Sean Andrews's List: Emergent Higher Ed

• The ramifications of the Committee’s report are sweeping,” Powers said Tuesday. “The combined recommendations could yield as much as $490 million over a decade. That is a lot of money, and we could do a lot with it.”
• The report also recommends that the University concentrate more effort on making money from its intellectual property. The effort is meant to build on the commercial possibilities of UT’s research, including invention disclosures, licensing, and the creation of start-ups.

• The final area of study—asset utilization—is likely to be more controversial and carefully watched. Alongside energy conservation, the report suggests outsourcing services like parking and dining. The Texas A&M University System undertook a similar plan, which has reportedly generated millions in new revenue. The committee estimated that UT could save $290 million over 10 years.

   

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• Officials of the Service Employees International Union are touting their effort to unionize adjunct faculty members at all colleges in this city as a model for similar campaigns in other metropolitan areas, and envision using such an organizing strategy to greatly improve the pay and benefits afforded such instructors in those labor markets
• "Clearly what we are trying to do is create a market solution" to improving the lives of adjuncts, said Anne McLeer, Local 500's director of research and strategic planning
• But in markets where most colleges' adjuncts are unionized, she argued, all colleges come under market pressure to meet adjuncts' demands, to avoid losing talent to colleges where such instructors have negotiated better pay, benefits, and working conditions through collective bargaining.
• The union, she said, could maintain a centralized database for the market listing adjunct positions and their pay, and could set standards dealing with adjuncts' pay and working conditions.
• At Saturday's forum on part-time faculty unions, Local 500's city-based organizing strategy was praised as promising by other advocates for adjunct instructors, including Maria Maisto, president of the New Faculty Majority, and Gary D. Rhoades, a former general secretary of the American Association of University Professors who played a key role in its union organizing.
• "This sort of 'metro strategy' that SEIU is engaged in is so smart and so needed," said Mr. Rhoades, who is now director of the Center for the Future of Higher Education, a virtual think tank.
• EIU Local 500 has been on a winning streak in its efforts to organize adjunct faculty members in the Washington area. It persuaded part-time faculty members at George Washington University to vote to unionize in 2005 and those at American University to follow suit this year. In 2008 it organized part-time instructors at Montgomery College, a public institution with campuses in three of Washington's Maryland suburbs.
• SEIU Local 500 organizers expect adjunct faculty members at Georgetown University, which employs about 900 part-time instructors and has not been openly resisting the adjunct-unionization campaign that the SEIU has under way there, to soon vote to form a collective-bargaining unit.
• Students have rallied behind adjuncts by producing videos in support of their unionization campaigns at American University and Georgetown University.
• Ms. Maisto of the New Faculty Majority argued that advocates for adjunct faculty members needed to reach out to, and find common ground with, other low-wage college employees whose unions can support the adjuncts' cause. "We have to think of them as our colleagues on campus," she said. "It is so critically important on campus.

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• Even before the expansion, Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng, the founders of Coursera, said it had registered 680,000 students in 43 courses with its original partners, Michigan, Princeton, Stanford and the University of Pennsylvania.
• “This is the tsunami,” said Richard A. DeMillo, the director of the Center for 21st Century Universities at Georgia Tech. “It’s all so new that everyone’s feeling their way around, but the potential upside for this experiment is so big that it’s hard for me to imagine any large research university that wouldn’t want to be involved.”
• MOOCs were largely unknown until a wave of publicity last year about Stanford University’s free online artificial intelligence course attracted 160,000 students from 190 countries. Only a small percentage of the students completed the course, but even so, the numbers were staggering.
• “The fact that so many people are so curious about these courses shows the yearning for education,” said Molly Corbett Broad, president of the American Council on Education. “There are going to be lots of bumps in the road, but this is a very important experiment at a very substantial scale.”
• University of Washington said it planned to offer credit for its Coursera offerings this fall, and other online ventures are also moving in that direction.

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• Face-to-face education matters even more now. Because these students see the world through screens (mobile, tablet, and laptop), I expected them to embrace the idea of online education. Just the opposite. They want to engage with a professor and with their classmates, they crave the serendipity of classroom discussions, and they want the discipline of going to class. Even the adult students I met preferred a physical classroom. Online “you’re pretty much paying to teach yourself,” a Valencia student told me. “It’s like text messages. There’s no tone of voice.”

• The online calculators ask prospective students a series of questions about their (or their parents’) income and sometimes their grades and test scores, then returns an estimate for what the student will actually pay. Even before the mandate went into effect last October, officials at some colleges embraced the calculators, saying they could be valuable tools for marketing to prospective students.

