Have you ever wondered about the process of getting a Ph.D.? Well, if you want all the dirty details, keep reading.
I earned my Ph.D. from a top-10 program in politics and my wife is currently working on a Ph.D. in a top-5 program in sociology. As a result, I am painfully aware of what it takes. It involves a series of hoops to jump through:
1) Get accepted into a Ph.D. program. I'm going to be honest. Too many people are admitted into Ph.D. programs right now. There is currently a glut of Ph.D.s on the job market. Too many universities have added Ph.D. programs to make themselves look better. With too many programs come too many people graduating from said programs. This comes at a time when colleges and universities are actually hiring fewer professors.
All this to say that it is much easier to get into a Ph.D. program than it has been at any time in history. But, at the same time, having a Ph.D. is becoming more and more meaningless. I know too many people with Ph.D.s who are working at restaurants and similar low-skill jobs. In order to come anywhere close to being guaranteed a job after getting a Ph.D., you must get your degree from a top-10 program. It is much harder to get into a highly-ranked program. If your college grades and admission exam scores are less than stellar, you might consider getting a Master's degree first and then apply for the Ph.D. program. Top programs are much more comfortable admitting someone who has proven they can do graduate school level work.
2) Coursework. The first two to three years of your Ph.D. program will involve taking classes. Typically you will take three courses each semester. If you are thinking, "Oh, that's not too bad. I took more than that in college," you would be wrong. Think about your toughest college class, triple the work load, and you now have an idea of a typical graduate school course. First-year graduate students are also frequently surprised at the types of things you are expected to learn. I'd have to say that in the first year of my graduate experience, I didn't learn a single thing about politics. That's right, nothing. In fact, I'm fairly sure that I knew more about politics than some of my professors. Graduate school course work is highly specialized. The higher-ranking the program, the more specialized the courses are. My wife took one required statistics course that literally had no numbers. (She was really confused.)
3) Intensive work for very little money. In order to pay for grad school, most people are either a TA or an RA. A TA is a teaching assistant which, much of the time, means glorified grader. You are essentially the slave of the professor teaching the class and you play whatever role that person tells you. I TAed for one class where I was one of two TAs for a class of 300 students. The professor was a particularly bad teacher, but liked giving lots of writing assignments. The result is that I essentially had to teach 300 students the material in office hours while also grading 150 student papers once per week.
An RA is an indentured servant to a professor performing research. You basically do whatever the the professor says while getting no credit for the work. They also seem to forget how long it takes to do things. Part of the deal is that you are supposed to work 20 hours in exchange for tuition and minimum wage. However, if it takes you more than 20 hours to get the work done, that's just the way it is. But if you put in too many hours, it takes away from your ability to do your own schoolwork.
4) Preliminary/comprehensive exams. This is a particularly annoying hoop through which to jump. You must decide two areas in which you claim to be an expert. Then, after your courses are complete (or near complete), you must prove that you are an expert in your areas. You are given a massive, all-day exam in each area which is then evaluated by a committee of professors in that area. Often there is one committee member who derives some sort of perverse pleasure from damaging graduate students. In my case, there was one professor who scored everyone's test as a "fail" because we did not, "adequately cite from the work of our department's highly esteemed faculty" (even though the questions asked had nothing to do with the research of any of our faculty). Different departments will do this differently. The natural sciences tend to be easier than social sciences or humanities for some reason. But, it is a painful hurdle through which we must jump.
5) Doing your own research. After completing coursework and proving you are an expert in your areas, you are now at the stage where you can start doing your own research (in addition to your TA or RA gig). This is a major shift. All of a sudden, you have spare time. You are suddenly your own boss for 1/2 the time (in theory--depending on TA/RA status). You set your own deadlines. You schedule your own days. You set your own priorities. Your academic advisor may give you suggestions, but they are suggestions and there aren't any penalties, or even grades to encourage your behavior. I've known a lot of people who did well in all the "hard parts" of graduate school but fell apart when they found their new freedom.
If you can handle the freedom, then your job is to come up with something that has never been said before. You are to convince a panel of scholars that your work is "interesting", "new", and "academically rigorous". The problem is that different scholars define those three things differently. In my own experience, I had a conservative Roman Catholic, a Black church scholar, and the chair of Women's Studies on the same committee. Looking back, I can say that it was stupid on my part. It was extremely difficult to make all three of these individuals happy, and I consider my own dissertation to be garbage as a result. I had to water down everything to make everyone happy. It ended up wildly different than my own views just so I could finish jumping through this hoop.
But, if you are willing to jump through all these hoops, you too can get a Ph.D. Just know what you are getting yourself into before you start. It is a lot of work, and there is no guaranteed job after all the hoops are complete. If you decide to pursue a Ph.D., make sure you truly love what you are studying, because I doubt that it is otherwise worth the effort.
Showing posts with label education issues. Show all posts
Showing posts with label education issues. Show all posts
Wednesday, August 8, 2012
Friday, June 29, 2012
Why are college costs so high?
I get asked this question a lot--by students, friends at church,
relatives struggling to get their kids through college,... So, here is
my attempt to explain it.
The first thing to understand is that colleges cost a lot of money to operate. They also cost a lot of money to build. A friend of mine and I once figured out that it would cost $225 million to build a very basic college that could have 900 students. Then you have to operate the whole thing. Most colleges are in debt due to the costs of building. They have to pay back building loans and such. So, in addition to paying all the bills (electric, water, sewer, internet) and paying a significant amount of people to run all the operations (including teaching), colleges have to make payments on their loans. There are wide variations in costs from school to school, but for a college of 900 students, without paying back building loans, you are looking at, on the low end, $7500 per year per student to operate. If there are loans to be paid back, then the number goes up. This also assumes a relatively low faculty salary. You have to think of that $7500 as the very low end, which would leave you with substandard science, music, and sports programs; as well as very little in the student resources that most colleges offer.
