thing that it should never include, IMHO, is Economics!)

[gcq]

I disagree. You are throwing away age old wisdom gathered by experimentation over many centuries that resulted in standardized tests. They were introduced as far back as BC in ancient China and were the hallmark of a merit based bureaucratic system that resulted in the expansion of many dynasties back in the time.

You can always cite isolated outliers, but you simply cannot throw away the litmus test that results in someone graduating from the MIT in Massachusetts versus someone graduating in MIT in Pune. To imply that there is a greater chance of them being equal than unequal is disingenuous.

Why study at all? Simply gather degrees from God knows what college and simply train yourself in Java, C# and what not and just enter the workplace, right?

Also, experience is ridiculously overrated. In my view, people who are smart and entrepreneurial are like that from day 1 and those people, if given opportunities from day 1, can contribute greatly. The masses write the same code over and over, and while it may help in doing the same repetitive thing more efficiently, it doesn't really result in any innovation. To tie experience to innovation is really a stretch and to claim EB2 just because you have x years of experience is also not a correct argument. I know at my workplace who is "smart" and who merely gets by experience. Everyone knows. No one will admit this, but if the axe fell tomorrow (and it has fallen quite a few times at my workplace, where we routinely gather the bottom feeders and give them the pink slips no matter what their experience is), the usual suspects get out. Hence, experience should come *after merit criterion*, not before it.

You are seeing it in a way that benefits you. You probably lack experience but has a US degree. You will be able to realize the value of experience only once you have it. Formal college education came into existence only recently. Great craftsmen and innovators of history doesn't become so after undergoing formal education. Formal education gives you a jump start, but is no match for the wisdom gained through experience.

People born with natural talents need no education to achieve their goals. If you look around now as well as in the past, you could see lot of people who reached heights with no/little formal education. On the other hand you could see numerous people with US MS degrees, but doing mundane tasks and surviving. In my company I see PHD candidates being tossed to trash since they don't have what it takes to make sensible contribution to an organization.

[abcx13]

You are seeing it in a way that benefits you. You probably lack experience but has a US degree. You will be able to realize the value of experience only once you have it. Formal college education came into existence only recently. Great craftsmen and innovators of history doesn't become so after undergoing formal education. Formal education gives you a jump start, but is no match for the wisdom gained through experience.

People born with natural talents need no education to achieve their goals. If you look around now as well as in the past, you could see lot of people who reached heights with no/little formal education. On the other hand you could see numerous people with US MS degrees, but doing mundane tasks and surviving. In my company I see PHD candidates being tossed to trash since they don't have what it takes to make sensible contribution to an organization.

Look, neither is a panacea. You can't design a rocket or a nuclear reactor based on experience and skills learned on the job. In many engineering disciplines you need to be licensed, which, you guessed it, requires a degree! And yes, PhDs can be highly incompetent but when you're filtering for the top 100 schools, that's already a pretty high bar. I would say the probability that these people are extremely valuable is >0.75. And the innovators you allude to (I assume you are referring to the cream such as Leonardo, Edison, Jobs, etc.) are outliers.

And FWIW, "formal college education" has been around for longer than you suggest. According to Wikipedia, Oxford has been around since 1100s and our very own Nalanda dates back to the 5th century AD.

P.S. - Just because you've been doing something for a long time doesn't mean your 'experience' is necessarily valuable. A bad manager is experienced at being a bad manager. Why would you want to hire him?

[GhostWriter]

I will point out a few things some of which i think are missing in the discussion above. (I did resist posting for last two days but i give up, i just disagree a lot to remain silent, but only this one time ).

- Debate between education vs. skill becomes irrelevant for an employment based system. Both education and experience are proxies for skills and capabilities and an employer is in the best position to determine how much of each is required to do the job. With all the criteria related to university/grades that are listed above you are trying to create a central HR department that will recruit without a job description (or a broad job description of STEM).

