American college graduates are making themselves increasingly vulnerable to outsourcing. I'm not the only one who thinks this. A top Intel executive has expressed this concern too.
The problem is that American technology workers have a lethal combination upon graduation: A sense of entitlement and a lack of skills.
The sense of entitlement is the from the belief that simply graduating with a degree in engineering, computer science, information technology, etc. somehow should entitle them to a high paying ($40k to $50k) job right away.
The lack of skills has to do with the poor quality of college education these days in these fields. They don't keep up well. I've yet to meet a technology major college graduate who actually benefited from their formal "education". The talented people we meet on the net are often in a scenario where we have to simply wait for them to finish college before hiring them. Their degree made no difference in hiring, them, it simply delayed their hiring and slowed down their development on projects with us.
How much someone makes is dependent on how much "wealth" they produce. A person making $40k per year has to be able to generate at least $120k in "wealth" to be fully secure in their position.
If I make a product that will make $1 million during its effective lifetime, I obviously can't spend more than that if I want to stay in business. Since Americans don't really care that much about WHERE something is made, my products and services have to compete with products made by people all over the world (as well as with "freeware"). Look at all the people who bellyache'd last month about RightClick costing $14.95!
So how much we can pay someone is dependent on how much they produce. Typically, it takes quite awhile for someone to be able to produce high quality results in high enough quantity. Many (most) Americans aren't willing to go without even if it's to their long-term benefit to sacrifice short-term.
When I founded Stardock, I was very poor for the first few years. In its first year, the company made less than $15k. My (ahem) "salary" was obviously less than that. It wasn't for a long while before I was able to make more than what I could have made had I simply taken an engineering job. But that short-term sacrifice led to greater long-term opportunities. Increasingly, I see fewer Americans willing to do that -- but I also see plenty of Europeans who are willing to.
The Americans we hire in the technology area typically start at far less for two reasons. One, because we're a fun place to work at for most people and two, because we have a consistent record of rewarding those who increase their skills and output with significant increases in salary.
But where we can't find someone to do the job, we don't discriminate, we'll look to anyone we can do the job and that increasingly means Europeans who are willing to sacrifice short-term for long term gain.
If Americans want to make the big bucks right out of college without fear of being outsourced then they need to dramatically increase their skills. And the first step would be to get our education system improved so that college graduates don't require a few years of training before they can produce anything of real value.