<p>weenie,</p>
<p>I am not sure what marite was talking about. As far as I know there are some non-tenure track assistant professorships akin to post-doctoral positions( 3-year non-renewable) . They have nothing to do with immigration and cost-saving. They are considered very desirable for newly-minted PhDs and competition is usually fierce.</p>
<p>Oh, I assumed he'd go for a adjunct-type position, which of course, would require that he'd have to teach. I think by then, we'd be OK financially with retirement benefits. And if he were offered early retirement, it would make the decision easier. We know people who have left industry in their 40s for academic positions that required the tenure-track route... not fun, but it is done.</p>
<p>Mathmom - would your husband go back to work (telecommute) from home six hours after having back surgery? Mine did - by 3PM, he was on the computer, and taking conference calls. Within five days he was driving himself to work. When he went to his follow-up appt. with the surgeon at two and a half weeks, the surgeon asked him if he was ready to be released to work.. my husband just laughed and told him he'd been working all along. The doctor laughed back and said to him, "Well, some people are just more motivated than others." (not exactly the adjective I would have used).</p>
<p>I guess my diatribe is that if universities want bright professors who speak english as their first language, then how far are they willing to go to hire non-traditional professionals? Actually my husband has been asked to teach a course at Northwestern as an adjunct, but would rather spend his time down there collaborating with a research group.</p>
<p>I agree with parabella's post 81). The 3-year positions have nothing to do with cost-saving. They are highly desirable.</p>
<p>One problem universities face is the aging of the faculty. There is no mandatory retirement age any more, and little incentive for faculty to retire. At many universities, the profs who are over 60 comprise a huge proportion of the faculty. Meanwhile, the universities cannot expand the ranks of the faculty. This is why so many newly minted Ph.D.s have a hard time getting jobs, and so many undergraduates are chary of going into Ph.D. programs.
Foreign-born graduate students may feel they have an alternative to the gypsy life that so many American Ph.D.s live as one year-replacements for tenured faculty who go on leave or adjunct professors who are paid by the course: they have the option of returning home.</p>
<p>Teriwtt - I agree, you're H's job is probably safe, as long as the site itself is safe. However, I was with my employer for 22 years, won a couple of national awards in my field, and had headhunters calling every few weeks. (Oh, and most everyone I worked with worked 60 hours a week, too.) None of that mattered one iota when the entire site closed (2300 employees, more than 200 chemists.) Right now it's an employer's market out there, and it's so much cheaper to hire a MS or PhD right out of school</p>
<p>One thing I've learned - no job is ever safe, and it always pays to have a back-up plan. Maybe academics is a good back-up. As for me, I got out of the field altogether... not out of desire, but out of necessity!</p>
<p>Just have to say...this is NOT new. Back when the dinos roamed (early 70's) we had lab assistants who were totally unintelligible...totally. I should add that I am a speech pathologist and my job (and my major) relates to communicating, often with those who are difficult to understand. Nevertheless, I clearly recall a physics lab assistant that was so difficult to understand and who spoke English SO poorly, that the group actually petitioned the science department for a change...and we got one. But how pathetic that they didn't realize this BEFORE they put this poor grad student IN a classroom.</p>
<p>Six hours? Probably not. :) But he'd have the laptop full of stuff to read.</p>
<p>There was a post doc who was in my husband's lab when he was a grad student at Caltech. I sat next to him once at Thanksgiving. He couldn't manage conversational English at all despite having been years in this country. Luckily he didn't teach and I believe there was nothing wrong with his research skills.</p>
<p>As you can probably tell, I have a very bad attitude about the H1-B program. I think it's a gift to the corporate "suits" at the expense of highly trained and educated Americans</p>
<p>A gift to some extent
To justify H1-B hires, employers have to advertise the position, find no suitable permanent resident/citizen candidates, pay something like $1000 application fee, and, oh, have to pay the prevailing wages:
<a href="http://www.foreignlaborcert.doleta.gov/wageinfo.cfm%5B/url%5D">http://www.foreignlaborcert.doleta.gov/wageinfo.cfm</a></p>
<p>Not every employer will be willing to do this. Most companies in my field of work have policies against H1-B sponsorship.</p>
<p>Here is a funny "prevailing wage" story. A friend of mine was telling how he got salary adjustment when the prevailing wage rule was instituted. His company was applying for an H1-B extension for one of the employees, and the application was turned down because his salary was too low. Being a foreigner, the H1-B guy did not know that salary information was to be kept confidential. He thought he would never get his visa extended and shared his problems with everyone in the department over a TGIF beer. Turns out, this company was lowballing everyone! To keep this key employee, and to keep everyone else from complaining and looking for other jobs, the company had to adjust his and everyone elses salary when they re-applied for his visa.</p>
<p>OK, back to the topic of poor English and our kids not being able to learn sciences because of terrible foreign profs and TAs. At a well-known public Big Research U once there was a policy that foreign TAs had to pass Test of Spoken English in addition to TOEFL to be eligible for teaching assistanships. It was a joke for most part, since majority of applicants passed, except one girl of European roots flunked the test by minimum possible number of points. When she talked to the department administrator, she was told that because of her European accent she was held to much higher judging standards than Asian applicants for whom English was considered a harder language to master (phonetic differences, etc.). Go figure! I wonder if the test requirement is still there.</p>
