Gina Vermiglio, a mechanical engineering student at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, isn’t anxious about finding a job when she graduates in two years. Her circle of friends, including a boyfriend who graduates in December, isn’t worried either.

Vermiglio’s brainy crowd may not be fretting about U.S. engineering jobs moving to India and China, but everyone else seems to be.

The angst about the loss of high-tech, white-collar jobs is busting out all over, from the covers of Time and BusinessWeek magazines to the stump speeches of presidential candidate John Kerry. The Sturm und Drang is palpable on techie Web sites such as YourJobIsGoingToIndia.com.

Yet a growing number of experts are speaking up to argue that the “offshoring” crisis is seriously overblown, particularly when it comes to information technology jobs.

“Despite all this hysteria, we still grew IT jobs by 10 percent last year. Do you think you’re any less reliant on technology today than you were four years ago?” asks John McCarthy, a researcher with Forrester Research, a technology research and consulting firm in Cambridge, Mass.

Sure, some high-tech and engineering jobs are going to Asia. Some 290,000 IT jobs have moved offshore since 1999, Forrester estimates. Many of them are relatively low-level positions such as code writers or program debuggers, say those who track job shifts.

But the hand-wringers are overlooking an even bigger phenomenon: An ongoing shortage of high-tech workers in this country that has been only partially allayed by importing foreign tech workers.

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