-->.....The shrinking computer science enrollments in American universities have finally caught the attention of the academic establishment. Computer science departments, which should have been speaking out long ago, have been muzzled, because they are heavily dependent on research and faculty funds from the very firms whose outsourcing practices are destroying the occupation in America.

Falling enrollments mean fewer faculty positions and graduate students. Despite their funding being threatened by fewer enrollments, most computer science professors are unwilling to contradict their corporate benefactors' false claim that"outsourcing is good for America." Another year of biting the tongue, another grant received.

Instead, the professors acknowledge that programming is a lost occupation for Americans and claim that there is still a future for American students in designing computer systems--"computer software systems architecture." Nonsense, says Matloff, a computer science professor himself. He notes that it is impossible to design computer systems without having years of programming experience. If you lose programming, you lose the base for the occupation, and all the rest goes offshore as well.

Some economists claim that lost occupations will return to the US once wages rise in India and China. Matloff's answer:"Did manufacturing work return to the US over time as wages rose in developing countries? Of course not." Only America is stupid enough to give away its manufacturing and high tech occupations.

Other economists allege that new high tech professions will rise to take the place of the lost computer engineering profession. Matloff punctures that delusion: Venture capitalists routinely demand that the new companies they finance outsource to the hilt.

US universities have educated enough Indians and Chinese to fill every high tech job American firms have to offer. The false claim that only drudgery jobs are outsourced is laughable.

If you believe that lie, you believe Saddam Hussein was in cahoots with Osama bin Laden and had weapons of mass destruction.

Paul Craig Roberts is John M. Olin Fellow at the Institute for Political Economy and Research Fellow at the Independent Institute. He is a former associate editor of the Wall Street Journal and a former assistant secretary of the U.S. Treasury. He is the co-author of The Tyranny of Good Intentions.




<ul> ~ http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts09292004.html</ul>