Media clips
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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.
Slate April 26, 2013 -
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.
The Washington Post April 26, 2013 -
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.
Wall Street Journal April 26, 2013 -
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.
The New York Times April 26, 2013 -
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.)
The Atlantic April 26, 2013 -
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.
Medill News Service April 24, 2013 -
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.
The Huffington Post April 24, 2013 -
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.
USA Today College April 24, 2013 -
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.
Campus Progress April 24, 2013 -
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.”
In These Times April 24, 2013