Now, take into consideration the state schools. Historically, tuition for in-state students was considerably lower than $7500 per year (even adjusted for inflation). State schools were able to do that because the states were subsidizing them. But, in the last few years, states have been cutting back on the subsidies due to larger budgetary issues. As state funding has gone down, either tuition needed to go up or cuts needed to be made. Generally both took place.
Tuition could get closer to the baseline $7500 per year if students (and parents) didn't demand as much. The things students and parents demand cost money--and that money has to come from somewhere. For example, most prospective students shun any institution that does not have fancy dorms, an extravagant student union, and a top-of-the-line cafeteria. You would be correct to note that most of these are supposed to come out of "room and board" fees, but they don't always.
Next, students rightly prefer smaller class sizes. But that means you have to pay for more faculty. Let's run a little math. Let's assume you are at a super thrifty institution and that your typical assistant professor teaches 4 classes a semester (which I can tell you from much experience is hard) and makes $50k per year. If you want small class sizes, to be competitive with other institutions wanting the same thing, you would need to average 15 students per class. That means that any given semester, a professor is teaching 60 students per semester, or 120 students per year. That means for each class, each professor gets $416 for each student. Each student takes an average of 5 classes per semester for two semesters and $4167 in tuition goes just to pay for faculty. Now, if you double the class size, the amount paid to faculty salary is cut in half. But let's say you are at one of those elite private schools where the professors are expected to publish a lot, and can only teach 2 classes per semester. The assistant professor at these institutions will be paid at least $70k (on the low end). Assuming a class size of 15, each student pays $1167 of their tuition per class. Multiply that out by 5 classes for 2 semesters, and you get $11,670 per student in tuition just for faculty salary. You can see how this could add up quickly.
The cost of teaching has also gone up a lot due to technology. If you are going to have a decent science program, you have to spend millions of dollars in equipment. To have decent computing, you have to spend money on computer labs and campus-wide wifi networks. Modern students are expecting technology in the classroom, which means you have to retrofit older classrooms or build new buildings. All the software costs a lot of money. The more technology you have, the more money it will cost.
The reality is that schools are competing with each other for students, so they have to do things like have nicer facilities and smaller class sizes. If they don't, then they lose out on potential students. State schools have something of an advantage here. Since tuition is lower due to state subsidies, they don't have to compete as much for students and they generally save money with larger class sizes. If they are Ph.D. granting institutions, they can have cheap graduate student labor. (I remember one summer class I taught at the large state school where I got my Ph.D. I had one graduate student to help with grading and I was given 350 students in my Intro. to American Government course. The combined salary for my grading assistant and myself for that class was $2100, so the cost of salary per student was $6 per student. The school made a killing on that one.) But, why do so many students want to go to these giant schools? Because of the programs, and the nice facilities, and the sports teams. All of these cost money, so schools have to get creative in finding ways to cut costs (usually at the cost of the quality of the education).
The problems mentioned above are self-perpetuating. The cycle of increasing tuition just keeps going because students keep demanding more and schools keep giving them more so that they can attract the students. Eventually one would expect the bubble to burst, students would stop demanding so much and tuition would go down. But there is one big problem: financial aid. Federal financial aid programs enable schools to keep having high tuition. There is no real incentive to control costs because students can just borrow more money to cover the costs. Students borrow without really thinking about the long-term costs of the loans. While it's true that student loans are a good deal as far as loans go, too many students rack up unreasonable debt. (My fiancee is currently a Ph.D. student. I won't tell you how much student loan debt she has, but my jaw literally dropped when I calculated the total. But, every year she has borrowed at least $10k and she had been in school for a long time. As a result of having this extra money, she lived a lifestyle not conducive to someone who is actually making a graduate student stipend. When I calculated out for her the amount of money she would have to be paying every month for the next 25 years to pay off the student loans, she was astounded. She has been more frugal since.) Schools, to keep up with student demands for stuff, have increased tuition repeatedly to provide more stuff. The schools can't afford to not offer the stuff because then students would choose to go to a different school that does have the stuff. Their cost/benefit analysis concludes that, due to student borrowing, it is more cost effective to offer the stuff and charge more in tuition than to lower tuition and lose students.
Some costs are outside the control of both the students and the institution. One recent (last 15 years) phenomenon is the dramatic increases in the number of support staff at colleges and universities. These are largely because the government instructs the schools to collect certain data. You need people to collect, consolidate, and report on that data. Many of these people have relatively high salaries because they have specialized skills in statistical analysis and programming. Yet another additional cost.
Finally, and I know this one will sound weird, tuition keeps going up because schools are trying to recruit lower income students. Let me try to explain. In their push for diversity, most colleges and universities actively recruit low-income students. These students, because they are more nervous about money, are less eager to take out large student loans. So, in order to attract these students, schools must offer very generous student aid packages, basically paying their tuition, room and board for them. Where does the money come from to cover the costs of these students? Part of it comes from external donations for scholarship funds. But, most of has to come from the tuition of those families "who can afford it". So, to attract low income students, tuition for everyone else has to go up.
So, there you have it. The vicious cycle of ever-increasing student tuition. I would love to hear your opinions on how to break the cycle.
