A bit of background: I'm an EE/MBA who worked in a number of customer facing sales and management jobs up until 2003. In the 80's, I worked as a sales manager selling UNIX workstations to a very large customer. One of the projects the customer undertook in the name of increasing productivity was to measure the amount of time the engineers spent using different applications on the workstations. What they learned that technical applications like circuit design or programming were only used 5% of the time. That's right: 5%. The other 95% were spent in communications applications: email, project management, presentations, and so forth. One's first instinct might be to double the productivity of the engineers by reducing their meeting and communicating load, but IMHO that's simply not human nature. The two things that every technical professional needs to do are to analyze or create, and to communicate those results. It's not an either/or, it's a both. If one doesn't analyze, one has nothing to bring to the party. If one doesn't communicate the analysis, it doesn't matter how good it is. I don't think that it's necessary for engineers to study poetry or literature as much as it is to just practice writing, and I know that most hate that task, but the articulate engineers are the ones who are most successful, not the profoundly private innovators. After 30+ years as a technical professional, the three most important courses I ever took ended up being trigonometry (the one for technical analysis), typing, and public speaking. Those were the skills I used every day to make my living. We all work in teams today, and written and spoken language are critical to our daily success. If I were a general manager, I would make it a point to hire a couple of English majors just to raise the quality of written and spoken communications in the organization, and to teach the rest of us how to do it better.

The author of the study bases his conclusions on the fact that H1B visa requests go opposite to the direction of unemployment. When unemployment goes up, H1B visa requests go down, and conversely. He then states that employers are therefore using H1B visa workers to grow, rather than to replace existing workers. My belief is that this is true, but that employers are using H1B workers to grow without paying higher salaries and benefits to attract more domestic workers. My belief is that this is one reason why IT salaries have stagnated over the past ten years.

My own education was in private, parochial schools through my undergraduate engineering degree, and it was outstanding. I went on to add a masters in business from one of the best biz schools in America, and feel very strongly and positively about the quality of what I received. Now, our two daughters-in-law are home schooling their children, and one of my wife's cousins home schooled both her now adult children. My own not very humble and bigoted opinion is that: 1.) It depends on why you want to do this. Does your child have special needs, e.g., do they suffer from ADD or social anxiety? Or are they intellectually gifted and you don't feel they will be challenged by the public system? Do you have strong religious beliefs that you want to be sure are taught? Or ?. If you don't have strong reasons why an outside school won't meet your child's needs, and all you're going to do is to buy and administer a commercial curriculum, I'd ask why you want to do this. 2.) If you do it, *do it right*. Home schooling is much like working from home; it's very, very difficult to maintain any sense of structure and balance in your home classroom with all the other things going on in your and your child's life. One advantage to a public or private school is to remove them from screen time while the laundry gets done, etc. My wife's cousin used a specific room in their home as the classroom, and that communicated the seriousness with which she approached the process. It helped maintain the discipline and structure that are needed. 3.) I had a long career working in customer facing jobs and management for a major American electronics company, and hired and fired people. In a second, retirement career, I've taught math in a number of career schools in the last few years, and I have been appalled at the poor skills in basic arithmetic that I've encountered. Modern careers requires that one be able to both analyze and communicate. At the grade school level, this translates into the need to drill the students *every day* in basic arithmetic facts for yes, two, three, or more years. But many elementary public and private school teachers find this less rewarding than promoting reading and language skills. The children need *both*, but they need the basic arithmetic skills established strongly before they can move on to the creative stuff like algebra and trig. This will mean confronting, cajoling, encouraging, demanding, teasing, laughing,...it's a lot of work and it's intense, and I question whether most parents are up to that. To be fair, many public and private school teachers aren't up to it either, and evaluating your local schools is part of this decision. 4.) An intermediate solution might be to supplement outside school with material tailored to your child's interests. My very technically gifted father had me wiring industrial relay logic from blue prints when I was twelve, and that interest led me to engineering school. One of our granddaughters is visually artistically gifted, and we try to encourage that. Another shows signs of ADD, great physical energy, strong creativity, exceptional skill with numbers, and an insatiable demand for attention. She needs enormous one-on-one time, and until she gets a bit older, could be a real outside school classroom disruption. 5.) My wife taught for 23 years and has a validation in gifted education. One of her observations is that children have to be pushed hard enough to feel challenged, but not so hard as to feel unsuccessful. If your child is outside the normal range, either by talent or lack thereof, or by personality or strong unusual interests, they need to be pushed just hard enough in just the right areas. Maybe you can do a better job of this, and maybe you can't. Be honest with yourself. 6.) You haven't mentioned religious beliefs, but if you're comfortable with a religious perspective, many parochial schools can be a better choice. Or maybe not; as I noted above, I got a killer education from parochial schools, but my own daughters ended up happier and more successful in public schools. We currently live in a city with a very large Catholic school system, roughly half the size of the public one, and many, many minority parents jump on any chance they get to put their children into that alternate system. In summary: lots of choices. Make yours carefully and honestly.

When I was growing up in Dayton, Ohio some sixty years ago, I frequently rode the city's electric trolley buses, and it really wasn't a big deal. Pros: they were quiet, odorless, much cheaper to install than streetcar/light rail/subway/monorail/overhead, and just kind of blended into the landscape. Cons: they were locked in rush hour traffic just like the rest of the cars, and extending the routes was technically difficult. I assume that the 600 Volt overhead power wires had a limited range before wire resistance losses became excessive. But I was able to ride them from my suburban home to my downtown high school and college. The system is still in operation today, and is the second oldest such system in the US. An interesting link can be found at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... I have no data with which to compare the cost of installing overhead lines vrs. buying the very expensive battery driven buses above, but as noted in the link story above, the Dayton buses seem to run for years and years.