• The calculators, intended to help students decide which colleges they can afford, sometimes will give students more than one price -- the federally mandated net price after grants, and the “out-of-pocket cost,” or the price “after all financial aid” -- including at least some loans. In some cases, the federally mandated net price disclosure is listed far below a different -- and lower -- number.

   

  Critics argue that this can encourage students to take on debt by making college appear more affordable than it actually is.
• Colleges, and the companies that create their calculators, say the opposite. They say that including the loans makes for more transparency and disclosure, and that it’s the federal requirement that is misleading, because the federal net price doesn’t capture the full scope of a financial aid package -- such as aid based on factors other than need or federal work-study. Some calculators also include a separate page to calculate the monthly payment for any recommended loans.

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• That's how she feels compelled to start a conversation about how she, a white woman with a Ph.D. in medieval history and an adjunct professor, came to rely on food stamps and Medicaid. Ms. Bruninga-Matteau, a 43-year-old single mother who teaches two humanities courses at Yavapai College, in Prescott, Ariz., says the stereotype of the people receiving such aid does not reflect reality. Recipients include growing numbers of people like her, the highly educated, whose advanced degrees have not insulated them from financial hardship.
• She never imagined that she'd end up trying to eke out a living, teaching college for poverty wages, with no benefits or job security.
• Ms. Bruninga-Matteau does not blame Yavapai College for her situation but rather the "systematic defunding of higher education." In Arizona last year, Gov. Jan Brewer, a Republican, signed a budget that cut the state's allocation to Yavapai's operating budget from $4.3-million to $900,000, which represented a 7.6 percent reduction in the college's operating budget. The cut led to an 18,000-hour reduction in the use of part-time faculty like Ms. Bruninga-Matteau
• I'm not irresponsible. I'm highly educated. I have a whole lot of skills besides knowing about medieval history, and I've had other jobs. I've never made a lot of money, but I've been able to make enough to live on. Until now."
• Last year, one in six people—almost 50 million Americans, or 15 percent of the population—received food stamps.
• Ms. Bruninga-Matteau is part of an often overlooked, and growing, subgroup of Ph.D. recipients, adjunct professors, and other Americans with advanced degrees who have had to apply for food stamps or some other form of government aid since late 2007.
• Others are trying to raise families or pay for their children's college expenses on the low and fluctuating pay they receive as professors off the tenure track, a group that now makes up 70 percent of faculties. Many bounce on and off unemployment or welfare during semester breaks. And some adjuncts have found themselves trying to make ends meet by waiting tables or bagging groceries alongside their students.
• People who don't finish college are more likely to receive food stamps than are those who go to graduate school. The rolls of people on public assistance are dominated by people with less education. Nevertheless, the percentage of graduate-degree holders who receive food stamps or some other aid more than doubled between 2007 and 2010
• During that three-year period, the number of people with master's degrees who received food stamps and other aid climbed from 101,682 to 293,029, and the number of people with Ph.D.'s who received assistance rose from 9,776 to 33,655, according to tabulations of microdata done by Austin Nichols, a senior researcher with the Urban Institute. He drew on figures from the 2008 and 2011 Current Population Surveys done by the U.S. Census Bureau and the U.S. Bureau of Labor.
• "People don't want their faces and names associated with this experience," says Karen L. Kelsky, a former tenured professor who now runs The Professor Is In, an academic-career consulting business. She also operates a fund that helps graduate students and Ph.D.'s who are struggling financially, most of whom are women with children.
• The first time we went to the office to apply, I felt like I had arrived from Eastern Europe to Ellis Island," he says. "The place was filled with people from every culture and ethnicity. We all had that same ragged, poor look in our eyes."