The first thing to understand is that colleges cost a lot of money to operate. They also cost a lot of money to build. A friend of mine and I once figured out that it would cost $225 million to build a very basic college that could have 900 students. Then you have to operate the whole thing. Most colleges are in debt due to the costs of building. They have to pay back building loans and such. So, in addition to paying all the bills (electric, water, sewer, internet) and paying a significant amount of people to run all the operations (including teaching), colleges have to make payments on their loans. There are wide variations in costs from school to school, but for a college of 900 students, without paying back building loans, you are looking at, on the low end, $7500 per year per student to operate. If there are loans to be paid back, then the number goes up. This also assumes a relatively low faculty salary. You have to think of that $7500 as the very low end, which would leave you with substandard science, music, and sports programs; as well as very little in the student resources that most colleges offer.
Now, take into consideration the state schools. Historically, tuition for in-state students was considerably lower than $7500 per year (even adjusted for inflation). State schools were able to do that because the states were subsidizing them. But, in the last few years, states have been cutting back on the subsidies due to larger budgetary issues. As state funding has gone down, either tuition needed to go up or cuts needed to be made. Generally both took place.
Tuition could get closer to the baseline $7500 per year if students (and parents) didn't demand as much. The things students and parents demand cost money--and that money has to come from somewhere. For example, most prospective students shun any institution that does not have fancy dorms, an extravagant student union, and a top-of-the-line cafeteria. You would be correct to note that most of these are supposed to come out of "room and board" fees, but they don't always.
Next, students rightly prefer smaller class sizes. But that means you have to pay for more faculty. Let's run a little math. Let's assume you are at a super thrifty institution and that your typical assistant professor teaches 4 classes a semester (which I can tell you from much experience is hard) and makes $50k per year. If you want small class sizes, to be competitive with other institutions wanting the same thing, you would need to average 15 students per class. That means that any given semester, a professor is teaching 60 students per semester, or 120 students per year. That means for each class, each professor gets $416 for each student. Each student takes an average of 5 classes per semester for two semesters and $4167 in tuition goes just to pay for faculty. Now, if you double the class size, the amount paid to faculty salary is cut in half. But let's say you are at one of those elite private schools where the professors are expected to publish a lot, and can only teach 2 classes per semester. The assistant professor at these institutions will be paid at least $70k (on the low end). Assuming a class size of 15, each student pays $1167 of their tuition per class. Multiply that out by 5 classes for 2 semesters, and you get $11,670 per student in tuition just for faculty salary. You can see how this could add up quickly.
The cost of teaching has also gone up a lot due to technology. If you are going to have a decent science program, you have to spend millions of dollars in equipment. To have decent computing, you have to spend money on computer labs and campus-wide wifi networks. Modern students are expecting technology in the classroom, which means you have to retrofit older classrooms or build new buildings. All the software costs a lot of money. The more technology you have, the more money it will cost.
The reality is that schools are competing with each other for students, so they have to do things like have nicer facilities and smaller class sizes. If they don't, then they lose out on potential students. State schools have something of an advantage here. Since tuition is lower due to state subsidies, they don't have to compete as much for students and they generally save money with larger class sizes. If they are Ph.D. granting institutions, they can have cheap graduate student labor. (I remember one summer class I taught at the large state school where I got my Ph.D. I had one graduate student to help with grading and I was given 350 students in my Intro. to American Government course. The combined salary for my grading assistant and myself for that class was $2100, so the cost of salary per student was $6 per student. The school made a killing on that one.) But, why do so many students want to go to these giant schools? Because of the programs, and the nice facilities, and the sports teams. All of these cost money, so schools have to get creative in finding ways to cut costs (usually at the cost of the quality of the education).
The problems mentioned above are self-perpetuating. The cycle of increasing tuition just keeps going because students keep demanding more and schools keep giving them more so that they can attract the students. Eventually one would expect the bubble to burst, students would stop demanding so much and tuition would go down. But there is one big problem: financial aid. Federal financial aid programs enable schools to keep having high tuition. There is no real incentive to control costs because students can just borrow more money to cover the costs. Students borrow without really thinking about the long-term costs of the loans. While it's true that student loans are a good deal as far as loans go, too many students rack up unreasonable debt. (My fiancee is currently a Ph.D. student. I won't tell you how much student loan debt she has, but my jaw literally dropped when I calculated the total. But, every year she has borrowed at least $10k and she had been in school for a long time. As a result of having this extra money, she lived a lifestyle not conducive to someone who is actually making a graduate student stipend. When I calculated out for her the amount of money she would have to be paying every month for the next 25 years to pay off the student loans, she was astounded. She has been more frugal since.) Schools, to keep up with student demands for stuff, have increased tuition repeatedly to provide more stuff. The schools can't afford to not offer the stuff because then students would choose to go to a different school that does have the stuff. Their cost/benefit analysis concludes that, due to student borrowing, it is more cost effective to offer the stuff and charge more in tuition than to lower tuition and lose students.
Some costs are outside the control of both the students and the institution. One recent (last 15 years) phenomenon is the dramatic increases in the number of support staff at colleges and universities. These are largely because the government instructs the schools to collect certain data. You need people to collect, consolidate, and report on that data. Many of these people have relatively high salaries because they have specialized skills in statistical analysis and programming. Yet another additional cost.
