The bar is higher because there's free (or near free) specialized education overseas and not domestically. Why pay to train entry level employers when the tax payers of X country will do it for you for free? Take away the subsidized labor pool and watch that bar fall back to the floor.
> The bar is higher because there's free (or near free) specialized education overseas and not domestically.
Uh not really.
I've been a front-end developer for almost ten years. When I first started out, yeah, you could teach a monkey to build a static site. Most of the jQuery I knew was copy and paste, easy stuff.
Now? You need to be an expert in Javascript, Object Oriented programming, CSS preprocessors, NPM and various build tools, template languages, responsive frameworks and at least another dozen or so technologies people are using to create dynamic websites. This doesn't even scratch the surface of what you need to know if you're interested in developing mobile apps.
Web designers don't have it much easier. You need to be completely fluent with every Adobe tool and Apple Sketch or any collection of wireframing software. Toss in deep knowledge of font pairings, color theory and you need to have expert level knowledge of CSS. You're not a "web designer" anymore either. You're now a UI/UX developer.
And did I mention that every single one of these technologies come and go faster than mumble rappers on Soundcloud? So once you've taken a year or so to learn BackboneJS, poof then Angular and ReactJS comes out, and now you have to pivot to those languages. Oh, you're company loved Angular but the new guys like ReactJS? Oh too bad, now we're going to use React instead. Oh you just interviewed for a new role, but they're in love with VueJS, do you know that too?
The bar is higher because development in general has become exponentially more complex and continues to get more complex every month. Specialized Education overseas really has nothing to do with it. At the rate technology is changing on the front-end side, there's just no way education can keep up.
20 years ago, I'm willing to bet the number of IT degrees overseas was a small fraction compared to today. Over the last 20 years the market has reacted to the conditions available and lead to the situation we have now.
You may be "willing to bet," but this is just you asserting that your premise is true. Do you have any data? My claim that free and low cost university-level education was available outside the US is easily verifiable with a 10 second Google search.