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• The American Anthropological Association meeting is held annually to showcase research from around the world, and like thousands of other anthropologists, I am paying to play: $650 for airfare, $400 for three nights in a "student" hotel, $70 for membership, and $94 for admission. The latter two fees are student rates. If I were an unemployed or underemployed scholar, the rates would double.
• My friend is an adjunct. She has a PhD in anthropology and teaches at a university, where she is paid $2100 per course. While she is a professor, she is not a Professor. She is, like 67 per cent of American university faculty, a part-time employee on a contract that may or may not be renewed each semester. She receives no benefits or health care.
• I have one friend who was offered $5000 per course, but he turned it down and requested less so that his children would still qualify for food stamps.
• Why is my friend, a smart woman with no money, spending nearly $2000 to attend a conference she cannot afford? She is looking for a way out. In America, academic hiring is rigid and seasonal. Each discipline has a conference, usually held in the fall, where interviews take place. These interviews can be announced days or even hours in advance, so most people book beforehand, often to receive no interviews at all.
• In most professions, salaries below the poverty line would be cause for alarm. In academia, they are treated as a source of gratitude. Volunteerism is par for the course - literally. Teaching is touted as a "calling", with compensation an afterthought. One American research university offers its PhD students a salary of $1000 per semester for the "opportunity" to design and teach a course for undergraduates, who are each paying about $50,000 in tuition. The university calls this position "Senior Teaching Assistant" because paying an instructor so far below minimum wage is probably illegal.
• It may be hard to summon sympathy for people who walk willingly into such working conditions. "Bart, don't make fun of grad students," Marge told her son on an oft-quoted episode of The Simpsons. "They just made a terrible life choice."
• But all Americans should be concerned about adjuncts, and not only because adjuncts are the ones teaching our youth. The adjunct problem is emblematic of broader trends in American employment: the end of higher education as a means to prosperity, and the severing of opportunity to all but the most privileged
• Even law, once a safety net for American strivers, is now a profession where jobs pay as little as $10,000 a year - unfeasible for all but the wealthy, and devastating for those who have invested more than $100,000 into their degrees. One after another, the occupations that shape American society are becoming impossible for all but the most elite to enter.
• Academia is vaunted for being a meritocracy. Publications are judged on blind review, and good graduate programs offer free tuition and a decent stipend. But its reliance on adjuncts makes it no different than professions that cater to the elite through unpaid internships.
• In May 2012, I received my PhD, but I still do not know what to do with it. I struggle with the closed off nature of academic work, which I think should be accessible to everyone, but most of all I struggle with the limited opportunities in academia for Americans like me, people for whom education was once a path out of poverty, and not a way into it
• And my heart broke a little when he said that, because his illusion is so touching - so revealing of the values of his generation, and so alien to the experience of mine.
• I have to say that her situation is mostly down to her, unfortunately.  Doesn't make it "OK," but she made a choice of a discipline that was going to be almost impossible to break into (stands to reason; it's pretty interesting!).
•  In fact, schools require students take courses in such areas because it is the only way to keep the professors they are paying, normally incredibly large amounts, working.  This did not "happen" to some disciplines.  It has been this way since before this woman was born.
  Just bear in mind that this is what's going on.  It's an easy gig -- and understandably, it's not easy to get one!Now, there IS a horrible story here -- and that is the crime committed by years worth of anthropology professors who taught and mentored her who did not tell her to "get out" of the discipline.  Why?  You retain your relevance at research institutions by how many Ph.D students you have.  She would have been hugely valuable to them for that purpose so they were not going to advise her to get out.

• What bothers me is that the brainless construct called market, as if it was the Oracle of Delphi, is simply and without any criticism accepted to be the rightful force that drives ultimately all value judgements and decisions in all areas including what counts as valuable profession and what contributes to society's progress. 

    

  I'll be honest: In my personal value system, anthropology, human sciences, ecological sciences rank quite high, right there with earth science and physics (my own training), but also including non-neocon macro-economics, while I see little use in all those many law schools and business schools. Sorry, Jenifer.  

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• alidity of standardized testing is questionable.
• troup has found an issue with the real-world Item Response Theory, the method used to develop the majority of standardized tests across the country.
• standardized testing has become more about a student’s ability to interpret tricky language on an exam than about how much knowledge a student actually has on the relevant material
• Stroup said if the testing isn’t accurately measuring a student’s knowledge of a subject, it is certainly unfair to hold people responsible for test results and a waste of taxpayers’ money.
• troup said the real-world IRT method uses benchmarks to determine how well students should be doing on the standardized tests and develops the tests accordingly. In the process of trying to develop an exam at a specific difficulty level, he said vendors will often choose a question because its wording is more complex and not because it actually covers more difficult material.
• The study shows the test’s question ratio is 70/30 and growing, with 70 percent of the score on a TAKS exam being about a student’s ability to “think like a gamer,” or the ability to read deceptive language. The remaining 30 percent is about other factors such as classroom instruction and class scheduling, the factors that “should show up on these tests,” Stroup said.

• This indicated that the vendor of the exam, Pearson, was aiming for a consistent distribution of test scores in each area, which Stroup said is a major issue with the test creation method.

   

• “For example, the test vendor may take 20 questions on slope and choose one because the right percentage of students get it correct,” Stroup said.

   

• Stroup said the skills necessary to do well on these exams are somewhat unknown but that whatever they are, these skills are not what instructors should be teaching students.

