“Don’t go, you pathetic loser!”

Karen Gregory has a great post up responding to the ubiquitous advice columns discouraging people from going to grad school.

There are many reasons why these screeds of “Don’t go! Graduate School will ruin your life” leave me wanting to kick the wall. Yes, things suck. I make no bones about that, but these screeds overlook the work that students are doing to organize, agitate, and resist the restructuring of higher education. And this oversight raises the question: if you realized the Pannapacker “Truth,” then did you then get involved in your union, in an activist group, in an education alternative (like the Free University), or in a conversation with your students? When did you start realizing that a career in academics also means addressing the very conditions of our labor? What have you done besides comparing the kind of tenacity it takes to be a graduate student today to being a willful smoker who smokes “four packs a day” and hopes to not get cancer?

As one used to say in the heroic era of blogging: read the whole thing.

So…. assessment

Through grad school and my visiting position at Kalamazoo, I was blissfully shielded from the idea of assessment. The veil was lifted when I came to Shimer, and I must confess that after our first meeting to discuss the issue, I was horrified. I remain suspicious of the “education reform” movement in general, but I have come to think that assessment — at least as it is conceived by Shimer’s accrediting body — might not be a bad thing. If I imagine that I’d never heard of Arne Duncan or charter schools and someone came up to me and suggested that my school might want to clarify its goals, gather information about how it’s doing in meeting those goals, and change its practices if it’s not working, I would find it hard to object. It bears a cost in terms of time and energy — but then so does plugging away at something that’s not working. Paying a reasonable number of hours up front in terms of data collection seems like a reasonable “hedge” against wasting countless hours on a pointless boondoggle.

One concern, particularly in liberal arts circles, surrounds the numerical aspect of assessment. I share the skepticism that numbers can really “capture” what we do, but we already use numerical forms of assessment all the time — we just mostly translate them into alphabetical form.

What is the business model for online education?

I should be clear: I believe that online education has only a very narrow ideal application (i.e., for literal shut-ins or for people stuck in Antarctica). There are more than enough classrooms and instructors to go around nearly everywhere in the US — indeed, colleges are constantly building new satellite campuses to compete with each other. The only benefit is an economic one, namely to create economies of scale. Yet every single credible piece of evidence in higher education research strongly supports the (completely intuitive) idea that high-quality education simply cannot be “scaled up.” Education is something that’s best carried out with some balance between small groups and one-on-one contact with an instructor.

Now it’s not as though most universities are following the ideal practice in any case. Large lecture classes are already essentially “distance learning.” So just from a totally cynical standpoint, one could begin to discuss whether the economic gains are likely to be enough to make up for the loss in quality of an already low-quality model (i.e., the large lecture class that remains a staple of mainstream higher ed despite the overwhelming evidence against its efficacy).

Let’s begin by bracketing the question of whether the money saved is likely to be well-spent — that’s pretty much a lost cause. But even if we start from the proposition that increasing revenue is an unalloyed good in itself, it’s still unclear how online education is supposed to do that.

Student loans are not the next housing bubble

This article is making the rounds, and similar sentiments have been expressed periodically in the last several years: student loans, we are to believe, are the next subprime mortgage. The obvious implication is that they will cause another ruinous financial crisis. I share the concern surrounding ballooning student loans — my current balance is no slouch, and I am haunted by the question as a faculty member at a small liberal arts college — but this approach is economically illiterate and misleadingly sensationalistic.

Student loans cannot conceivably cause a 2008-style financial crisis.

But seriously, folks…

I really do think that what we think of as a good academic job is a desirable and flexible model for all labor. I’m not thinking of the paradise of teaching one advanced seminar every three years while giving sold-out lecture tours, etc., etc. — but a job with a reasonable teaching load, some support for research, and a non-toxic administrative environment where faculty actually has some say in things.

If we viewed the good academic job as a model, what we’d have is first of all a non-totalitarian work environment.

The theory of the “shadow resume”: A tip for grad students

There are a few facts that every graduate student must come to terms with:

• Adjunct teaching is exploitative.
• There’s a very real possibility that one will ultimately be unable to find a suitable academic position.
• Having a PhD can seriously hurt one’s “civilian” employment prospects.

I developed a strategy to address all these problems simultaneously, which I called the “shadow resume.”

Rejection letters for dummies

While we see a lot of advice for people on the job market, it is much more rare to see tips for people on the other side of the process. This is a shame, as poor execution on the side of the hiring institution can cause significant unnecessary emotional distress. While there is a lot that could be changed, I’d like to start by providing tips for one of the most common documents produced by academic departments: rejection letters. It’s a delicate moment, to be sure, but I think many common practices, even well-intended ones, make the situation worse. As such, here is my advice:

Class and Academia: On cultivating a sense of entitlement

David Brooks’s column today is, like all his columns, cynical and manipulative — in this case, because he dismisses concerns about Mitt Romney’s experience as CEO as irrelevant to his likely performance as a president, but then lists desiderata that clearly lead one to conclude that Romney is the man for the job (as opposed to Obama, the insecure social climber). Nevertheless, he does manage to get at something true here:

First, successful presidents tend to be emotionally secure. They have none of the social resentments and desperate needs that plagued men like Richard Nixon. Instead they were raised, often in an aristocratic family, with a sense that they were the natural leaders of the nation. They were infused, often at an elite prep school, with a sense of obligation and responsibility to perform public service.

While the last sentence is probably a little over-optimistic, I do think he’s pointing toward a little-discussed consequence of class division, namely, the “emotional overhead” of being lower class. And I think this is particularly relevant in academia, where many young academics are making a shift in class status.

Here I can draw on my own experience. I was a first-generation college graduate.

No one expects the Academic Job Market

My Twitter feed is replete with complaints about preparing academic job applications, and it occurred to me that I could provide a valuable public service by opening up a forum to discuss the common yet vague requirements for such job applications. Possible topics for discussion include the following:

• What should go in my cover letter?
• What counts as “evidence of teaching effectiveness”?
• How do I go about writing an effective teaching statement or research agenda?
• How can I tell whether a job listing is a sincerely open search or an empty formality that will end in an inside hire?
• Why in the world does every postdoc application process require slightly different materials such that I need to rewrite everything every single time?
• How can I best balance my desire to save money with my need to cling to some shred of hope when weighing whether to just go ahead and sign up for three years of Interfolio up front?
• Why does God hate young academics so much?

Advice columns I’d like to see

Job market advice columns are a mainstay at Inside Higher Ed. Today’s contribution to the genre discusses the ways you can make yourself stand out by responding specifically to the job ad rather than sending out a generic letter to every school. I was actually surprised to learn that a lot of people really do send out generic application packets to every school — though I understand the motivations behind it, it strikes me as unlikely to be a successful technique. For my part, I customized every cover letter I’ve sent out (nearly 100!). The results speak for themselves: over the course of three years, I got a couple preliminary interviews and one job offer. Go and do likewise, young academics!

What I’d like to see is an advice column for shaping job postings. We have more than enough supply-side advice — it’s time to work on the demand side as well.