That’s according to the graph below from Economic Policy Institute’s recent report on America’s supply of science and tech talent. Among OECD nations in 2006, the United States claimed a third of high-performing students in both reading and science, far more than our next closest competitor, Japan. On math, we have a bit less to be proud of — we just claimed 14 percent of the high-performers, compared to 15.2 percent for Japan and 16.2 percent of South Korea. 

In a companion post to this feud, economist Heidi Shierholz of the liberal Economic Policy Institute estimates that non-inevitable workforce dropouts represent three-quarters of the decline in participation since the end of the recession. That’s about 4.4 million workers, by her calculations. In a follow-up e-mail, Shierholz draws on historical Labor Department estimates of participation rates given the nation’s demographic trends and calculates that another 3.7 million workers went non-inevitably missing from the labor force in the decade before the recession. That’s 8 million people, if you’re scoring at home.

Elise Gould, director of health policy research at the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank, says the new provision won’t affect most workers. But studies show about 2 million workers could potentially get fewer hours — and therefore remain without health insurance.

“Workforces that are based on part-time work, a lot of those workers already are not eligible,” Gould says. But, she adds, “to the extent that they have some workers that are working, say, 32 hours a week, are they going to move them down? Absolutely. Those are the workers that are most at risk.”

“Indian companies can advertise and recruit in the U.S. just the way foreign auto companies do. There is plenty of homegrown talent who would be happy to work at a good salary for a company with a future in the United States,” said Ross Eisenbrey, vice president of the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank in Washington.

The year started off strong in January and February with rising job creation numbers, but slowed sharply in March with only 88,000 jobs added. 

Josh Bivens, research and policy director for the Economic Policy Institute, said the report shows that the economy “is growing just above stall-speed.” He said the pace of expansion of the economy is only enough to reduce unemployment slowly.

A new report looks at the results of school reform in three major cities and finds that reformers’ claims about success don’t exactly match reality. Here’s a piece on it by Elaine Weiss, the national coordinator for the Broader Bolder Approach to Education. This appeared on The Nation’s website.

A new report, released last week, suggests that DC Public Schools’ much lauded reform efforts are  still failing to produce positive results for DC’s students.  Despite changesfirst championed by former Chancellor Michelle Rhee and now by Chancellor Kaya Henderson, the report isn’t pretty:  There was little progress in test scores, costly school closures made capacity problems worse and sent students to poorer-performing schools, restrictive evaluations led to higher turnover of teachers, and racial gaps in achievement grew.

Elaine Weiss, the National Coordinator who wrote the report for theBroader, Bolder Approach to Education campaign, said that“instead of continuing Rhee’s reforms, the District should address health and other problems that lead to truancy, and it should make sure the quality of teachers in Anacostia are just as good as those in Chevy Chase”.

The Senate’s current immigration bill would grant their wish. As written, it vastly increases the annual limit on H1-B visas, which allow corporations to bring employees with a bachelor’s degree to the U.S. from overseas for up to six years. Roughly half the guest workers who currently arrive through the program come for computer-related jobs. When Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced earlier this month that he was forming a political action group to back the reform effort, it was in part seen as a move to ensure that the H1-B provision would make it to President Obama’s desk intact. 

There’s just one problem. That whole skills shortage? It’s a myth, as was amply illustrated (yet again) by a report this week from the Economic Policy Institute. It still might be the case that tech companies are having trouble finding specific skill sets in certain niches (think cloud software development, or Android programming), but there simply aren’t any signs pointing to a broad dearth of talent.

A briefing paper issued last week by the progressive Economic Policy Institute noted that under the Gang of Eight H-1B cap increase half of all IT jobs requiring a college degree would go to guest workers.

“What are the consequences of having that much of an occupation taken up by these temporary workers?” said Ross Eisenbrey, EPI’s executive vice president. “The conclusion is it does lead to lower salaries. And when salaries are depressed, it leads to U.S. workers and students being turned off from those fields.”

U.S. colleges now graduate 50 percent more students with degrees in computer and information science and engineering than get hired into those fields each year, according to the findings of a report by the nonpartisan Economic Policy Institute. The co-authors offer what amounts to a counterintuitive take on a legislative hot potato. Even as tech CEOs continue to press legislators to let high-skill — and generally lower-cost — guest workers in the country, the report argues that the U.S. labor market already has a surfeit of Americans with skills in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics — the so-called STEM labor market — even as U.S. companies continue to source temporary talent from abroad.

“We really already accept a generous number of these types of migrants,” said co-author and Georgetown professor B. Lindsay Lowell. “You can talk a long time about what temporary status means and the implications for the workers and for the workforce generally and for our economy. I don’t think the argument here is that foreign workers aren’t good or they’re not productive. I think the argument is yeah, I think we want foreign workers and want our employers access to them. But the question is in what amount and is more better? And unfortunately, I think a lot of people conflate the obvious difficulties in making the system work, the kind of bottlenecks that we have in the visa system with numbers…

“You have to really sit back and ask a little bit, especially after having been presented with the facts about domestic supply if you believe in the law of supply and demand, at what point is more, better. and how much more. I think those are the tough questions we need to ask.”

