On 10 Mar 2005 18:46:49 -0800, wrote:

John H wrote:

That's the attitude! Give our kids even *more* reason to search for the
easiest
way to get a worthless degree.

The education problem was here before outsourcing. Outsourcing is one
of the
effects of our education problem.


--
******************

If we turned out as many or more engineers as do the Chinese and the
Indians (countries with several times our population and probably not
producing that many more engineers per capita)
the corporations would *still* look around and say:

"We can pay an American graduate, living in the United States, a
starting wage of $1000 a week, plus another $1000 a month in FICA and
fringe benefits, and have that graduate make design computations on a
software program. Or, we can pay and Indian graduate, living in New
Delhi, $125 a week to do the same job and not worry about the fringe
benefits, etc, because the government provides for the sick and the
elderly in India. The Indian graduate will work at least as hard for
the $125 a week, be more grateful to get it, be able to buy an equally
luxurious lifestyle, and when he qualifies for a 10% pay increase after
a year it will cost us $12 a week instead of another $100."

Even Bill Gates, who is loudly wailing about the loss of high tech jobs
to third world countries and is blaming the shift on "poor education",
is laying off some of the most highly educated workers in the world
here in the US to export jobs as fast as he can to a market where his
labor costs are about 20% of what they are here in the US.

You want to train the younger generation for the jobs of tomorrow?
Forget anything that can be done on computer with the results shot
anywhere around the world via the internet.

The best paid new jobs will be in sales and marketing, construction,
mechanical repair, home remodel, travel and entertainment. Medical
professions are safe. Anything that requires the physical presence of a
skilled human being, on site, rather than several thousand miles away
in a socialist, third world economy.

It's a paradigm shift, yet again. Our generation was well compensated
for what we *knew*, but knowledge is portable and you can educate
people who are willing to work and who can afford to work for
substantially less than even poverty-level wages in the US. Our kids
will be paid less for what they know and more for what they can *do*,
and the less exportable the skill set and the greater the requirement
that somebody be physically located where the services are performed
the more the job is likely to pay.

Your last three paragraphs say it all, although I may disagree with the short
list of best paid new jobs. Go he http://www.bls.gov/ncs/ocs/sp/ncar0002.pdf
and you'll find all kinds of occupations that pay well and are not
'outsourceable'. You'll also notice that the best paying require something more
than a 'basket weaving' major in college.

If you'll look at the table he

http://money.cnn.com/2004/02/05/pf/c...ative_degrees/,

you'll see what I'm talking about with regards to the type of degree. Note the
high paying degrees - they aren't liberal arts degrees. Look at the bottom of
the list, Elementary Teacher Education, which is one of the easiest to obtain.
That starting wage applies only if the person can find a job, and they aren't
that easy to find. The supply is simply too great.

A problem is that the number of graduates with the 'hard degrees' is dwindling.
High school graduates are not what they used to be, and therefore they don't get
the 'hard' degrees in college in sufficient numbers. Because the supply is
dwindling, the wages for these folks goes up. Because the number of 'soft (if
any) degree' is increasing, the supply is greater than demand and the wages stay
down.

So we end up with an upper middle class, and more lower middle class (or poor),
and no 'middle' middle class.


--
John H

"All decisions are the result of binary thinking."