Finally, and I know this one will sound weird, tuition keeps going up because schools are trying to recruit lower income students. Let me try to explain. In their push for diversity, most colleges and universities actively recruit low-income students. These students, because they are more nervous about money, are less eager to take out large student loans. So, in order to attract these students, schools must offer very generous student aid packages, basically paying their tuition, room and board for them. Where does the money come from to cover the costs of these students? Part of it comes from external donations for scholarship funds. But, most of has to come from the tuition of those families "who can afford it". So, to attract low income students, tuition for everyone else has to go up.
So, there you have it. The vicious cycle of ever-increasing student tuition. I would love to hear your opinions on how to break the cycle.
Tuesday, June 26, 2012
Academically Adrift?
About a year and a half ago a book came out that set the academic world aflutter. Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses
by sociologists Richard Arum and Jopisa Roksa argue, essentially, that
colleges aren't doing their jobs. (For purposes of full disclosure, my
fiance knows both of the authors and is in regular correspondence with
Roksa. I haven't met either one, but just in case, I wanted my readers
to know there might be an influence.)
First and foremost, I should note that even though the book has received a lot of mainstream attention, it is not written for mainstream readers. It is an academic book with an academic audience in mind. If you aren't accustomed to reading "social sciency" material, I would highly recommend reading good summaries. Even with advanced degrees in the social sciences, some of the tables intimidated me and gave me flashbacks to dreaded statistics classes. But, if you can get past that, they have some important findings that I think those of us in the higher education field should take seriously.
Perhaps their most important finding is that students are not learning how to do higher level thinking. 45% of students did not demonstrate a significant improvement in learning after 2 years of college and 36% of students did not demonstrate a significant improvement after 4 years. (Just a technical note, "significant" doesn't actually mean "a lot" in this type of context. It means something like, "enough that we don't think the difference was accidental". A significant improvement can actually be very small when dealing with technical statistics.)
So, what was the cause of this seeming failure of colleges? Arum and Roksa argue that there are a few influences, but by far the largest is a lack of academic rigor. Basically, we professors are being too easy on the students, and not forcing them to improve their learning and thingking skills. Other findings include students not spending enough time studying (because they don't have to because the classes are easy), students are spending too much time socializing and working jobs, and the studying that does take place is in less than ideal settings (especially "studying" with friends). In perhaps their finding that got the most people mad, they found the students in business, communication, education and social work majors overall had significantly lower levels of higher thinking skills.
I want to emphasize that I have not done any scientific research and the following is based strictly on personal observations. In other words, these are just my personal, very unscientific thoughts:
by sociologists Richard Arum and Jopisa Roksa argue, essentially, that
colleges aren't doing their jobs. (For purposes of full disclosure, my
fiance knows both of the authors and is in regular correspondence with
Roksa. I haven't met either one, but just in case, I wanted my readers
to know there might be an influence.)First and foremost, I should note that even though the book has received a lot of mainstream attention, it is not written for mainstream readers. It is an academic book with an academic audience in mind. If you aren't accustomed to reading "social sciency" material, I would highly recommend reading good summaries. Even with advanced degrees in the social sciences, some of the tables intimidated me and gave me flashbacks to dreaded statistics classes. But, if you can get past that, they have some important findings that I think those of us in the higher education field should take seriously.
Perhaps their most important finding is that students are not learning how to do higher level thinking. 45% of students did not demonstrate a significant improvement in learning after 2 years of college and 36% of students did not demonstrate a significant improvement after 4 years. (Just a technical note, "significant" doesn't actually mean "a lot" in this type of context. It means something like, "enough that we don't think the difference was accidental". A significant improvement can actually be very small when dealing with technical statistics.)
So, what was the cause of this seeming failure of colleges? Arum and Roksa argue that there are a few influences, but by far the largest is a lack of academic rigor. Basically, we professors are being too easy on the students, and not forcing them to improve their learning and thingking skills. Other findings include students not spending enough time studying (because they don't have to because the classes are easy), students are spending too much time socializing and working jobs, and the studying that does take place is in less than ideal settings (especially "studying" with friends). In perhaps their finding that got the most people mad, they found the students in business, communication, education and social work majors overall had significantly lower levels of higher thinking skills.
I want to emphasize that I have not done any scientific research and the following is based strictly on personal observations. In other words, these are just my personal, very unscientific thoughts:
- Students tend to take the easier courses with easier professors when they can. Then, to get class numbers up, faculty are somewhat pressured to ease up on the work so they can increase their class sizes.
- The rule of thumb for studying is that you should spend 2 hours outside of class for every hour you spend inside class. When I work with students and they lay out how they spend their weeks, it is usually the inverse.
- Too many students do lack higher thinking skills. It amazes me. Constantly. I can't figure out how some of these students got into college, let alone how they managed to survive so long in college. Given their thought patterns, they shouldn't be passing 2/3 of their classes. (Of course, I am under pressure to give such students a C just so we don't have to continue to deal with them.)
- Some majors do a much better job of teaching thinking skills than others. While it will change from institution to institution, I recognize some of the same trends as the book authors. However, to be positive, I would like to cite philosophy departments for doing a supurb job with their students. (Although, to be fair, there is probably a selection bias there since only students interested in higher-level thinking would become a philosophy major in the first place.)
- While some students appear to me to be lazy, some are honestly over-worked. Those who are trying to work a 30-hour per week job to pay for college are shooting themselves in the foot. If you take 15 credit horus (roughly the average course load on a semester system), you will be in class 15 hours per week. If you do spend the amount of time doing school work, 2 hours outside for every hour inside, you are up to 45 hours per week to be a full time student. If you then work 30 hours at a job, you are up to 75 hours. A typical 19 year-old won't be able to do that. So what gets lost? Doing work outside of school. When I show this math to these students, I tell them that if their financial situation is really that bad, they shouldn't be a full time student. Take fewer classes. It's okay to take longer to graduate.