<p>The problem with the "prevailing wage" fantasy is that there is a huge spread between what the professional with experience is making and the entry level position. So, they simply lay off all the experienced workers and rehire H1-B people. (And believe me, we've seen it happen it my city.) Of course, that is just before they simply outsource the whole thing to India. :(</p>
<p>Weenie:</p>
<p>I think your experience reflects what happens in industry, but not in academia (I'm not talking about researchers in labs, but profs). Academic departments would much rather hire someone who can stay on through tenure than have to search for new faculty (who get paid the same whatever their nationality) every few years. It's extremely expensive in terms of both money and time.</p>
<p>To second the point made by marite, when a research university hires an assistant professor in the physical sciences, the start-up costs for laboratory equipment are roughly $500,000 (more than $1 million in some related fields). It's a big investment. Universities are looking for people who will succeed as researchers. National origin is largely irrelevant to this. Savings on salary could be a false economy in this context (not that the salaries are high by any means, just that there's not a differential based on national origin).</p>
<p>But universities are also looking for faculty members who can communicate well with students. In general, accents are overlooked completely, but the ability to put ideas across is essential. </p>
<p>If a student is having difficulty understanding an instructor, I'd recommend that the student start by talking informally about it with an academic advisor, or with the associate chairperson/director of undergraduate programs in the department. They can often help problem-solve.</p>
<p>In the sciences at many schools the salaries come mostly from grants anyway.</p>
<p>Well, I guess I still don't understand why colleges and universities need so many H1-B visas then. </p>
<p>If there are few slots available due to aging faculty who don't retire, and there are big lay offs of PhDs in corporate America's research facilities, and the start up costs to hire a new prof are very high - all those things seem to suggest that it's a very tight field. </p>
<p>So, why the need for H1-Bs at all? </p>
<p>Are there really no Americans for these college prof jobs?</p>
<p>Weenie:</p>
<p>I would venture that the great majority of H1B visas in academia go for pure research (medical labs and so on)--which is not germane to the issue of profs and TAs who cannot speak English intelligibly. These H1B-visa holders never come in contact with undergraduates.</p>
<p>Are there really no Americans for these college profs jobs? See the thread on reducing time to degree in Ph.D. programs; see discussions about wanting well-paying jobs (eg. in the high 5 figures or 6 figures); see discussions about going into i banking. That's where most Americans are headed: pre-med, pre-law, ibanking, engineering, comp sci. Not academia.</p>
<p>Now there's no shortage of American Ph.D.s in history or English. But that's not where American students are complaining of incomprehensible profs and TAs.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Now there's no shortage of American Ph.D.s in history or English. But that's not where American students are complaining of incomprehensible profs and TAs.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Nor is there any "industry" to go to . . . Hence, professors in the humanities get paid poorly. (But that's a subject for another day!)</p>
<p>
[quote]
The problem with the "prevailing wage" fantasy is that there is a huge spread between what the professional with experience is making and the entry level position. So, they simply lay off all the experienced workers and rehire H1-B people. (And believe me, we've seen it happen it my city.) Of course, that is just before they simply outsource the whole thing to India.
[/quote]
We're outsourcing Harvard University to India? Who knew? Perhaps I should read a few more posts in this thread.</p>
<p>weenie,</p>
<p>Every year my H looks through dozens of grad school applications. There are very few americans among candidates. They always get first priority. Not all of them come, some of them come and don't stay( get a Masters degree and get out) . H also sits on a search comm. There are very few americans among job applicants too. Most of the time they get snagged by "bigger and better" schools. Somebody has to teach so the last two hires were Indian and Russian( with american PhDs) . I don't know if they needed H-1B Visas.</p>
<p>And piggybacking on to parabella. My husband works at a med school. He looks at applications for both the Phd and Md/Phd program. For the combo program plenty of Americans. For the Phd. program almost none and the few that are, are children of immigrants.</p>
<p>^As I said in an earlier post, the problem of foreign profs with limited English and incomprehensible accents is a Made in America problem cause by the lack of Americans going into academia in certain fields. </p>
<p>So, the question to ask of folks who complain that for the amount of tuition they pay, their children ought to have profs and TAs who can speak intelligibly: Where are universities and colleges going to find them? From what I've just heard this morning, students in math and science might feel luck to have TAS at all as their advisors often discourage them from teaching at all. (The mystery of the undergraduate CAs in certain fields is now solved).</p>
<p>Does this phenomenon of a high percentage of foreign profs in math/science/engineering exist at top universities in places like Europe as well?</p>
<p>I'm not sure about profs, but there is plenty of foreigners doing research in Europe. Just take a quick look at the names of authors of publications coming from top European labs - I doubt that Chens, Nagulas and Petrovs are typical Western European surnames. There are a few Americans who choose to do their postdocs there, too.</p>