- Employment based is a market system, takes care of demand and supply in labor market. Points based (or education based) is more of a planned system and will sooner or later fall out of sync with actual skills that are needed. So today a STEM bill gives Greencards to all people in these areas. In few years if more finance professionals/doctors/lawyers or other professionals not covered in these categories are required the slow moving legislative process will result in market distortions.
It is very hard to win against the market, a good case study is LTCM.

- Overall Employment based system in my opinion does a good job. It is flexible and automatically fills the gaps that exist at different times. It provided doctors in US when they were in shortage and provided Computer/IT professionals when they were needed.

- A country may have good universities in one field and labor shortage in another. The best thing would be to have foreign students come and study in the first field and go back and attract trained foreign workers in the second field into the country (import computer scientists with foreign degrees, export degrees in philosphy or the other way around).

- Overall a simple employment based system with fewer categories and constraints is the best option. The current three categories are sufficient (probably more than required). Comparing or prioritizing between two PERMs seems a very arbitrary thing to me. The problem with current system is not in structure, it is again the planned numbers that have been allocated. The numbers need to be increased to reflect the demand in the labor market. If there is manipulation or fraud it must be prevented but i do not beleive it would be more than 5-10% of the entire PERMs filed. That won't change the current backlog materially. Objective should be to ensure all GCs are processed with in a reasonable timeframe of 1 year. The country caps and overall quotas are very outdated. HR3012 would have fixed (and could still fix) the country cap issue and would have made the increasing of the quotas more likely with entire EB community suffering equally (and fairly).

- Creating more categories or coming up with artificial education restrictions will result in unfilled jobs and make the system even more complex and costlier. The tax code has lots of rules but can still be (and is) manipulated. It actually becomes harder to detect manipulation. US law firms overseen by US agencies control the immigration process. They increase scrutiny in H1 and PERM processes and audit cases whenever they smell any manipulation. To put the blame on applicants or even hiring companies is not entirely fair.

Other (minor) technical issues
- US and other global companies hire for their US operations from foreign campuses they view at par with the best US universities. Two people in the same training program at a bank will get their GCs in different times.
- What about people who obtain undergrad degrees from US universities. How do they compare with people with foreign undergrads but US masters. Might be a lower number in past but with increasing wealth in India and China this will be a significant block standing in the queue soon. Should they tell people with US masters that they have 4 years of "great" education vs. 2 years for people with only a foreign masters. What if they also do masters here should they demand another category for people with two degrees in US vs. one.
- Foreign doctors filing for Green cards will still have the old fate and so will finance professionals even if they were educated here.
- How do you compare a person in field X from university A with a CGPA of P and M years of experience with a person in field Y from University B with a CGPA of Q and N years of experience. The answer is in general the immigration process does not need to. The decision is best left to the hiring firms.

My simple point is the more lines you will draw the more divisions you will get. Keep it simple and work towards making it better for everyone.

PS: abcx13, i know your opinion about economists but a basic course in micro and macro economics will help you in understanding the other sides of the argument. (At least i think it helped me).

[qesehmk]

@ghost - i really liked your overall emphasis on markets being the ultimate arbitrar (or deciders in Dubya-speak!). I wholeheartedly agree .. but..(and there has to be a but!) just want to point out that the overall cap and country quotas by default make the system not so quite market driven. IMHO - all these caps and quotas have a political purpose. Immigration based on employment should be unrestricted i.e. purely based on market demand. As long as there is an employer to sponsor GC - give it their employee after x number of continuous employment.

On another note - economics has been one of my favorite subject too. It is probably one of the few disciplines that carry objectivity of science and subjectivity of arts!

[abcx13]

I will point out a few things some of which i think are missing in the discussion above. (I did resist posting for last two days but i give up, i just disagree a lot to remain silent, but only this one time ).

- Debate between education vs. skill becomes irrelevant for an employment based system. Both education and experience are proxies for skills and capabilities and an employer is in the best position to determine how much of each is required to do the job. With all the criteria related to university/grades that are listed above you are trying to create a central HR department that will recruit without a job description (or a broad job description of STEM).