Wednesday, January 11, 2012
The Problem with Academia: Part III
Call me a radical, but I believe the most important job of colleges and universities should be teaching students. Given that the vast majority of the teaching is done by professors, I believe professors should devote a significant amount of energy to teaching and improving their teaching skills.
At too many institutions, though, that is not the case. At larger and at more prestigious institutions, teaching usually takes a back seat to research. Frequently, especially at the larger institutions, the graduate students are more effective teachers than the highly paid faculty. Yet, even for the graduate students, there is little reward for teaching excellence. At most, if they get good evaluations, they can include them in their job applications to be professors. However, that won't help them at the larger or more prestigious universities. Do you see a disturbing pattern here?
However, that pattern does not end there. At the smaller institutions that do care more about teaching, they also tend to place far greater emphasis on "preparing students for the job market". They do this because otherwise they won't get students. Parents today are demanding that their children receive "marketable skills" so they can quickly and easily get a job after college. The institutions know that if they don't cater to this, then they won't get students.
Herein lies the problem. The steps taken to "prepare students for the job market" don't actually prepare them for the job market. It is based on a very shallow and underinformed understanding of the job market economy.
Let me explain it this way. The perception is that two of the most "marketable" majors are in business and engineering. It is probably true that you are more likely to quickly get a job out of college if you major in one of those areas. However, once you get the job, you are going to be somewhat trapped. Studies have shown that people in those majors, while they get jobs quickly, advance within their companies far more slowly. This is because, due to demands made my parents and students, the students in college are taught how things work at the time they are in college. As business practices and technologies change, their training is now useless. This is because too often students in these areas are not taught how to think and learn how to do things for themselves. As things change, they are left in the dust. They are far more likely to lose their job 15-20 years after graduating from college.
Now let's look at a couple of "impractical" majors: literature and philosophy. If I am an employer and I have a job that requires a lot of writing, I hire a lit major. I don't hire a business major, even if she took a "business writing" class because she won't be able to adapt her skill to different situations. Literature majors, however, learn to write by reading excellent writing. They have far more capacity to adapt their skills to different situations. Good writing is good writing. It is much easier to teach a good writer to adapt to a given style than to teach someone competent in a given style to be a good writer in another style.
Similarly, if I am an employer and I have a position for which there is really no specific college training available, but does require intelligence, I hire a philosophy major. I hire a philosophy major because, at the very least, a philosophy major knows how to learn and think critically. She can see problems that others don't and come up with solutions that others might not think of. Philosophy majors are highly adaptable. They know how to think.
This, in my opinion, is one of the biggest problems with a lot of college training today. Students are not taught to think. They are trained to memorize and regurgitate information in given contexts. They are not trained to problem solve or adapt to new situations. This may help them get an initial job, but when the job changes, which it inevitably will, they are stuck, lost, and getting passed up for promotions by those humanities majors who were mocked in college for being impractical.
I think this is why employers are so much more ready to hire students from elite colleges. You can safely assume that these students at least know how to think critically. They get trained to do that in many of their classes. There is no guarantee of students receiving that type of training at the local state school. It is, frankly, unfair to the students who do not have access to the elite colleges. It is a disservice that those of us who serve them at these we buckle under to the demands of the parents and students to "just give them what they need to know". In reality, we should understand that what they need to know is to develop the skill of thinking, not merely vocational training.
At too many institutions, though, that is not the case. At larger and at more prestigious institutions, teaching usually takes a back seat to research. Frequently, especially at the larger institutions, the graduate students are more effective teachers than the highly paid faculty. Yet, even for the graduate students, there is little reward for teaching excellence. At most, if they get good evaluations, they can include them in their job applications to be professors. However, that won't help them at the larger or more prestigious universities. Do you see a disturbing pattern here?
However, that pattern does not end there. At the smaller institutions that do care more about teaching, they also tend to place far greater emphasis on "preparing students for the job market". They do this because otherwise they won't get students. Parents today are demanding that their children receive "marketable skills" so they can quickly and easily get a job after college. The institutions know that if they don't cater to this, then they won't get students.
Herein lies the problem. The steps taken to "prepare students for the job market" don't actually prepare them for the job market. It is based on a very shallow and underinformed understanding of the job market economy.
Let me explain it this way. The perception is that two of the most "marketable" majors are in business and engineering. It is probably true that you are more likely to quickly get a job out of college if you major in one of those areas. However, once you get the job, you are going to be somewhat trapped. Studies have shown that people in those majors, while they get jobs quickly, advance within their companies far more slowly. This is because, due to demands made my parents and students, the students in college are taught how things work at the time they are in college. As business practices and technologies change, their training is now useless. This is because too often students in these areas are not taught how to think and learn how to do things for themselves. As things change, they are left in the dust. They are far more likely to lose their job 15-20 years after graduating from college.
Now let's look at a couple of "impractical" majors: literature and philosophy. If I am an employer and I have a job that requires a lot of writing, I hire a lit major. I don't hire a business major, even if she took a "business writing" class because she won't be able to adapt her skill to different situations. Literature majors, however, learn to write by reading excellent writing. They have far more capacity to adapt their skills to different situations. Good writing is good writing. It is much easier to teach a good writer to adapt to a given style than to teach someone competent in a given style to be a good writer in another style.