Noted fellow study co-author and Rutgers professor Hal Salzman:

“There’s just a large supply of STEM graduates,” he said. “You can’t just see in the numbers a failure of various colleges and universities to produce a sufficient supply.”

“Too often, OIRA has been the place that regulations, even those whose measured benefits far outweighed the costs, went to die,” said Ross Eisenbrey, vice president of Economic Policy Institute. “The next administrator should respect the agencies’ expertise and help them fulfill their statutory missions, not impede them. OIRA is not a super-agency or the handmaiden of industry, and it should never act that way.”

Similarly, independent observers have given low marks to Apple and Reebok’s purported attempts to democratize their affiliated factories in China.

Economics Policy Institute vice president Ross Eisenbrey, a dogged critic of labor conditions in the Chinese Foxconn factories where Apple and other major hardware companies have their products built, compared the Bangladeshi building collapse to the recent fertilizer plant explosionin West, Texas.

“If you think we can rely on businesses to self-regulate, think again,” he wrote. “West Fertilizer, the small business that blew up and killed fourteen people in Texas last week, declared itself safe and estimated the chance of a catastrophic explosion at zero. They needed someone with authority and the power to change behavior to look over their shoulder, to look out for the workers and first responders who were most at risk, and to look out for the school children whose schools were within the blast radius. But no agency had or exercised that authority.”

One of my more heterodox political views is that advocacy groups do themselves a disservice by adopting BS rhetoric that simply sounds good, because they leave themselves excessively vulnerable to attack. A great illustration comes today from an Economic Policy Institute study from Hal Salzman, Daniel Kuehn, and Lindsay Lowell that shows pretty persuasively that there’s no real “shortage” of STEM workers in the American economy. They look at this through a variety of lenses, but the key one is simply that you’re not seeing big wage gains for STEM workers of the sort that a shortage would cause. And since a lot of the rhetoric around H1-B visas for highly skilled guestworkers has focused on an alleged shortage, this kind of research constitutes a big blow to that whole frame.

President Obama has said that improving STEM education is one of his top priorities. Chief executives regularly come through Washington complaining that they can’t find qualified American workers for openings at their firms that require a science background. And armed with this argument in the debate over immigration policy, lobbyists are pushing hard formore temporary work visas, known as H-1Bs, which they say are needed to make up for the lack of Americans with STEM skills.

But not everyone agrees. A study released Wednesday by the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute reinforces what a number of researchers have come to believe: that the STEM worker shortage is a myth.

As Congress debates whether to grant more visas to high-skilled workers, a new study says contends that the influx leads to lower American wages.

The paper from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute challenges the conventional wisdom among economists that the visas address a shortage of skilled American workers.

But the EPI paper says it’s a myth that there is a shortage of skilled labor in the U.S. Instead, the paper says, guest-worker programs have led to more competition for technology jobs, enabling employers to pay lower wages than otherwise. In turn, American graduates in computer, science and engineering move to other fields.

And the studies did not hold up under scrutiny. By late 2010, the International Monetary Fund had reworked Alesina-Ardagna with better data and reversed their findings, while many economists raised fundamental questions about Reinhart-Rogoff long before we knew about the famous Excel error. Meanwhile, real-world events — stagnation in Ireland, the original poster child for austerity, falling interest rates in the United States, which was supposed to be facing an imminent fiscal crisis — quickly made nonsense of austerian predictions.

Critics of the contemporary reform regime argue that these initiatives, though seemingly sensible in their original framing, are motivated by interests other than educational improvement and are causing genuine harm to American students and public schools. Here are some of the criticisms: the reforms have self-interest and profit motives, not educational improvement, as their basis; corporate interests are reaping huge benefits from these reform  initiatives andspending millions of dollars lobbying to keep those benefits flowing; three big foundations (Gates, Broad, and Walton Family) are funding much of the backing for the corporate reforms and are spending billions to market and sell reforms that don’t work; ancillary goals of these reforms are to bust teacher unions,disempower educators, and reduce spending on public schools; standardized testing is enormously expensive in terms both of public expenditures and the diversion of instruction time to test prep; over a third of charter schools deliver“significantly worse” results for students than the traditional public schools from which they were diverted; and, finally, that these reforms have produced few benefits and have actually caused harm, especially to kids in disadvantaged areas and communities of color. (On that last overall point, see this scathing new reportfrom the Economic Policy Institute.)

Elise Gould, a health care economist at the Economic Policy Institute, said she expects the effects of the employer mandate to be minimal.

