I thought we'd had enough of experts?
When I was at school in the 1980s, it was already obvious even to a callow youth that science was NOT the career to go into if you wanted a comfortable life. Nevertheless, encouraged by a science teacher who'd never had a job outside of education, full of youthful ignorance and enthusiasm I started a science degree. I switched to engineering after less than a year when it became too obvious to ignore that the average science graduate is valued about as highly as a Tesco checkout operator (judging by the salaries being offered in job ads in the specialist press).
My mistake was staying in engineering after graduation, instead of doing what most of my contemporaries did and taking their technical degree to an accountancy firm. Most of them are retired, I'm looking down the barrel of another ten or fifteen years' work.
My former boss (a PhD polymer chemist) made damn sure none of his kids did science at uni.
My former g/f, a science teacher, once handed me a stack of CVs to filter for her. The job being advertised was lab assistant at a school - a part-time menial position washing glassware, setting out equipment and ordering supplies. Annual take-home pay for a job in the UK in the 2010s was less than £10k. It didn't *require* a qualification beyond GCSE, and barely required that. Most of the applicants had science degrees, several of them had doctorates. Most didn't even get an interview.
Science graduate jobs are already woefully underpaid. Importing qualified foreigners will depress wages further.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