Similarly, if I am an employer and I have a position for which there is really no specific college training available, but does require intelligence, I hire a philosophy major. I hire a philosophy major because, at the very least, a philosophy major knows how to learn and think critically. She can see problems that others don't and come up with solutions that others might not think of. Philosophy majors are highly adaptable. They know how to think.
This, in my opinion, is one of the biggest problems with a lot of college training today. Students are not taught to think. They are trained to memorize and regurgitate information in given contexts. They are not trained to problem solve or adapt to new situations. This may help them get an initial job, but when the job changes, which it inevitably will, they are stuck, lost, and getting passed up for promotions by those humanities majors who were mocked in college for being impractical.
I think this is why employers are so much more ready to hire students from elite colleges. You can safely assume that these students at least know how to think critically. They get trained to do that in many of their classes. There is no guarantee of students receiving that type of training at the local state school. It is, frankly, unfair to the students who do not have access to the elite colleges. It is a disservice that those of us who serve them at these we buckle under to the demands of the parents and students to "just give them what they need to know". In reality, we should understand that what they need to know is to develop the skill of thinking, not merely vocational training.
Saturday, January 7, 2012
The Problem with Academia: Part II
In part 1 of this series, I spoke about the "cult of the new" in academic publishing. You are rewarded for saying something new rather than something interesting or thought provoking. This cult of the new leads itself to acedemic work that is either concerned with minutia or saying ridiculous things.
Today's post is related. I will talk about the hiring and promotion processes in academia. It can be summarized this way: the more you publish, the higher your pay will be and the more likely you will be promoted. (In part 3 of the series, I'll talk about why this isn't good for students.)
The system is not universal. The rules are different for large and/or elite universities as compared to smaller or less elite ones. But, professors get paid a lot more at large and elite universities. Speaking for the top-10 program where I earned my Ph.D., in order to get hired in the first place you had to have at least 10 peer reviewed articles published in "tier 1" journals or have a book published by a respectable university academic publisher. Once you have the job, in order to get tenure, you have to have an additional (beyond what you had when you were hired) 30 articles or two books in the next six years. I know that may sound like a long time, but I assure you that it isn't. Most assistant professors at these institutions are putting in a minimum of 60 hours per week, 50 of which are spent doing research. But this is what you have to do to get the higher paying, presigious job.
Personally, at my non-elite smaller university, I get paid about the same as a public school teacher with a similar level of experience. I also want to note, for the record, that I put in 60 hours per week and maybe 5 of those go to doing research. If I, for my future job, wanted to make a better salary, I would need to produce a lot of publications (which means writing about things no one really cares about or making up ridiculous stuff). Then, once I got the job, in order to gain tenure (job security and a pay bump), I would have to publish a lot more.
At smaller and less prestigious institutions, though, they don't care about publishing as much. What they do care about depends heavily on the individual institution. Some schools will count mostly your teaching evaluations. Others will go with "collegiality" (i.e., do they like you). A handful will take into serious consideration "service" (working on a lot of university committees or in the community, thus making the institution look good).
Almost every university, in hiring, takes into consideration the categories of scholarship, teaching and service. What each of those categories mean to the institution and how they are weighted depends heavily. The more prestigious jobs that pay better overwhelmingly consider scholarship to be significantly more important. The less prestigious jobs that pay less gernerally take more account of teaching. So, to give a preview of what's coming in part 3, as a professor I am rewarded, at least in prestige and salary, by largely ignoring my students. That, I believe, is a problem in academia.
Today's post is related. I will talk about the hiring and promotion processes in academia. It can be summarized this way: the more you publish, the higher your pay will be and the more likely you will be promoted. (In part 3 of the series, I'll talk about why this isn't good for students.)
The system is not universal. The rules are different for large and/or elite universities as compared to smaller or less elite ones. But, professors get paid a lot more at large and elite universities. Speaking for the top-10 program where I earned my Ph.D., in order to get hired in the first place you had to have at least 10 peer reviewed articles published in "tier 1" journals or have a book published by a respectable university academic publisher. Once you have the job, in order to get tenure, you have to have an additional (beyond what you had when you were hired) 30 articles or two books in the next six years. I know that may sound like a long time, but I assure you that it isn't. Most assistant professors at these institutions are putting in a minimum of 60 hours per week, 50 of which are spent doing research. But this is what you have to do to get the higher paying, presigious job.
Personally, at my non-elite smaller university, I get paid about the same as a public school teacher with a similar level of experience. I also want to note, for the record, that I put in 60 hours per week and maybe 5 of those go to doing research. If I, for my future job, wanted to make a better salary, I would need to produce a lot of publications (which means writing about things no one really cares about or making up ridiculous stuff). Then, once I got the job, in order to gain tenure (job security and a pay bump), I would have to publish a lot more.
At smaller and less prestigious institutions, though, they don't care about publishing as much. What they do care about depends heavily on the individual institution. Some schools will count mostly your teaching evaluations. Others will go with "collegiality" (i.e., do they like you). A handful will take into serious consideration "service" (working on a lot of university committees or in the community, thus making the institution look good).
Almost every university, in hiring, takes into consideration the categories of scholarship, teaching and service. What each of those categories mean to the institution and how they are weighted depends heavily. The more prestigious jobs that pay better overwhelmingly consider scholarship to be significantly more important. The less prestigious jobs that pay less gernerally take more account of teaching. So, to give a preview of what's coming in part 3, as a professor I am rewarded, at least in prestige and salary, by largely ignoring my students. That, I believe, is a problem in academia.
