American college grads: Homebodies with worthless degrees
I had a somewhat disturbing conversation yesterday with Steve Fussell, the senior VP of human resources at pharmaceutical maker Abbott. His basic message, which I may pursue in a column down the road, was that Abbott is going to be hiring tons of people for high-paying jobs over the next decade, but not many of them will be Americans because we study the wrong things in college and we're not willing to work overseas.
The key quotes:
1) "I hate to say we don't have the world's best universities. We may have the best minds, the best liberal arts education. The problem is it doesn't match the work anymore." (That is to say, not enough students are getting science and math degrees.)
2) "I don't have these graduates in Europe and Asia telling us they want to live with mom and dad or they don't want to relocate to Asia."
I don't know what I can do about the second issue, but here's my contribution (via Robert Waldmann) to persuading American college students to change their majors before it's too late:
Update: As this post has taken on something of a life of its own, I feel compelled to confess that one phrase above is really not the most accurate representation of what Fussell said. I write that of Abbott's hires in the decade to come, "not many ... will be Americans." Depends on how you define "many," but what Fussell really seemed to be trying to get across was that not as many as he would like will be Americans.
Also, in the comments, omarlittle says that:
American citizens have to pay US taxes even if they work abroad (one of the only countries to have such a system), they will also not be paying into social security and lose out on future pension payments.
I'm sure there are some situations where what omarlittle says is true, but as somebody who worked overseas (in London) for a U.S.-based company (Time Warner), I can report that I still paid in to Social Security and that, because foreign income taxes are deductible on U.S. tax returns and because the UK has this great system where you're exempt from their taxes every day you spend out of the country, my tax burden went down during the two years I lived there.
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1
Abbott's HR person makes a self-serving statement, and it is reported as Gospel.
Maybe Abbott needs to align its incentives so that people want to work for them.
(And I'm with Dr. Black: quite willing to work overseas, but there has to be a commitment from the firm, including paying relocation both ways if they terminate employment. Bad enough trying to find work in several areas of the U.S.; finding it in Switzerland or [especially] an EU country is incrementally more difficult for the non-citizen.
If Mr. Fussell believes people should be willing to relocate to Europe without such guarantees, and believes that those areas will be the growth spots, why hasn't he moved his offices there?
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2
My daughter graduated with a degree in mathematics this spring. She spent her junior year abroad and has traveled extensively in Europe and South America. She plans on taking her vacations overseas. She works for a large multi-national company and is looking forward to working overseas when the opportunity presents itself.
She would never consider working for a pharmaceutical company. Can't say I blame her.
Maybe Steve Fussell should look in the mirror when he wonders why many college graduates do not consider pharmaceutical companies.
A good math major would tell him that correlation is not causation.
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2.1
What a lot of people tend to not realize is that mathematicians and physicists, can get very high paying jobs in the financial sector. A lot of them have become rich I'm talking (10-100 million rich). A really good and entertaining book that goes into these types of stuff is The Predictors: How a band of maverick physicists used chaos theory to trade their way to fortune on Wall Street. There's also a new phenomenon on the rise called econophysics.
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3
I can't believe this guy is a senior VP of human resources!
Back in the late 70s, I owned a burger alarm company and never had any trouble finding or holding quality employees. I paid 10% over the prevailing wage to get them.
The sciences have not been paying as well as other career fields. The foreign workers accept that wage because it's so much more than they could make at home.
Working overseas can be a pain just as being on the east coast while your family is on the west coast. You want people to put up with the aggravation and additional cost of traveling to see family on holidays, bring your check book.
The bulk of foreign workers are not brought in because they have special skills, they are brought in because they cost less.
Can't figure out how he got to where he is without knowing these business basics.
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3.2
...hey, don't knock that profession. You ever had co-workers or others try to steal your french fries or sandwich at lunch when you're not looking?
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3.3
wow justin.... its pretty low of you to comment on someone's spelling error.
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3.4
I would never comment on a common spelling error, but that's some kind of totally brilliant Freudian slip.
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4
i honestly think he is right. What MADE (i say made because it's still running on past momentum) US a great country is the amount of investment they made in engineers and research during the cold war.
US spends more on research than any other country but it's population does not reflect this investment. A lot of it has to do with the end of the cold war and the desire and perhaps motivation that arose from the fear of the REDS is gone.The government should treat this as a national security issue. The life blood of development lies in Engineers. that is where innovation comes from. US is loosing it's magic touch because the govt can't spend on research due to soaring debt. A ticking time bomb with future disastrous effects. the problem is it's effect as so slow that the fly below the radar.
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5
I wish that people with a public forum, when they decided to write about a subject, would do some research. Taking an HR guy's word without further understanding of the subject? Are you trying to get a job on cable TV? According to this Duke Study, this blog item is an example of a particular discourse that is part of the problem: http://tinyurl.com/5bntfa
You might want to look at this, too:
"Quality vs. Quantity in Engineering"
Every spring, Jitendra Malik, chair of electrical engineering and computer science at the
University of California at Berkeley, has a sitdown with students who have been accepted
to the College of Engineering and are mulling over whether to attend.Thanks, Duncan Black, for drawing my attention to this matter...
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[...] tries to push a “young people are lazy because they don't want this particular job” line, ask for details on the [...]
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[...] also said, echoing Abbott's Steve Fussell, that finding people in the U.S. with the right technical skills is a challenge. He said it's a [...]
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American citizens have to pay US taxes even if they work abroad (one of the only countries to have such a system), they will also not be paying into social security and lose out on future pension payments. This makes it very unattractive for US citizens to work overseas.
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[...] story from a couple of days ago. It told of a new study (pdf) which found that, contra Steve Fussell, there's no shortage of qualified science and engineering graduates in the U.S. It's just that many [...]
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