Gina Vermiglio, a mechanical engineering student at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, isn’t anxious about finding a job when she graduates in two years. Her circle of friends, including a boyfriend who graduates in December, isn’t worried either.
Vermiglio’s brainy crowd may not be fretting about U.S. engineering jobs moving to India and China, but everyone else seems to be.
The angst about the loss of high-tech, white-collar jobs is busting out all over, from the covers of Time and BusinessWeek magazines to the stump speeches of presidential candidate John Kerry. Yet a growing number of experts are speaking up to argue that the “offshoring” crisis is seriously overblown, particularly when it comes to information technology jobs.
“Despite all this hysteria, we still grew IT jobs by 10 percent last year. Do you think you’re any less reliant on technology today than you were four years ago?” asks John McCarthy, a researcher with Forrester Research in Cambridge, Mass.
Sure, some high-tech jobs are going to Asia. Some 290,000 IT jobs have moved offshore since 1999, Forrester estimates.
But the hand-wringers are overlooking an even bigger phenomenon: an ongoing shortage of high-tech workers in this country that has been only partially allayed by importing foreign tech workers.
No wonder IIT students aren’t worried. During the last three years, the job placement rate for IIT engineering grads was 96 percent.
Still, there’s rising concern that the offshoring talk is scaring away students from technology and computer sciences.
Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates is so concerned that he toured five college campuses in February, including MIT, Harvard and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, to reassure computer science students that lucrative livelihoods still await them.
U.S. universities are taking actions to prepare their graduates for offshore competition. DeVry University, the for-profit school focused on technology degrees, is fine-tuning its curriculum after seeing undergraduate enrollment decline a little more than 10 percent.
“We’re emphasizing systems analysis, which is looking at the business problem you’re trying to solve through a particular application. You have to be on-site to analyze the problem and talk with people,” she said.
IIT is taking a different course. The school is launching a techno-business program this fall designed to give its engineering students a broader business perspective.
The new program was enough to keep Vermiglio from transferring to an art school when she got bored with classes.
By signing on, she will be able to take classes in design at IIT’s Institute of Design, a downtown program that before was only open to graduate students.
“It just seemed perfect for what I wanted to do,” she said.
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Edited by Lara Weber (lweber@tribune.com) and alBerto Trevino (atrevino@tribune.com)
