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27 Apr 09

Op-Contributor - End the University as We Know It - Op-Ed - NYTimes.com

www.nytimes.com/...27taylor.html - Preview

academics via:arthegall tenure research graduateschool university

The dirty secret of higher education is that without underpaid graduate students to help in laboratories and with teaching, universities couldn’t conduct research or even instruct their growing undergraduate populations. That’s one of the main reasons we still encourage people to enroll in doctoral programs. It is simply cheaper to provide graduate students with modest stipends and adjuncts with as little as $5,000 a course — with no benefits — than it is to hire full-time professors.
In other words, young people enroll in graduate programs, work hard for subsistence pay and assume huge debt burdens, all because of the illusory promise of faculty appointments. But their economical presence, coupled with the intransigence of tenure, ensures that there will always be too many candidates for too few openings.

01 Apr 09

The Third Bit » Blog Archive » Reassurance Cuddles for CEOs

Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired and author of The Long Tail, gave a talk at the MaRS Centre this morning to promote his new book about the economics of free stuff. I was looking forward to hearing him speak: his resume includes stints at The Economist, Nature, Science, and Los Alamos National Laboratory, so he’s obviously a bright guy.

The talk was crap. There’s no other way to say it.

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wired business university education future freemium

Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired and author of The Long Tail, gave a talk at the MaRS Centre this morning to promote his new book about the economics of free stuff
The talk was crap. There’s no other way to say it. It was superficial, derivative, and stumbling (OK, maybe there are other ways to say it). None of what he said was original (I was going to say “particularly original”, but the qualifier isn’t needed), and he failed completely to back up any of his claims with anything that looked like evidence.
3 more annotations...
- I remembered a book called The Witch Doctors
- the authors make the point that what people are usually paying for when they hire a high-priced management consultant is not answers, but certainty.
- the freemium business model, which reminded me that I wanted to say that I think it’s the future of higher education: lectures and course materials will be free, while students will pay per use for tutoring and access to labs, performance spaces, and the like. A handful of universities will earn their keep by being recognized for honestly administering meaningful examinations (my money’s on the Open University, by the way, rather than traditional bricks-and-mortar institutions