Oklahoma, Information Technology, and the Global Economy
We can no longer pray at football games. However at our state's two comprehensive universities, internationalization now occupies its own almost ecclesiastical role, as anyone who has been around them knows. It is the fabric that ties their diverse departments together, from postmodernist English language deconstructivists to hard science researchers setting up joint research endeavors abroad. It is one of the most prominent of their official goals and it has been adopted by our Governor as a way of achieving the long awaited goal of upgrading, modernizing and diversifying Oklahoma's economy into the new era of the global economy. It is something in other words that most figures and institutions of any prominence in Oklahoma support, and none openly question.
Each year the best and brightest of Oklahoma's young people, from Oklahoma City and Tulsa to the states thousands of small, dying, and dead small towns, arrive at OU and OSU, our state's two comprehensive universities, with the goal of building the profitable and successful careers that this state has not recently produced in sufficient numbers. They, along with the rest of the state, look to the universities and to internationalization to provide them the jobs the dying agricultural and energy sectors no longer provide. That is the promise of internationalization, and in truth it is probably in some form or the other the only option for our state before we become even more like Wyoming or North Dakota than we already are.
The potential benefits of internationalization in areas such as technology are certainly sold to Oklahoma's leaders. Last year a Daily Oklahoman article titled "Designing a Brighter Future" stated "politicians and industry leaders are complaining loud and often that the state is not producing enough (engineering) graduates to satisfy demand" and "sustain its dream of building a high-paying, high-technology economy". This is paradoxically true even though in the next sentence the article states "as many as half of the state's graduates leave Oklahoma for opportunities elsewhere".
This article did not explicitly state what the remedy for this alleged shortage was, but several months earlier in a another Daily Oklahoman article, the solution now in place was discussed, increases in immigration quotas for skilled workers under the H1-B program. Discussing the bill to boost the number of H1-B visa's to 200,000 per year, (on a per capita basis several times that of Oklahoma's annual production of engineering graduates) Senator Don Nickles stated "this is a good bill and one that's needed". State Chamber of Commerce spokesman Mike Seney said "We have to recognize we are in a global society now".
The benefits of internationalization and the global economy are certainly prominent according to state politicians, educators and business leaders, but what about the costs? Costs there certainly are, in a number of areas. Not the least of the costs to the reader might be the costs incurred in getting one of the degrees that are so enamored of by the leading lights and figures of the new international economy. A close analysis of the winners and losers in the new international economy might indicate signs that far from benefiting from this, the people of Oklahoma are once again being played for the patsie, with the economic benefits going elsewhere. A look at what was just recently almost universally (save a few skeptics like Norm Matloff's"Debunking the Myth of a Desperate Software Labor Shortage" (http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/itaa.html ) acknowledged to be one of the supposedly hottest areas of the new global economy, information technology, is a case in point.
In actuality the much ballyhooed job market for computer science graduates was never that great: even at its best, when people were talking about the "dot-coms" rather than the "dot gones" only half of computer science graduates got hired for programming jobs, which are needed to stay current in the field and maintain one's career, although incredibly the average career of a computer programmer is only seven years. This year though newspapers such as San Jose's Mercury News now carry headlines such as "Tech grads coping with unemployment", as many computer programming graduates are now unable to get any job, let alone ones in their major. The news is scarcely better for those who did get jobs in years past, as hundreds of thousands have been laid off. How did the information technology industry and its allies in government claim there was such a severe shortage in the past? A look at its history is instructive. It is something the mainstream media never discusses and few people are even dimly aware of.
In 1997 the information technology association of America (ITAA), a high tech industrial organization newly headed by a certain Harris Miller, in 1997 created a great stir when it announced a huge shortage of computer programmers existed. Over 300,000 jobs were supposedly vacant, and the industry would suffer huge setbacks unless massive steps were taken to alleviate the same. Later analysis of the shortage by independent groups such as the government accounting office (GAO) indicated there were some major shortcomings with the methodology used for the study, and there was actually some question as to whether a shortage existed at all. But whatever deficiencies in the studies methodology were more than made up by the political clout of the ITAA and the high tech industry it represents. Congress quickly rushed into action to give the ITAA what it wanted, deceptively titling the bill the "American Workforce and Competitiveness Act" as this was supposedly necessary so we could continue to compete in the new global economy. It raised the quota for H1-B visas (a "temporary" work visa) from 65,000 per year to 115,000 per year in 1998, then again to more than 200,000 per year in 2000, a number comparative to that of the annual total of all the computer science graduates in the United States. In spite of all the layoffs the quota is still close to being filled, and unlike computer science graduates, H1-B's mostly continue to work in their technical field, as this is a requirement of the visa, although many of them too have been laid off recently.
Concurrently with this congressional campaign by the ITAA, an intense campaign was started in the media on the dire shortage of computer programmers and the intense demand for the services of those that existed. Stories of computer science graduates being given 6 figure salaries and Mercedes Benz's for signing bonuses and being mobbed at industry fairs were cleverly fed to the media reporters, most of whom hardly know the difference between a computer program and a TV program. Such stories were taken at face value, inserted into the national culture, and millions of people all across America were informed that a degree in computer programming was a ticket to a certain pot of gold at the end of the academic rainbow. All across the nation, from LA to Boston from Miami, Florida to Seattle people of all ages, looking for promising careers rushed into computer programming, and enrollment skyrocketed. I’m not sure of the figures for Oklahoma, but the same stories were repeated here, and tend to resonate even strongly between the other Miami (OK) and Altus where tens of thousands of high schoolers graduate each year in economically dying downs in rural Oklahoma looking for greener pastures elsewhere.
For old time Okies and anyone who has read the Grapes of Wrath, one could not help but be struck by the bitter irony when one studied the details of how Harris Miller created this media hype of a computer programmer shortage. Miller’s previous job before the ITAA was a lobbying representative for the fruit pickers industrial association. While there, he negotiated a big increase in the temporary Mexican labor "bracero" program in Congress, using the methodology that he later used with the ITAA: announce a huge projected shortage of workers and regale the public with stories that all their dinner tables will be devoid of lettuce, tomatoes, and fruit unless we get more people to pick them, etc. As with the fruit picker situation in the 30’s, there was never really a shortage, but clever fruit picking industry reps know that a big surplus of labor drives wages down and creates a buyers market for growers hiring fruit pickers and other agricultural workers. Believe it or not in this high tech age, we Okies are still dealing with, and falling for, a fairly close replica of the organizations and tactics that led so many to ruin and starvation in 30’s California. Yes, Virginia, it is practically the same cheery group of people that tricked the Grapes of Wrath's Tom and Ma Joad and family into heading off to California to look for work for in the 30’s, after seeing all those "pickers wanted" signs. At least the 30’s Okies got a movie made about them. Out of work computer programmers sleeping in their Honda Accords don’t have the same picturesque presence as the Okies with their stuff piled high in their jalopies.
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