- Employment based is a market system, takes care of demand and supply in labor market. Points based (or education based) is more of a planned system and will sooner or later fall out of sync with actual skills that are needed. So today a STEM bill gives Greencards to all people in these areas. In few years if more finance professionals/doctors/lawyers or other professionals not covered in these categories are required the slow moving legislative process will result in market distortions.
It is very hard to win against the market, a good case study is LTCM.

- Overall Employment based system in my opinion does a good job. It is flexible and automatically fills the gaps that exist at different times. It provided doctors in US when they were in shortage and provided Computer/IT professionals when they were needed.

- A country may have good universities in one field and labor shortage in another. The best thing would be to have foreign students come and study in the first field and go back and attract trained foreign workers in the second field into the country (import computer scientists with foreign degrees, export degrees in philosphy or the other way around).

- Overall a simple employment bassed system with fewer categories and constraints is the best option. The current three categories are sufficient (probably more than required). Comparing or prioritizing between two PERMs seems a very arbitrary thing to me. The problem with current system is not in structure, it is again the planned numbers that have been allocated. The numbers need to be increased to reflect the demand in the labor market. If there is manipulation or fraud it must be prevented but i do not beleive it would be more than 5-10% of the entire PERMs filed. That won't change the current backlog materially. Objective should be to ensure all GCs are processed with in a reasonable timeframe of 1 year. The country caps and overall quotas are very outdated. HR3012 would have fixed (and could still fix) the country cap issue and would have made the increasing of the quotas more likely with entire EB community suffering equally (and fairly).

- Creating more categories or coming up with artificial education restrictions will result in unfilled jobs and make the system even more complex and costlier. The tax code has lots of rules but can still be (and is) manipulated. It actually becomes harder to detect manipulation. US law firms overseen by US agencies control the immigration process. They increase scrutiny in H1 and PERM processes and audit cases whenever they smell any manipulation. To put the blame on applicants or even hiring companies is not entirely fair.

Other (minor) technical issues
- US and other global companies hire for their US operations from foreign campuses they view at par with the best US universities. Two people in the same training program at a bank will get their GCs in different times.
- What about people who obtain undergrad degrees from US universities. How do they compare with people with foreign undergrads but US masters. Might be a lower number in past but with increasing wealth in India and China this will be a significant block standing in the queue soon. Should they tell people with US masters that they have 4 years of "great" education vs. 2 years for people with foreign masters. What if they also do masters here should they have another category for people with two degrees in US vs. one.
- Foreign doctors filing for Green cards will still have the old fate and so will finance professionals even if they were educated here.
- How do you compare a person in field X from university A with a CGPA of P with a person in field Y from University B with a CGPA of Q. The answer is in general the immigration process does not need to. The decision is best left to the hiring firms.

My simple point is the more lines you will draw the more divisions you will get. Keep it simple and work towards making it better for everyone.

PS: abcx13, i know your opinion about economists but a basic course in micro and macro economics will help you in understanding the other sides of the argument. (At least i think it helped me).

I was just pointing out that econ is not a science and it is folly to consider it one. (See last 10 years and where economic determinism has lead us.) But yes, I will admit that I don't think too highly of most economists. I find that those who have taken economics courses tend to lean heavily on market based solutions, which when taken to their extremes result in their own distortions (and no, the liberterian Ron Paul solution of axing even more 'market distorting' government institutions such as the FAA, FDA, etc. is not the answer - that's moronic). Besides, the reasoning behind why market based systems supposedly work better is typically based on idealized theoretical assumptions which simply do not hold up in practice (markets are NOT efficient, information is NOT perfect, humans are not always rational, etc). Anyway, let us say we simplify the system as you propose and get rid of all categories and all requirements except for a labor market test (since it is impossible to design a perfect test, let us assume it will be as flawed as it is currently). Allow me to point out the many flaws in your proposal:

1. Under your system, the implicit "price" of a visa will be the differential between the fair domestic wage and the wage an immigrant would accept. Since there will be price elasticity of demand, and supply is fixed, you will end up with those immigrants where the wage differential is the widest, in other words those willing to work for lower wages (I've pointed out the flaws of the prevailing wage system before and given how easily it is gamed, I don't consider that a solution). Your highly skilled IIT or Cambridge grads will not put up with this wage suppression and will stay at home. You will get strawberry pickers and construction workers instead. Net effect: wages for locals are suppressed, low skilled immigrants come in who don't create jobs and are less likely to stimulate the economy (in fact, remittances will likely be higher).

2. You talk about importing CS grads and exporting philosophy majors. First, you can't force your citizens out of their own country. Second, labor markets are NOT liquid. People can't cross borders freely unless they live in the EU (and even then net migration across EU countries is lower than it is in the 50 united states).

3. If you think there is only 5-10% fraud in PERM (I think the number is likely much higher, especially if you consider the spirit of the law) and all PERMs are created equal, why not lift all quotas and let anyone with a PERM migrate? After all, the PERM guarantees you that the position is unfilled because no skilled candidate is available so you are not stealing jobs (except for the 5-10% fraud, which you can live with since the other 90% will likely still result in a net gain to the economy). In other words, the number of PERMs will automatically "reflect the demand in the labor market". Do you realize what would happen if the US government did this? The queue outside the US Embassy in Delhi will extend from Chanakyapuri to Jaipur.

All that said, I don't necessarily disagree with you that an employer is probably a better judge of who'll be a better employee regardless of education, background, skills, etc. And the other technical issues that you raise are valid. I don't have good answers but one thing to consider: immigration is also about assimilation and integration into society. It's not just about economic benefits. This is one big reason that immigration systems favor foreign students educated in the country. These foreign students will also have personal and professional networks and are more likely to contribute to civic life in other non-economic ways. (Of course, the reason that politicians give - that oh, we've spent so much money educating these people and they shouldn't go home - is just another form of the sunk cost fallacy. The real reason is easier assimilation.)

P.S. - LTCM was a great example of hubris, greed, arrogance and too much faith in economic models based on flawed theoretical assumptions (go look at the Black Scholes assumptions and tell me how many of them are true). It has nothing to do with being able to beat the market. And the fact that the losses had to be socialized is yet more proof that market based solutions don't work (there are always externalities). There is systemic risk which leads to too big to fail situations, which ultimately leads to private sector losses being socialized at the taxpayers' expense and the creation of moral hazard.

[abcx13]

Once again, I agree with everything sportsfan said. The difference between that metallurgy PhD from Berkeley and the Indian with 14 years of IT experience is that the Berkeley gal knows *how to learn* and apply her knowledge in new and unique ways, whereas odds are the Indian IT guy can only do what he's been trained for.

P.S. I do not differentiate between an undergrad and a graduate student, except when it comes to research. In graduate schools, top students are focused on their research and that attribute can translate very well in research oriented jobs.

I meant to point this out, but forgot. As someone who was on the fence about going to grad school and went half-heartedly and ended up loving it, I think I grew and learned more in 1.5 years of grad school than I did in four years of undergrad. You know what the difference was? Doing research and interacting with PhD students and learning from them and looking for the reasons behind why things happen. Teaches you a whole lot more than undergrad classes which are mostly about learning existing knowledge and frameworks instead of developing new things. The world as a whole needs more of the latter than the former.

