Corporate America's education myth

[sasha031]

The New York Times has a piece today on the latest myth being peddled by our government and the corporate interests who run it. It goes something like this: job outsourcing and declining wages is happening in America because Americans are getting more stupid, and thus the only way for America to stop the bleeding is to produce more students educated in science and math. This is a brilliantly crafted storyline because it both reinforces Americans' concerns about its public school system and, more importantly, distracts from the corporate-written trade policies that are really at the heart of America's economic problems. Oh yeah, one other thing - the storyline is also a shameless lie. The Times' piece describes a new report showing that many major corporations - who continue to pocket billions in American-taxpayer-funded corporate welfare - are going to be shifting research and development jobs overseas to places like China and India. The Times obediently reports without any question at all that "the study contended that lower labor costs in emerging markets are not the major reason for hiring researchers overseas." We shouldn't be surprised at that - corporate executives are smart enough to know how to lie. And they are lying.

If you take 2 minutes and actually think about what's going on, you will realize the painful intellectual acrobatics it takes to try to claim otherwise. Low wages - and the trade policy that forces Americans to compete with low wages - is at the heart of this, nothing else. Think for a moment about this education argument. The United States has the best universities in the world. While our education system certainly needs upgrading, the concept that we are not producing enough good graduates for R&D jobs is just silly. And the idea that India and China have better schools producing better-trained workers is also ridiculous. These countries may be quickly developing - but last I checked, most of the world's most prominent technical colleges and universities are here in the good old U.S. of A.So now think like a corporate executive trying to maximize profits. You have one set of R&D workers here in the United States, and another set of less-skilled, less-educated R&D workers in the developing world. You can do one of two things - afford to pay fewer workers in America. Or, you can go to India or China, spend a fraction of what you'd spend here on wages, and be able to hire an army of researchers. Granted, each researcher overseas might be less-skilled than each researcher in the United States - but the sheer numbers of researchers you can get over there makes the economics of outsourcing work.
http://www.workingforchange.com/blog/index.cfm?mode=entry&entry=738A9593-905C-D276-A1D0A426D5840D6A

[RagingInMiami]

1. If corporate America is so concerned about our declining education system

Why don't they give up all the tax breaks and corporate welfare they receive so the money can be funneled into our public education system?

[Coyote_Bandit]

2. Hmmmmmmm

Ten years of college here. Three graduate degrees, two professional licenses. Good references. Solid work history. And now unemployed for over three years - during which time I have collected over 1,000 rejection letters.

Higher education is largely irrelevant to career success these days. But it serves a few purposes: (1) it keeps a significant number of folks out of the workforce for an extended period of time (2) it funds the business of higher education; and (3) because the majority of college graduates carry debt and sometimes very significant debt, it serves the interests of corporate America in that (a) financial institutions earn money either through direct interest or indirectly through additional lending to poor graduates and (b) it limits the abilities of graduates to innovate, start their own businesses or otherwise compete with established businesses dueto their lack of capital.