Saturday, August 20, 2011
The Problem with Academia: Part I
A lot of my friends in academia recognize that I'm not a typical academic in a lot of ways. One of the biggest ways I am atypical is that I don't really like the way the academic game is played. This will be the first of probably several posts "exposing" (or complaining about) aspects of academia.
The first round of complaints deals with publishing, or how you get rewarded in academia. In the real world, you can get published if there are enough people interested in what you have to say. In the academic world, that is largely irrelevant. To get published in academia, you have to say something that no one has said before.
This may not be a bad idea in the hard sciences, where it is all about discovery. Even in the social sciences, if you get new data you can often say something new. It causes some difficulties in other disciplines, though. If I am researching political theory, I am expected to come up with something that hasn't been said in the last 2500 years of political theory. This leaves me with two broad options: either I can say something so specific that no one really cares (but, hey, it's at least "new") or I can something utterly ridiculous (but new). That is how you get published in academia.
Even this wouldn't be so bad, except that in order to advance in academia, you have to publish. If you don't have a certain amount of publications in your first 7 years as a professor, you lose your job. So, in order to keep my job, I have to come up with either ridiculous things or things that no one cares about.
Granted, occasionally there are authentically good new ideas that come out of this process. Those individuals deserve to be the academic rock stars. I may be able to come up with one of those things myself, but it is doubtful. Instead, I must publish something no one cares about, or come out with something that is ridiculous that I don't actually believe (but try unsuccessfully to defend). That is my chosen career.
What's sad is that this ridiculous process is widely recognized as being ridiculous among academics. We joke about it in private conversations at conferences. And yet the ridiculousness is so enshrined that we can only mock it behind its back. Reform is just a dream.
The first round of complaints deals with publishing, or how you get rewarded in academia. In the real world, you can get published if there are enough people interested in what you have to say. In the academic world, that is largely irrelevant. To get published in academia, you have to say something that no one has said before.
This may not be a bad idea in the hard sciences, where it is all about discovery. Even in the social sciences, if you get new data you can often say something new. It causes some difficulties in other disciplines, though. If I am researching political theory, I am expected to come up with something that hasn't been said in the last 2500 years of political theory. This leaves me with two broad options: either I can say something so specific that no one really cares (but, hey, it's at least "new") or I can something utterly ridiculous (but new). That is how you get published in academia.
Even this wouldn't be so bad, except that in order to advance in academia, you have to publish. If you don't have a certain amount of publications in your first 7 years as a professor, you lose your job. So, in order to keep my job, I have to come up with either ridiculous things or things that no one cares about.
Granted, occasionally there are authentically good new ideas that come out of this process. Those individuals deserve to be the academic rock stars. I may be able to come up with one of those things myself, but it is doubtful. Instead, I must publish something no one cares about, or come out with something that is ridiculous that I don't actually believe (but try unsuccessfully to defend). That is my chosen career.
What's sad is that this ridiculous process is widely recognized as being ridiculous among academics. We joke about it in private conversations at conferences. And yet the ridiculousness is so enshrined that we can only mock it behind its back. Reform is just a dream.
Sunday, August 14, 2011
How useful are IQ tests as a measure of intelligence?
While observing some of our incoming freshmen take "placement exams" yesterday, I was reminded of an academic study in which I participated back in the late 1990s. They wanted to compare IQ scores of perceived intelligent people given different test formats and different testing atmospheres. So I took I think 10 different tests over two weeks in different settings.
I ended up with an unusually high range of scores. They ranged from 111 to 155. Most of the tests concluded I was in the high 120s to mid 130s.
First a note on what these scores supposedly mean. According to most scoring models, the scores designed to measure what percentile of the overall population you are more intelligent than. A score of 100 is average. A 111 puts me at smarter than about 75% of the population. A 155 places me smarter than 99.9% of the population. There is quite a difference between those two numbers. According to one I am smart enough to survive college and according to the other I am a genius.
So, how did I end up with such a wide range of scores? There were three variations in the tests that impacted me in particular: time, distraction, and spacial reasoning. I did much better in untimed tests than timed ones. I did much better when there was little distraction than when there was a lot. Finally, I have a really low spacial reasoning iq.
My 111 score involved a timed test, with a large spatial reasoning component, and there were children playing loudly outside the window. My 155 score was an untimed test with no spatial reasoning component and a soft piano concerto playing in the background. Arguably, neither of those scenarios are good measures of my working intelligence. While I would like to do all of my thinking without time pressures and having classical piano in the background, that isn't real life.
The reason I talk about this is that admission to gifted programs in school are frequently tied to iq tests. I didn't get into the gifted program in elementary school, in spite of being widely recognized as the smartest kid in my class. My sister was admitted, and she will be the first to tell you that I have a much higher iq than her (although she more than crushes me with eq).
The accuracy and legitimacy of iq tests worry me, especially for aspies. It is my impression (which may be wrong) that aspies have "specialized intelligence". We tend to be exceptional at some things and bad at others, even if they are somewhat related. Immanuel Kant, for example, was probably an aspie (he's been dead for a while, but based on everything I've read about him, he fits every criteria). He was arguably one of the greatest philosophers in world history. Yet, in spite of his clear genius, there were certain fields of study he just could not do. I wonder what his iq score would have been when he was 9 years old. Would Kant have been "tracked" with the average or below average kids? (I was until about 4th grade.) How much genius are we missing because we don't really know how to measure this type of specialized intelligence?
I'm not sure if there is a point to all this rambling. It's just something I've been thinking about the last couple days. If you can figure out the point to my rambling, please comment so as to help other readers and myself.
I ended up with an unusually high range of scores. They ranged from 111 to 155. Most of the tests concluded I was in the high 120s to mid 130s.
