Another month gone by in Seattle, and another Silicon Valley company has moved in to establish a beachhead for recruiting tech workers. And they all seem to say the same thing: This area is rich with talent.
That’s certainly true—not to mention cheaper, compared to the Bay Area. But all of those companies often wind up chasing the same pool of experienced workers—a pool that Washington state isn’t adding to fast enough by cranking out computer science graduates of its own.
It’s a situation that can’t be sustained if the region is to maintain its prominence in the tech world. And if it isn’t fixed soon, some worry that the mega-companies currently feeding the pipeline—namely Microsoft and Amazon—could tire of poaching and immigration woes and cut off the supply, establishing more satellite offices where the workers already live rather than investing a lot to recruit them to the Northwest and then lose them.
“They have to spend a lot of money to recruit talent around the world to come here,” says Eric Schinfeld, who works on regional economic development for the Prosperity Partnership. “If I’m Microsoft, how long do I want to subsidize everybody else stealing my employees?”
Here are the big numbers: In the second quarter of this year, state labor economists expect about 88,400 people in King County will be employed in computer science-related jobs. That figure is projected to rise to almost 95,000 by 2013, and climb to about 105,000 by 2018. Between 2013 and 2018, labor economists expect the number of job openings to average nearly 3,700 per year.
Washington’s colleges aren’t churning out enough grads to get those precious jobs. According to U.S. Department of Education statistics, fewer than 1,000 computer science degrees were granted to master’s and bachelor’s students in the 2008-09 school year across all colleges in the state—a positively middling performance. Washington schools ranked 23rd among states in producing computer science bachelor’s degrees, with 736, and 24th in master’s degrees, with 213. The state is getting beaten in those rankings not just by the usual suspects—California and Massachusetts—but also by states like Colorado, Minnesota, and Missouri.
Meanwhile, the slow economic recovery is crimping our sales-tax dependent state budget, which means Washington’s almost entirely public university system is not likely to see large, sustainable additions in enrollment anytime soon. It’s ironic: The tech sector is robust, expanding, and pays well. But that economic performance doesn’t show up very well in the flow of money feeding educational growth, because Washington doesn’t have an income tax. So in some ways, the slower parts of the economy wind up holding back the pipeline of talent for the parts that are charging ahead.
Ed Lazowska, the the University of Washington’s Bill & Melinda Gates chairman in computer science, says the last sustainable increase in state spending for higher education enrollments was