[GhostWriter]

Thanks Q. I agree with what you said after "but". The quotas and caps are political distortions in an otherwise market based system. Also on your other note, it is very interesting to watch people respond to incentives.

abcx13, thanks for a healthy discussion. Some of the things that i did not say or imply (that you thought i did)
2. I did not talk about exporting philosphy majors, i only talked about exporting philoshphy degrees. Foreign students come in, earn these degrees and go back. If demand in Computer industry saturated in future but the universities still had courses, same should happen with foreign students in those courses. No one is talking about firing citizens, i am not Romney

1. I am not proposing a new system. I said i like the existing structure (problem is the quotas and caps). Fewer categories do not necessarily imply zero categories. Between reducing the existing categories vs. increasing them i would prefer the former. Focus should be on reasonable wait times in the entire system. Carving out additional categories with lower wait times, and increasing the wait times for the remaining ones (by keeping the same number of visas) does not seem appealing to me (irrespective of where i fit). The problem and the enemy is the quantity, not the categorization.
I did not follow the rest of your explaination in point 1. The price of a visa is fixed - it is the processing cost of filing H1 and PERM. The decision facing the employer is if he can attract a foreign worker at prevailing wage or higher (which will vary with the job) and bear this fixed expense himself. If the prevailing wage for a doctor is higher in US than India and a hospital can not find a US citizen to work for it by offering a premium equal to the visa processing costs then it will seek a foreign doctor and doctors for India will line up, doctors from Australia may not line up.

3. For very low wage jobs the domestic wage level will first increase significantly before it makes sense for the employer to hire a foreign worker. Businesses will be forced to pass on the costs to the customers or shut down. That is why farm owners like illegal immigration and that is the reason the queue outside Delhi consulate won't be as long as you think. To check those things number of years required on H1 before filing PERM can be controlled.

I have a feeling (and i might be wrong) that you are mixing up economic forecast models with economic systems of production. The first have lots of flaws and they actually make the case stronger for market based economic systems than centrally planned ones (which are based on economic models). I agree market based systems have limitations and pose systemic issues but the answer is more oversight and regulation and not central planning. (Probably) Without realizing you and sportsfan33 are actually proposing a model based on education and grades to control who gets a visa, i am merely suggesting that let employers decide who they need. If more employers prefer (and they do) foreign workers with US degrees vs. foreign workers with foreign degrees more people will automatically take the MS to H1 route and if another employer does not care (or if the foreign workers with US degrees still don't make up the shortfall in a sector) then so be it. Why penalize both the applicant and the employer for decisions they had very little control over.

sportsfan33, thanks for your post, i just saw it, but I will not reply to it. The discussion will become more heated (and repititive) and not go anywhere. I think i have made the points i wanted to in the two posts. But feel free to join abcx13 at his economics classes . You two seem to make a good pair.

[abcx13]

I'm not going to reply to the above (and I'll be damned if I'm going to take an economics class - they are quite frankly useless). We'll just have to agree to disagree that employers will do a good job of bringing in the most valuable immigrants.

I actually think a simpler solution is to have a H1B program with stronger wage protections (require higher wages to eliminate bodyshoppers and other wage arbitrageurs) and grant people permanent residency after a fixed period of time like most sensible countries do (pretty much every OECD country I can think of).

[GC-Utopic]

I'm not going to reply to the above (and I'll be damned if I'm going to take an economics class - they are quite frankly useless). We'll just have to agree to disagree that employers will do a good job of bringing in the most valuable immigrants.

I actually think a simpler solution is to have a H1B program with stronger wage protections (require higher wages to eliminate bodyshoppers and other wage arbitrageurs) and grant people permanent residency after a fixed period of time like most sensible countries do (pretty much every OECD country I can think of).

I like this proposal of yours unlike stapling(literally) GC's to top school alums. I guess that would bring the so called ratta maroing Indians and Chinese to ace these GRE's and GMAT's and get into top schools (more incentive now to get into top 30/100), which would reduce the very innovative minded individuals you are trying to produce.

I know getting into these schools is not entirely based on scores but it still is a very major part if you are in the 98-99 percentile. I can tell from being an ivy school alum.

jmho.

