I agree with everyone, lifeisgood. There are more than enough US citizens graduating with Bachelor’s Degrees in US colleges to fill the available openings (except possibly for the “niche” openings that flu mentioned here).
I was simply pointing out that I can see where a US-born person observing typical college students and workers on the ground who are in engineering fields could get the idea that “foreigners” are taking up too much space in both US universities and employment billets at coveted firms.
It’s an innocent observation but one needs to really dig deeper, be connected to a CA university oneself, be a hiring/employment “insider,” like flu (or one of my kids who is in HR for a firm in SV) or simply live within a highly multicultural environment where you know your neighbors well to realize that you can’t judge a person’s citizenship (or even race/nationality sometimes) solely by their appearance or surname.
Too many H1-B’s in the workforce (in relation to qualified and available US citizens) may be true for “Gen X” in some fields (abt 38-51 yrs old, as flu referred to as being trained in the ’90’s and the physicians I referred to earlier). But I don’t think it is true for millennials. I used to think CA public universities offered too many slots to foreign students but I no longer believe that about the CSU (the verdict is still out on the UC). I think the CSU strives mightily to admit as many qualified freshmen as it possibly can but there are simply too many CA-resident applicants that ARE highly qualified, so they can only pick some (after leaving slots open for their “service area applicants” under agreement with their school districts). After freshman year and during/after sophomore year, many “service-area applicants” admitted to a CSU under less-stringent admission criteria DO end up dropping out due to failure to progress (academic problems). University IS hard for a freshman, especially for a student from a disadvantaged family. This process of elimination leaves open slots for transfer applicants from CC with AA-T and AS-T (qualified Associate Degrees) who will be entering the same degree programs as the failed undergrads vacated.
