The IT Professionals Association of America (ITPAA, Inc) expects the number of Computer Science degrees to continue declining in line with demand due to outsourcing and H-1b, L-1 visa abuse.
(PRWEB) February 4, 2005 -- The IT Professionals Association of America, (ITPAA, inc www.itpaa.org) does not see any end to the decline of students pursuing degrees in Computer Science any time soon. Scott Kirwin, founder of the group states that shortage concerns voiced by industry leaders such as Microsoft, HP, and IBM are overblown.
"People vote with their feet," Kirwin says. "Salaries continue to decline in IT, and entry-level positions for new graduates are hard to come by since most of these have been offshored to India and China. Given that the average college student graduates with $50,000 in debt, it makes sense that he or she would avoid fields such as IT that are disappearing, and go into those that provide the income necessary to pay back that debt."
Kirwin believes that outsourcing and labor dumping - a term coined by Kirwin to describe flooding the American labor market with foreign workers - are to blame. "Pro-offshoring and pro-labor dumping industry sponsored groups like the IT Association of America (ITAA) and Compete America want talent, but they don't want to pay for it - so they head abroad to find that talent on the cheap. The free market goes both ways," he says. "If there are too many American IT workers, then their salaries go down and people avoid the field. If salaries began rising, then people would become interested in the field again, but that hasn't happened, nor do we expect it to anytime soon."
Kirwin believes that the IT industry has become hooked on cheap labor and has lost the ability to find the value of American IT professionals. "We see it in the lack of innovation across the board. There has been no major advance in software engineering in a decade, nor in hardware engineering or technical design - all fields that have been sent abroad."
"Americans are extremely creative and the most productive people on the planet," Kirwin states, "Yet that creativity and productivity has been ignored by the industry in pursuit of a few less dollars an hour."
Kirwin remains extremely pessimistic about IT in the USA. "I'm not much for doomsaying," he says, "but it's hard to avoid thinking that way when you look at the state of the IT field today. It's gone, and what little remains is packing its bags." He believes that the United States will soon be under pressure in other areas because of outsourcing and labor dumping.
"Banks like Citibank and JP Morgan-Chase have educated tens of thousands of foreign nationals in banking and the backoffice that supports it. HP and IBM have taught tens of thousands of software designers and engineers. While HP executives like Carly Fiorina may not harbor patriotic or nationalistic feelings for their own nation, those they trained do - and will act to build their home banks and service firms to compete against America."
When asked what solution he believes is necessary, Kirwin demurs. "I really believe it's too late. I've studied the problem for three years now, and I don't see any solution beyond letting the so-called 'creative destruction' force of the market go forward."
"In a sense," Kirwin adds, "it's justice. American firms thought they could get something for nothing by firing Americans and hiring foreigners, and now the foreigners are coming back to compete with them. The people who gained from offshoring jobs will now be the ones who suffer, and the declining enrollment in Computer Sciences is only the beginning."
###
|
