An article on ecommercetimes.com reports that there might be a growing trend of American students dropping their plans for grad school. This is not a good sign particularly if they’re leaving the sciences and engineering fields.
But it looks like outsourcing American jobs are having this effect on students. For almost twenty years IT projects have been outsourced to top software development companies, top seo companies, and top web design companies in off-shoring destinations like India, Philippines, and China. Apparently, universities are now outsourcing the role of teaching assistants to home-based workers in India. This translates to stay at home moms grading college papers. Incidentally, this was exactly the kind of work that grad students applied for to cover a part or all of their tuition fees.
According to the article, The Chronicle of Higher Education reported that college professors are outsourcing grading. The role of the TA has been a fundamental part of the graduate program, perhaps the doctoral degree in particular. It was good training to be a TA, and it was like paying your dues while you worked up the higher echelons of graduate school.
But it appears that the downturn in the economy has universities rethinking their strategies and the already underpaid TA is getting stiff competition from a well qualified stay at home mom or some other type of qualified home based worker.
Unfortunately, the options are not good for the future of grad students. They might have to take student loans on top of the fact that they might already have taken heavy loans for their undergraduate study. And yet the worst option is that students might actually not consider going to grad school if it’s too much hassle.
Educators are also implying that the state of the U.S. workforce could be in bad shape if students in science and engineering abandon their hopes for grad school. The aerospace industry is one sector that needs staff that are highly qualified in these subjects, says Tom Captain, Deloitte Vice Chairman.
According to a Congressional survey, International students obtained 20 percent of U.S. social science doctorates in 2002, while 35 percent graduated in physical sciences and almost 60% graduated in engineering.
With the new trend in outsourcing taking away the ubiquitous teaching assistant position from U.S. students, it is possible that American and foreign students might make different choices for their career.
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“The aerospace industry is one sector that needs staff that are highly qualified in these subjects,”
Uh, huh. Haven’t some of us heard that one, before? Repeatedly? Here’s what people who are saying things like that keep forgetting to mention: graduates with high marks from good schools who pound the pavement for years, even decades in many cases, only to be stubbornly refused any chance to work at their first real, professional jobs on the basis that they’ve never held real, professional jobs. No experience, no work, and good luck getting a coherent answer to the question of how one is supposed to get one’s first job if nobody will hire one until one has worked for a few years at a professional job. So, eventually, they give up on trying to find jobs that, by their nature, might provide an answer to the question of why any of those job seekers had ever bothered to crack open their textbooks instead of going out to party like everybody else. They just look for some job, any job, only to find that they are now being discriminated against on the basis of “over-qualification” – and being told as much by Human Resources.
If Corporate America wants talent, the solution to its self-inflicted problems in this area are simple – to stop throwing away that which others have worked so hard and sacrificed so much to make available. If the good people at Deloitte are willing to break new ground and be reasonable when dealing with would be new entrants to the job market, including a fair number of us who’ve been kept waiting for a length of time so unreasonably long as to be reminiscent of something out of an old folk tale, then their problems will be over quickly. If they are not willing to do so, then may I please ask Tom to sit down and shut up?
The whining has grown old. Deloitte’s hiring practices are under Deloitte’s control, not under the applicants. If the company is now suffering because of its own stupidly chosen policies, that’s its own doing and nobody else’s.
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