Bank of America pulls job offers to H-1B MBAs
SOURCE: Financial Times
DATE: March 9th, 2009
Mohit Soapbox:
The news below talks about Bank of America pulling job offers to foreign MBA students who will require an H-1 visa sponsorship to work in the US. The beginning of the end for a number for hopes and aspirations of would be students coming to the US. Though over the past number of years there has been a decline in number of students coming to the US to go to school. The new mix of politics, corporate will make that decision making easier for students planning to go to school in the US. The prep work needed for a foreign student to go to a school in the US is a year long full time effort.
For aspiring students across the world, given where the US economy is and is supposedly going to be in the forseeable future, the dollar exchange rate ( more expensive to study in the US) and the closing of doors because you have now a ‘foreign’ visa stamped , staying home for education is starting to look as the better alternative.
This has a potential to have a far reaching impact on the globalization and the standards of academic institutions across the US.
ARTICLE
The recently passed $787bn stimulus bill in effect prevents financial institutions that have received money from the government’s troubled asset relief programme from applying for H1-B visas for highly skilled immigrants if they have recently made US workers redundant. BofA, which has received a total of $45bn in Tarp funds, is in the process of digesting two large acquisitions – Countrywide, the mortgage broker, and Merrill Lynch – which will see thousands of jobs lost.
A spokesman for the bank said: “Recent changes in legislation made it necessary for Bank of America to rescind job offers it had made to students requiring H-1B sponsorship.”
The number of international students affected by the BofA move is thought to be no more than 50 but business schools are concerned that other banks could follow suit.
Traditionally, about a third of MBA students at the leading US schools have taken up finance and banking jobs on graduation, with about a third of those MBAs coming from outside the US.
Some supporters of freer migration have criticised the Tarp measure for threatening to cut the US off from foreign talent and encouraging tit-for-tat retaliation by foreign countries.
One concern for business school deans is that students who have traditionally studied in the US may go elsewhere. “There might be an inclination for people from around the world to vote with their feet,” says David Schmittlein, dean of MIT’s Sloan school of management in Boston.
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