TY - JOUR AU - Bound, John AU - Demirci, Murat AU - Khanna, Gaurav AU - Turner, Sarah TI - Finishing Degrees and Finding Jobs: U.S. Higher Education and the Flow of Foreign IT Workers JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series VL - No. 20505 PY - 2014 Y2 - September 2014 DO - 10.3386/w20505 UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w20505 L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w20505.pdf N1 - Author contact info: John Bound Department of Economics University of Michigan Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1220 Tel: 734/998-7149 Fax: 734/998-7415 E-Mail: jbound@umich.edu Murat Demirci University of Virginia E-Mail: md8bh@virginia.edu Gaurav Khanna University of California, San Diego 9500 Gilman Drive La Jolla, CA 92037 E-Mail: gakhanna@ucsd.edu Sarah Turner University of Virginia Department of Economics Monroe Hall, Room 237 248 McCormick Rd Charlottesville, VA 22903 Tel: 434/924-7857 Fax: 434/924-1384 E-Mail: set5h@virginia.edu M1 - published as John Bound, Murat Demirci, Gaurav Khanna, and Sarah Turner. "Finishing Degrees and Finding Jobs: U.S. Higher Education and the Flow of Foreign IT Workers," in William R. Kerr, Josh Lerner, and Scott Stern, editors, "Innovation Policy and the Economy, Volume 15" University of Chicago Press (2015) M2 - featured in NBER digest on 2015-01-30 M3 - presented at "Innovation Policy and the Economy 2014", April 8, 2014 AB - The rising importance of Information Technology (IT) occupations in the U.S. economy has been accompanied by an expansion in the representation of high-skill foreign-born IT workers. To illustrate, the share of foreign born in IT occupations increased from about 15.5% to about 31.5% between 1993 and 2010, with this increased representation particularly marked among those younger than 45. This analysis focuses on understanding the role that U.S. higher education and immigration policy play in this transformation. A degree from a U.S. college/university is an important pathway to participation in the U.S. IT labor market, and the foreign-born who obtain U.S. degree credentials are particularly likely to remain in the U.S. Many workers from abroad, including countries like India and China where wages in IT fields lag those in the U.S., receive a substantial return to finding employment in the U.S., even as temporary work visa policies may limit their entry. Limits on temporary work visas, which are particularly binding for those educated abroad, likely increase the attractiveness of degree attainment from U.S. colleges and universities as a pathway to explore opportunities in the U.S labor market in IT. ER -