>I suppose the counterargument is that the US educational system is generally so poor that it's not generating enough people with the necessary technical capabi

>I suppose the counterargument is that the US educational system is generally so poor that it's not generating enough people with the necessary technical capabilities to meet employer demand... It's not the quality of the education system, it's the motivation of the students. In the mid-2000s, it was very fashionable to believe that all programming jobs should be offshored to India. People imagined that the startups of the future would have executives living in California and programmers living in India. Some VC firms would even pressure their startups to structure themselves in this way. Now imagine it's 2006, you're 18, you're American but you're hearing that the future of programming is going to be in India. Are you going to major in Computer Science? Probably not. Fast forward to 2012. The problems of offshoring to India are much more apparent, plus some of the most successful startups of the mid-2000s (e.g. Facebook) did not rely on offshored talent. So now people want to hire in the US. But now there's a shortage of new CS grads. But of course, companies/executives/VCs blamed the laziness of American students and the alleged poor quality of the American education system, rather than the messages they themselves had been sending out for the previous 10 years. >It's also rather noticeable that the VC tech investor sector wants more cheap obedient labor, and doesn't want this point raised. I've never been able to wrap my head around VCs, executives, and others in the US who have a obvious preference for foreign-born talent, but still complain about the lack of US-born workers.