Commerce Requests Paper on Human Resources Needs

The Commerce Department recently invited the Computing Research Association to submit a brief policy paper on human resource needs in the area of software production. The context of the request was the continuing discussion over the role of foreign nationals in the US labor market. As we pointed out in our response, computer science and computer engineering departments produce only a fraction of the total work force that goes into software production.

The complete policy paper is available at CRA's Web site (see http://www.cra.org; click on Government Affairs). The following is a brief summary of the response.

Background observations

1. The demand for software professionals is growing rapidly. Although the magnitude of supply and demand is hard to quantify even over the short term and very difficult to project into future years with any precision, the entire information sector continues to grow rapidly. The demand for software professionals far outstrips the supply. In particular, there is no reason to believe that foreign nationals are taking industry jobs, academic jobs or educational program slots from qualified Americans. Quite the contrary: Foreign national software experts are contributing to our nation's storehouse of knowledge and to our software production capability.

2. The nature of software jobs and the skills required to hold them are widely varied and changing rapidly. A software production team may include artists, content specialists, specialized programming and database experts, marketing and sales people and customer service representatives. Technological change also creates a rapid change of labor requirements.

Computing departments must produce graduates who can find rewarding jobs that fill the needs of the current market but who are also broadly educated and flexible.

3. Educational institutions need to sustain a stable, long-term response to growth in demand for their graduates. Throughout their brief history as an academic discipline, computing departments have experienced periods of surging enrollments followed by droughts. According to the 1996 CRA Taulbee Survey, undergraduate enrollments are up sharply. CRA's members are trying to strike a balance, sustaining a reasonable growth in the production of graduates at all levels while avoiding the painful consequences of overproduction.

4. The computer science and engineering departments that are members of CRA only produce a small-albeit a critically important-portion of the workers loosely labeled as "information" or "software" professionals. They are deeply trained in such specialties as computer architecture, data communications, systems, data structures, information security, object-oriented programming, artificial intelligence and virtual representations. The complex, advanced applications of today could not be built without the talent and knowledge they possess.

5. Foreign nationals constitute an important and welcome part of the student population and of academic faculty and industrial research staff. In response to the original Commerce query regarding foreign-national employment patterns in computing research, we posed some questions to the CRA Board of Directors. The results are at best anecdotal. However, our university respondents suggested that nearly 40% of the new hires last year were foreign nationals. Our numbers also suggest a similar proportion of foreign-national researchers work in US industrial labs. Several of those who responded said they expected the proportion of foreign nationals in academia and industry to increase over the next several years. Another problem is the enormous administrative burden of qualifying a foreign national to be hired. In the words of one respondent, "The [high] success rate of attempts to hire these people through the federal approval process is not a valid measure of how tough it is to hire foreign nationals. [Newspapers sometimes cite the high success rate as an indication that the process is too easy.] In fact, the legal and financial barriers are so high that only rock-solid cases are brought to this level."

To repeat our point above, foreign nation software experts make an important contribution to the national's technical strength, and there is no evidence that American experts are displaced.

Policy recommendations

Our specific recommendations are as follows:

• Do no harm when undertaking immigration reform and, if and when possible, remove unnecessary burdens.

• Invest in research that improves the effectiveness, quality and ease of production of software. • Federal policy needs to encourage steady and consistent growth.

• Federal programs that reach out to encourage women and underrepresented minorities to enter the computing fields are a sensible and desirable response to the growth needs of the field.

It is in the self-interest of the field and of the nation that we try to address this issue. CRA has been quite active in its work. But there is also a major role for the science agencies to play.