   

  “The test-taking profile is an ability to read tricky language, to think strategically about which one of these four letters is right. I don’t think society should be optimizing education for that.”
• He said the result is forcing teachers to make their instruction more like what is seen on the exams, forcing teachers to take classroom time simply to show students how to break up tricky exam questions so the students can score better on what the exams are actually testing them on.
    Stroup said he feels they have lost some credibility by producing such a flawed testing method.

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• While the rate of attrition may seem high, Anant Agarwal, the president of edX and a professor of computer science and engineering at MIT, points out, “if you look at the number in absolute terms, it’s as many students as might take the course in 40 years at MIT.”

• Even with almost 13 million Americans looking for work and 8 million more settling for part-time jobs, almost half the 1,361 U.S. employers surveyed in January by ManpowerGroup say they can’t find workers to fill positions. At the same time, American employers are less likely than their counterparts overseas to invest in training, the Milwaukee-based staffing company reported last month.
• To narrow the skills gap, employers are teaming up with philanthropies, governments and community colleges to develop a ready resource: their existing workforce. The practice, known as upskilling, builds on the “up from the mailroom” idea, the management philosophy that the best person for a job could be one a company already has.

• esides hospitals, factories and construction companies are reviving apprenticeships and collaborating with community colleges and each other to develop courses. The Department of Labor spends about $7 billion a year to fund jobs training and other workforce development.

  Most companies are using that support to avoid layoffs or train existing employees, said Jane Oates, assistant secretary for employment and training at the Department of Labor.

  “You get a new worker of any age who comes into a job, I don’t care how qualified they are on paper, you don’t know how they’re going to w
• Grooming incumbent workers fell out of favor with the rise of information technology and the knowledge and service economies, which created demand for highly specific skills and led to certification programs and other types of education, said Anthony Carnevale, director of the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce, in Washingto
• They’d prefer to buy the skill rather than have to make it, but the skill base in the workforce is not there,” Carnevale said.
• . The shift left many airport laborers with jobs, including operating the airport’s wheelchairs, that offered little opportunity for advancement.
• In Pennsylvania, Aker Philadelphia Shipyard (AKPS) won state help to revive a dormant apprentice program for welders last year, graduating 20 people in February. The company plans to bring 20 more on board in August, Vice President Mike Giantomaso said.

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• Two years ago Ken Cuccinelli, the freshly elected attorney general of Virginia, opened a new front on the War on Mann, serving the UVA Board of Visitors with a subpoena-like demand requiring them to produce anything and everything in the institution’s possession the scientist had touched—all emails to and from, research conducted, data and source code kept by, administrative correspondence concerning, et cetera ad nauseam—from “the period between January 1, 1999 to the present date.” Although Mann had not worked at UVA since 2006, the demand provoked widespread indignation among students, faculty members and the requisite national advocacy groups, moving the Board to amend its initial promise to comply and retain a lawyer.

• This much we all can agree on: The past several years have been difficult ones for American higher education; in every sector, major changes are afoot -- or are already under way.
• n College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be (Princeton University Press), Columbia University professor Andrew Delbanco tries his hand at answering some of the most fundamental questions about college in America: What is college for? What should college -- as distinct from university -- look like? And what on earth is to be done about it?
• This is a story in which the “elites” play a foundational role. The struggle between university values (research, pre-professional and professional training) vs. college values (education for citizenship, encouragement of reflection on ethical questions) has been fought for centuries at these institutions, and they continue to exert a disproportionate influence far beyond themselves. Teaching methodologies, curricular design, financial aid principles — all have been debated and, to a large extent, determined, in a small number of institutions whose culture thereby affects the experience of many more students than their own
• "College, more than brain-training for this or that functional task, should be concerned with character," you write. What does this mean in practical terms? What actions might be taken by a college that hopes to develop the character of its students?
• Both goals cannot be met without significantly expanding public and private investment in financial aid for students at all institutions and at all levels of need. Ultimately, it’s a matter of public commitment to the value of postsecondary education — and, unfortunately, colleges have been losing rather than gaining public respect at just the time when they depend on it more than ever.
• The impact of this shift is a good example of why the culture of elite colleges matters more than to themselves. A self-loving cadre of national leaders, convinced of their superiority to their fellow citizens as measured by tests, income, range of influential “contacts,” and so on, brings into view the kind of nightmare society that Michael Young prophesied in The Rise of the Meritocracy nearly half a century ago. We’re already headed there, and we ought to do everything possible to change direction. I try to sound this alarm in my book — but I am also encouraged by the resurgence of civic engagement among many of the “best and the brightest” in selective colleges, who, through volunteer work, or post-college programs such as Teach for America, are expressing their own alarm at what it would mean to live in a silo society in which the winners cordon themselves off from everyone else. In this respect, college always has been, and will continue to be, a battleground for the American soul.

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