[GC-Utopic]

I don't get what produces *innovation*? If you free up an average human mind from *ratta marofying*, you get unlimited facebooking that creates a 100 billion company selling absolutely nothing. Are you saying that somehow people who show a lot of dedication to study and get into highly ranked schools are killing the innovative part of their brain? If so, is there any study/evidence that shows this?

The IIT-JEE exam was one of the toughest I ever took and not only required creativity, but it also required a lot of structured planning, persistence and dedication, traits which translate well into corporate life. The SAT is a similar experience in the US for young kids entering into colleges. The kind of command and grasp you require for languages and math is enough to chafe top quality students from bottom feeders statistically.

I get it that a few of these super job creators are dropouts (however most notably, Gates and Zuck still went to Harvard, Brin/Page are from Stanford and it is a guarantee that we will never see another Steve Jobs), but you have to look at hundreds of thousands of successful Ivy Leagueres who don't feature in mainstream media and who run this country. We implicitly expect them to be from Yale/Harvard. Why do we expect any less from the best and the brightest immigrants?

Please refer to the post above irt the reducing quality of IIT by rote memorization, I was implying about the same happening here,,not denying the difficulty of the test per se.

[abcx13]

I don't get what produces *innovation*? If you free up an average human mind from *ratta marofying*, you get unlimited facebooking that creates a 100 billion company selling absolutely nothing. Are you saying that somehow people who show a lot of dedication to study and get into highly ranked schools are killing the innovative part of their brain? If so, is there any study/evidence that shows this?

The IIT-JEE exam was one of the toughest I ever took and not only required creativity, but it also required a lot of structured planning, persistence and dedication, traits which translate well into corporate life. The SAT is a similar experience in the US for young kids entering into colleges. The kind of command and grasp you require for languages and math is enough to chafe top quality students from bottom feeders statistically.

I get it that a few of these super job creators are dropouts (however most notably, Gates and Zuck still went to Harvard, Brin/Page are from Stanford and it is a guarantee that we will never see another Steve Jobs), but you have to look at hundreds of thousands of successful Ivy Leagueres who don't feature in mainstream media and who run this country. We implicitly expect them to be from Yale/Harvard. Why do we expect any less from the best and the brightest immigrants?

You make a great point - the Silicon Valley of today (at least what is covered in the media) is mostly hype based on Wall Street/VC pump and dump bullshit and extremely shaky business models. The stock values are ephemeral and will fall as the bubble deflates. If you look at most startups in the old Silicon Valley, they were nearly ALL created by techies from Stanford/Berkeley/insert prestigious school who had at least a MS. Sun Microsystems, Cisco, all the semiconductor companies (the Silicon!), HP, Adobe, Yahoo, SGI etc. Of the new companies, the ones which have durable business models such as Arista, Google, VMWare, etc. have been created by techies again. Good luck making a virtualization monitor without a freakin' degree. There are a few exceptions to the rule (such as Amazon in Seattle) but even Apple won't have been where it is today without Steve Wozniak. And the world will go on just fine without the Facebooks and LinkedIns but what's going to happen if Intel can't find people to make chips tomorrow? What are you guys going to do? Hire a mechanic without a degree but with 20 years of experience to design your 16nm chip?

It is ludicrous to discount the value of education so severely - especially when it comes to jobs which require technical know-how and a research mindset. Yes, you can probably do your Infy/Cognizant/Wipro jobs without a degree, but are those what ultimately drive the kind of innovation and improvements in the quality of life that have enriched this country in the past fifty years?

[Spectator]

I thought you might be interested in this, since it relates to STEM.

http://blogs.technet.com/b/microsoft...eneration.aspx

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/...ship/MSNTS.pdf

Part of this says:

To be effective in keeping jobs in the United States, we also need targeted high-skilled immigration reform. We believe this should take two forms. First, Congress should create a new, supplemental allocation of 20,000 visas annually for STEM skills that are in short supply. [This refers to extra H1B]

Second, it should take advantage of prior unused green cards by making a supplemental allocation of 20,000 new green card slots annually for workers with STEM skills.

