Earlier quoted context omitted.
A nice idea but would make it impossible, for example, for my kid’s foreign-language school to bring in qualified teachers.[+] It’s difficult already as teachers switch jobs over the summer which over the past couple of decades has been when the supply is already used up. [+] English teachers are recruited from the California system. Unfortunately CA schools are so terrible that if the kids go back to their jobs,enco…
These sorts of "highest salary wins" rules should typically be crafted in an industry/sector-specific way. So schools have to compete with each other on salary but not with tech/finance/med. And then there are caps by sector. The problem with this approach, of course, is that you need a judge/executive who follows the spirit of the law so that I can't get a bunch of cheap tech workers by saying "oh, job ABC in town X…
The RAND institute, among others, concluded that the reason US citizens have turned away from graduate degrees in the sciences is a rational market response to poor pay and working conditions in favor of fields that offer better salaries and career stability. In short, there is no shortage, just a desire to pay extremely low salaries and establish exploitive working conditions - which you can do when you control someone's right to live and work in the US when these rights are difficult to come by.
Not only do I think that there's no reason to prop up a system that suppresses salaries outside tech/finance/med (or within those fields, that happens too, especially in tech), I think there's real harm in the market distortions these schemes produce.