Tech CEOs against travel ban must also increase domestic pipeline

Last week, President Trump signed a new version of his controversial Jan. 27 executive order, “Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States.” The updated travel ban, which is slated to go into effect on March 16, is still provoking resistance from individual state governments and citizens. Activated by their employees, tech firms remain forcefully opposed to the immigration and travel restrictions.

The ongoing battle in the courts triggered by Trump certainly has constitutional consequences, but focusing only on the new president’s power to alter the rules and rights of immigrants and temporary workers in the United States may blind us to the fundamental issue that helped secure Trump’s electoral victory: jobs.

Now Trump and the tech titans — as well as armies of lawyers and public relations advisers — are so tied up in a tug-of-war that they have overlooked the reason why America has become reliant on the visa regulatory system in the first place.

For decades, America failed to tap into its own domestic sources of tech talent or increase the pipeline for skilled domestic workers. And for decades, the computer science skills gap in the U.S. has been a real and dangerous problem for which importing foreign talent has been a temporary and inadequate fix.

{mosads}As jobs in the U.S. tech sector continue to multiply, the only long-term solution is to educate and retain often-overlooked domestic sources. President Obama started down the necessary path to address these failures, but his successor did not concern himself during the campaign, nor since, with the dearth of homegrown human resources.

Meanwhile, during the political transition in Washington, the Oscar-nominated film “Hidden Figures” — which grossed $131 million domestically — was opening millions of eyes to the drain on innovation that occurs when women or minorities are excluded from full participation in America’s quest to remain technologically superior.

The history compellingly dramatized by that film occurred in the South in the 1960s. But today, nationwide, the computer-science skills gap in the United States expands as jobs in the tech sector are slated to increase by a staggering 12 percent over the next decade, faster than any other field. By 2018, 51 percent of all science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) jobs are projected to be in computer science-related fields.

Experts in innovation agree that diversity on a problemsolving team enhances the outcome, but somehow “diversity” in the tech world too often refers to diverse sources overseas — often forgetting women, underserved minoritiesand unconventionally trained experts here at home.

The U.S. simply is not graduating enough computer science majors to fill open positions. To compensate, immigrants make up more than one-third of Silicon Valley, but shortages of tech expertise still exist.

Only 42,969 computer science students graduated into the workforce in 2015, 17 percent of which were women, and 18 percent of which were minority groups. That same year, California alone added 59,500 tech jobs. At this rate, the U.S. cannot fill the 607,708 open computing jobs nationwide, and is not on track to fill the 1.1 million computing-related jobs predicted by 2024.

Despite its critical importance, computer science is taught in only a small minority of U.S. schools. Only 40 percent of schools in the U.S. teach computing programming and only 5 percent offer the AP computer science exam. Only 28 states, plus the District of Columbia, allow computer science to count toward a math or science graduation requirement.

When computer science classes are offered, few students are encouraged to take them. Of those high-schoolers who choose to take AP Computer Science courses, only 13 percent of these students are from minority groups and only 22 percent are girls.

All schools in all states must quickly inject computer science curriculum into K-12 classrooms, and best practices need to be incorporated to broaden the appeal of computer science for students.

Even though computing jobs offer higher-than-average salaries, we consistently fail to make computing education accessible to all and attract domestic talent to the discipline. Sometimes we do not even hire the talent we have at home. Those who take unconventional paths to computer engineering are often overlooked by employers, who tend to hold rigid conceptions as to what a “real” programmer is.

In fact, some research contends that a knack for coding is not strictly correlated to whether an individual has a degree from a prestigious university. Surprisingly, major tech companies tend to overlook minority graduates. For example, 4.5 percent of computer science degrees are awarded to African-American students, yet the workforce of seven major tech companies is only 2 percent black.

This has serious consequences for fields like cybersecurity, where the federal government alone is lacking 10,000 information technology and cybersecurity professional — jobs that often require U.S. citizenship.

We also have a difficult time retaining the talent we do manage to inspire. Women already employed in the tech sector leave at far higher rates compared to their male counterparts. This can be attributed to a toxic work culture and a lack of adequate family leave policies, something that both Republicans and Democrats in the White House and Congress must address.

The H-1B visa program functions as a Band-Aid for the gaping skills gap. It is not a long-term solution as tech jobs will continue to grow beyond both the domestic graduation rates of computer science majors and the H-1B visa cap.

We can no longer afford to ignore the fact that we have a large and viable domestic workforce right on our own doorstep. We should welcome talent from diverse backgrounds, both here and abroad. That means doubling down to prepare women/girls and men/boys for the digital age.

Trump and the truly long-term thinker/doer tech CEOs should convene a second meeting. This time, they need to put American jobs on the agenda and commit to bold solutions that funnel domestic talent into the tech pipeline.

The group should include a few more women — starting with Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos — and rally state and local school boards to champion computer science in the K-12 curriculum. Ivanka Trump should also attend, adding this issue to her work/life agenda for both women and men in digital America.

This meeting should also invite groups like the National Center for Women and Information Technology (NCWIT) — for whom I am a senior adviser — to highlight the practices that prepare, attract and retain American talent.

Paula Stern is the former chairwoman of the U.S. International Trade Commission (USITC). She consults for businesses and nonprofits, including the National Center for Women and Information Technology (NCWIT), for whom she is a senior adviser.

The views of contributors are their own and not the views of The Hill.