Because education and immigration opportunities should go hand-in-hand, we believe it would be appropriate to require employers to make a meaningful financial commitment toward developing the American STEM pipeline in exchange for these new visas and green cards.

Those funds would help pay for the STEM education investments across the country that would be part of a Race to the Future initiative. Based on our own analysis, we believe that it would be fair and feasible to require an investment of $10,000 for each of these new STEM visas and $15,000 for each of these new STEM green cards. This would raise up to $500 million per year — or $5 billion over a decade — that the federal government could use to distribute to the states where STEM education investments are needed.

[gcq]

I would summarize all the arguments by abcx13 and sportsfan to this.

They argue/discuss issues in such a way that that people like them stay on top of the rat race. To achieve this they support points system or whatever is convenient for them.

I don't see much meaning in discussing with them.

abcx13,
As for the discussion about IT industry, I would say you are judging a field that you doesn't know really well. IT is the booming field now and will remain so for the foreseeable future. So no point fretting about it.

As for biotech, it is not "the" field yet. Biotech's time may come, but it is not now. When biotech becomes "the" field you will see Indians, Chinese and other foreign nationals flocking to that field. I have been hearing about biotech being the next top filed for the past couple of years. I haven't seen it becoming the top field so far. Let us see whether the hype around biotech remains a hype.

[abcx13]

I would summarize all the arguments by abcx13 and sportsfan to this.

They argue/discuss issues in such a way that that people like them stay on top of the rat race. To achieve this they support points system or whatever is convenient for them.

Really? I suggested PhDs should get priority even over me even though I don't have one.

abcx13,
As for the discussion about IT industry, I would say you are judging a field that you doesn't know really well. IT is the booming field now and will remain so for the foreseeable future. So no point fretting about it.

As for biotech, it is not "the" field yet. Biotech's time may come, but it is not now. When biotech becomes "the" field you will see Indians, Chinese and other foreign nationals flocking to that field. I have been hearing about biotech being the next top filed for the past couple of years. I haven't seen it becoming the top field so far. Let us see whether the hype around biotech remains a hype.

Yup, Indians will join biotech once it's the "safe option". Meanwhile, Chinese and other foreign nationals are already flocking to it. It's the Indians that are missing - but no worries, I'm sure we'll learn to copy and become the world's low value genome sequencing center or some other such thing once all the hard research problems are solved.

And as to the part about me not knowing enough about IT, it is undeniable that is lower value than what Microsoft, Google, Oracle, VMWare, etc. do. I have an open challenge - show me some magazine article or news report about Indian IT companies doing innovative world class R&D. I haven't seen it, but since you claim to know the field better, surely you can find something? You want to know how much R&D Infosys does? $0. A big fat zero. Go see their annual report.

[gcq]

Once again, I respectfully disagree. I have received my masters back in 2002, and I have worked for 2 employers for the last 10 years. I have worked in 5 different roles. I have worked with multiple teams. As part of my work, I have also interacted with many clients. I have interviewed about 100 people so far. I interview about 1 person every 3 days nowadays. I have been on many career fairs. I can say safely I am experienced until the mid managerial level.

I can tell you without any reservation: Experience is vastly overrated. Smart people are smart - right out of the school. A person with no formal knowledge of CS has completely blown me away in an interview once. That person was smart and she became one of the most successful core engineers in our team. Within 3 years with our company, she managed to produce 2 patents. She was a PhD in metallurgy. This is not an isolated example either. It holds fairly consistently everywhere.

The craftsmen examples you have given are *menial jobs*. In order to be good at the same repetitive task, obviously experience helps. Experience can also make a genius person even better. Examples - Roger Federer, Sachin Tendulkar etc. However if you just don't *have it*, experience will only make your mediocrity efficient. Honestly. There is a term for that in the IT world: "code monkeys". Trackitt is full of them and they all boast years and years of experience.