“I don’t think that it is going to lead to much job loss,” she said. “There may be some shifting in hours to avoid the mandate. I think that would be small though.”

Gould also added that she expects employers to take many different factors into account when considering expansion, with the insurance requirement being just one small factor.

Recent college graduates faced an average unemployment rate of 8.8 percent fromMarch 2012 through February 2013, according to the Economic Policy Institute, and an underemployment rate of 18.3 percent. A January report from the Center for College Affordability and Productivity found nearly half of all college graduates are working jobs that don’t require a degree.

Unfortunately, for many students, earning a college degree does not guarantee a job in one’s field of study after graduation.

A May 2012 Economic Policy Institute report on the labor market for young graduates revealed that approximately 54% of recent college graduates are either unemployed or underemployed. Underemployment refers to those with higher education in positions that do not require a college degree.

A series of new reports from Washington think-tanks this month detailed the costs Millenials have borne during the Great Recession.

The first, by the Economic Policy Institute, examined the state of the labor market for this year’s graduating high school and college seniors. Young workers, on the whole, face an unemployment rate of 16.2 percent, more than double the national average. But those with only a high school degree fare worse: Nearly one-third are unemployed, and more than half cannot find as much work as they would like. Prospects are even bleaker for graduates of color.

The report, released in March, came as Congress was in the thick of debating immigration reform legislation. The blueprint that Congress came up with includes a new “W visa” program for low-skilled jobs, which would let workers switch jobs and eventually petition for a green card, explains Daniel Costa, an immigration policy analyst at the Economic Policy Institute.

But Costa doesn’t expect there will be a requirement to provide healthcare. Farmworkers will likely only be given health insurance “if the employer provides it.”

Expanding access to college education is a key mechanism for building a strong middle class. The college wage premium—the percent increase that a college graduate earns compared to a similar worker without a college degree—is approximately 45 percent, according to data from the Economic Policy Institute. Furthermore, the overall middle class has shrunk as the supply of highly skilled workers hasn’t kept up with the demand for those skills. Approximately one-third of the rise in income inequality since the late 1970s is due to the rising college premium.

If you use visa demand as a kind of proxy for labor demand, it’s not hard to grasp how businesses view the problem. There just aren’t enough visas to hire all the foreign workers employers want. But some labor economists see nothing particularly special about foreign workers, aside from their cost, that should recommend them more highly compared to their American counterparts.

“The positions these workers fill are entry-level positions,” said Daniel Costa, an immigration lawyer at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington. “They’re cogs in a machine.”

Yet critics of the H1B program say the visas put many foreign workers at a deep disadvantage. They tend to get paid less and cannot easily leave the companies that brought them to the United States unless they obtain green cards. In addition to proposed higher wages, the Senate plan seeks to protect U.S. workers by prohibiting U.S. companies from displacing Americans with foreign employees.

Is it conclusive? One response has been to argue that the causation is backwards, or that slower growth leads to higher debt-to-GDP ratios. Josh Bivens and John Irons made this case at the Economic Policy Institute. But this assumes that the data is correct. From the beginning there have been complaints that Reinhart and Rogoff weren’t releasing the data for their results (e.g. Dean Baker). I knew of several people trying to replicate the results who were bumping into walls left and right – it couldn’t be done.

Reinhart and Rogoff have always been careful to note that just because high-debt countries have tended to grow more slowly than low debt countries, it doesn’t mean that high-debt definitively caused slow growth. Critics have a pointed out, quite justifiably, that the causation could be the other way around — that slow growth causes debt

I spoke to Josh Bivens, an economist with the Economic Policy Institute in Washington who co-wrote one of the first critiques of the Reinhart-Rogoff paper in 2010. He said he wasn’t surprised by the UMass result: “There’s never a sound theoretical reason why there should be a threshold” at which debt suddenly becomes a serious problem—90 percent in the Reinhart-Rogoff paper.

Bivens also said it’s quite possible that rather than debt causing slow growth, in many cases it’s the other way around: Countries that are growing slowly tend to rack up lots of government debt. He said Reinhart and Rogoff in some of their nonacademic writings have ignored that possibility and asserted—without justification—that high debt does indeed harm growth.

A new report from the Economic Policy Institute outlines the discouraging news about 16.2 percent unemployment for Americans younger than 25, along with low wages and underemployment for both high school and college students in the class of 2013.

“Young workers always experience disproportionate increases in unemployment during downturns,” the report notes. “The Great Recession and its aftermath has been the longest, most severe period of economic weakness this country has experienced in more than seven decades.”

Only 88,000 new jobs were produced last month, and the only reason the unemployment rate ticked down to a still-alarming 7.6 percent is because so many people left the work force altogether, which sent the labor force participation rate down to 63.3 percent, the lowest point since 1979. If we were to include in the calculations those who have given up looking for work, the unemployment rate would actually be 9.8 percent.