First a note on what these scores supposedly mean. According to most scoring models, the scores designed to measure what percentile of the overall population you are more intelligent than. A score of 100 is average. A 111 puts me at smarter than about 75% of the population. A 155 places me smarter than 99.9% of the population. There is quite a difference between those two numbers. According to one I am smart enough to survive college and according to the other I am a genius.
So, how did I end up with such a wide range of scores? There were three variations in the tests that impacted me in particular: time, distraction, and spacial reasoning. I did much better in untimed tests than timed ones. I did much better when there was little distraction than when there was a lot. Finally, I have a really low spacial reasoning iq.
My 111 score involved a timed test, with a large spatial reasoning component, and there were children playing loudly outside the window. My 155 score was an untimed test with no spatial reasoning component and a soft piano concerto playing in the background. Arguably, neither of those scenarios are good measures of my working intelligence. While I would like to do all of my thinking without time pressures and having classical piano in the background, that isn't real life.
The reason I talk about this is that admission to gifted programs in school are frequently tied to iq tests. I didn't get into the gifted program in elementary school, in spite of being widely recognized as the smartest kid in my class. My sister was admitted, and she will be the first to tell you that I have a much higher iq than her (although she more than crushes me with eq).
The accuracy and legitimacy of iq tests worry me, especially for aspies. It is my impression (which may be wrong) that aspies have "specialized intelligence". We tend to be exceptional at some things and bad at others, even if they are somewhat related. Immanuel Kant, for example, was probably an aspie (he's been dead for a while, but based on everything I've read about him, he fits every criteria). He was arguably one of the greatest philosophers in world history. Yet, in spite of his clear genius, there were certain fields of study he just could not do. I wonder what his iq score would have been when he was 9 years old. Would Kant have been "tracked" with the average or below average kids? (I was until about 4th grade.) How much genius are we missing because we don't really know how to measure this type of specialized intelligence?
I'm not sure if there is a point to all this rambling. It's just something I've been thinking about the last couple days. If you can figure out the point to my rambling, please comment so as to help other readers and myself.
Wednesday, May 18, 2011
Not everyone should go to college
I’m going to be blunt. College is not the best choice for a lot of people coming right out of high school. I speak as someone who has seen too many students go to school for one year and then drop out. This can be due to lack of academic preparedness, lack of academic ability, lack of financial resources, or lack of maturity. I rarely see someone who has been in the workforce start school again and then drop out. I believe this is because they work out maturity and financial issues. So here are some rough guidelines for students who should not go to college right away:
1) If your high school gpa is not at least a 3.2, don’t go to college because college is a whole lot harder. Perhaps community college, but not a 4-year institution. (An exception would be if you went to an exceptionally good high school, then you can probably get away with attending a lower-academic college.)
2) If you have trouble making smart decisions, you are not ready for college. For example, if you have been arrested, that probably indicates you have trouble making smart decisions and you are not yet ready for college. You have a lot more opportunities to make dumb choices in college than you did while living with your parents in high school.
3) If you know you will have to work more than 20 hours per week to afford college, you shouldn’t go to college full time. It’s fine to go part time, but it is immensely difficult to manage your time effectively if you are working a lot of hours and taking a full class load. Let me put it this way—the rule of thumb is that you should spend two hours on school work outside of the class for every hour you spend inside the classroom in order to be successful in college. So, if you take a typical 15 credit full-time school load, you should spend 30 additional hours doing school work. That’s 45 hours. If you then spend just 20 hours working a job, you are up to 65 hours. Add another 49 hours for sleep, you are up to 114 hours. There are 168 hours in a week. That leaves 54 hours a week for everything else including eating, socializing, getting to and from places, grocery shopping…Most 18-year olds are not good enough at time management yet to pull this feat off. So what gets taken out? Studying. What then suffers? Grades.
What should you do if you fit in one of the three categories above? I would argue that you should work and maybe take a few classes at a community college first. This will help you develop maturity, study skills, and time management skills. Then you will be better prepared for college and get far more out of the experience.
1) If your high school gpa is not at least a 3.2, don’t go to college because college is a whole lot harder. Perhaps community college, but not a 4-year institution. (An exception would be if you went to an exceptionally good high school, then you can probably get away with attending a lower-academic college.)
2) If you have trouble making smart decisions, you are not ready for college. For example, if you have been arrested, that probably indicates you have trouble making smart decisions and you are not yet ready for college. You have a lot more opportunities to make dumb choices in college than you did while living with your parents in high school.
3) If you know you will have to work more than 20 hours per week to afford college, you shouldn’t go to college full time. It’s fine to go part time, but it is immensely difficult to manage your time effectively if you are working a lot of hours and taking a full class load. Let me put it this way—the rule of thumb is that you should spend two hours on school work outside of the class for every hour you spend inside the classroom in order to be successful in college. So, if you take a typical 15 credit full-time school load, you should spend 30 additional hours doing school work. That’s 45 hours. If you then spend just 20 hours working a job, you are up to 65 hours. Add another 49 hours for sleep, you are up to 114 hours. There are 168 hours in a week. That leaves 54 hours a week for everything else including eating, socializing, getting to and from places, grocery shopping…Most 18-year olds are not good enough at time management yet to pull this feat off. So what gets taken out? Studying. What then suffers? Grades.
What should you do if you fit in one of the three categories above? I would argue that you should work and maybe take a few classes at a community college first. This will help you develop maturity, study skills, and time management skills. Then you will be better prepared for college and get far more out of the experience.
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