The danger we face is if we promote too much mediocrity, it will eventually become industry standard and innovation will just stop. Technological bullies like Microsoft did this for years where they brought out the same cr@p years and years while fleecing the consumers of billions of dollars. No innovation, only mediocrity. It took some rather smart people to upend them. However if it happens consistently all around, eventually, innovative and smart people will have no motivation to succeed and mediocrity and slow decline will rule the day.

I think where we differ is to judge a person's value/smartness from the school he/she went. reputed schools by and large get the best and most talented people. You may have occasional outliers, but there are very few. You can't tell me some smart person in India never dreamed of an IIT or that smart people in the US never dream of MIT/Harvard/Stanford/Yale. If I do not know a person, how do I make a judgment on their abilities? Obviously by looking at their performance in school. Where a person receives his/her education is a big part of that person's aptitude, and it's been that way for quite some time.

P.S. The metallurgy PhD student was from Berkley, which is the second best University for that discipline in the US behind MIT. I would hire her first before I hire a CS graduate with a combination of degrees from India + 14 years of IT experience.

What I meant by experience is not the experience gained by mediocre people. My point is basically same as yours. It is the talent that matters. Sheer experience or having the label of some US school is not a criteria for brilliance. Smart people are born that way. An experienced person reaching top is through his talent alone. He has no labels (MS or otherwise) to give him a upper hand. Where as most of the graduates of US schools get into places they don't deserve by the label of the school they study in. The PhD metallurgy gal you mentioned blew you away not because of her PhD, but by her talent. Obviously metallurgy is not the field she worked in your organization. If she excelled in a field she did not study, it just highlights her talent not her degree.

[abcx13]

Where as most of the graduates of US schools get into places they don't deserve by the label of the school they study in.

This is a ridiculous statement. It sounds like someone has an inferiority complex. I'm sure all those poor grad students from MIT and Caltech who publish papers in Science or Nature and Professors who get Nobel prizes didn't really deserve them. Nor did the people from Stanford who worked on Google's search algorithm.

It would be one thing to say these things if our own house was in order but given how miserably we fare on most counts (research output, industrial innovation, simple civic sense, social indicators, etc.) compared to Western countries, it takes a LOT of arrogance for Indians to say stuff like this.

And I don't want to get into a nature vs. nurture debate, but I don't think smart people are "born that way".

[GhostWriter]

Thanks Spec. An innovative proposal from an employer. So Microsoft is saying that they are willing to bear an extra fixed cost of 25K (10K for visa and 15K for GC) over the processing fees for visa and GC to permanently hire a foreign worker. This reflects their desperate state and inability to fill jobs with domestic talent. They also only talk about STEM skills with a basic requirement of an undergrad. They do not talk about any preference for a masters, preference for US or foreign Masters, grades in college, number of years of experience or any other thing. Those will vary depending on the different job profiles they will try to fill. They are willing to give the extra money to the government to invest in undergrad and high school education in STEM fields which will increase the domestic supply and reduce the need to hire foreign workers in future (assumption being that the demand for STEM workers will be high in future as well). This is why it is important to leave the hiring decisions to the individual employers. They know the best about what they need and what they value.
Of course this is just a proposal with many open questions that will need to be addressed if it has to be implemented.

I thought you might be interested in this, since it relates to STEM.

http://blogs.technet.com/b/microsoft...eneration.aspx

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/...ship/MSNTS.pdf

Part of this says:

[qesehmk]

Friends - Gentle reminder to stay on topic and not make personal comments.

[miller]

I agree with with the statement that some of Grassley's amendments will be better for immigrants like us. but I don't the goal is to put pressure on immigration.Degree from Premier US Schools holder should gave little preferred as they surly have some extra skill because of there study background.Skilled people are the valued people.

[qesehmk]

Finally a sensible voice on immigration. I hope this sparks wider acceptance of high skilled immigrants.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/...A0M1P120140123