Apt. 11D

The Price of Prestige, Exposure, A Line on the Resume

In AlJazeera English, Sarah Kendzior writes about a $22,000 internship at the U.N. No, they aren't paying interns $22,000. The intern pays the U.N. $22,000 to “gain inside knowledge of just how the UN really operates.”

Pacific-Standard reports on a study that examined economists' desire to publish in highly prestigious journals. No academic journal pays its authors for their work, but there is a pecking order among these journals for prestige. They sent a questionnaire to fellow economists and asked them, " If a medicine existed that would give them a day-long surge in brainpower—enough to formulate an article good enough for one of four major journals—would they take it? If so, would they still do so if they knew it would slightly reduce their lifespan?"

Yes, economists would shorten their lifespans, if they would be guaranteed an article in a top-tier journal. They would be willing to shorten their lifespans by nearly a year for that money-less honor. Of course, there are indirect monetary benefits from publishing in a prestigious journal. You can bumped up the academic payscale with a promotion, but the types of people who get published in those journals are already at the top of the pay scale and have tenure. 

I have not necessarily made the best career decisions over my lifetime. I always seem to lean towards jobs that provide prestige and not so much money. With all my career fluctuations, I'm stuck in the "paying dues" job phase and never made it to the "gravy train" phase. So, I understand the need for low paying, prestigious work, but I'm trying very hard to be more rational about my work efforts. 

Some of these unpaid internships and honorific jobs are a result of the crappy economy. Post-college kids need to get something on their resume, other than their summer job at Wendy's. But the economists in the Pacific-Standard story aren't suffering like that. Where's the rational actor in all this? 

NYU's Expansion Plan

I haven't been paying enough attention to the craziness at NYU, but maybe I should. 

Did you know that adjuncts make up 50-70 percent of the faculty at NYU? And tuition and fees = $60,000. 

The Haves and The Have-Nots of Academia

Last week, I tweeted a link to a Slate article entitled, "Thesis Hatement: Getting a literature Ph.D. will turn you into an emotional trainwreck, not a professor." A friend responded, "is it really as bad as that?" 

Let's just talk about salary disparities for the moment. An article in today's Times has some nice numbers. 

For the academic elite — tenured professors at private research universities — average pay this year is $167,118, while at public research universities such professors earn $123,393, according to the annual report by the American Association of University Professors.

But public college professors aren't making that. 

Average pay for assistant professors at private colleges that award only bachelor’s degrees is $62,763, while public colleges paid $58,591.

And what about the non-tenured faculty?

... this year’s report includes data from a Coalition on the Academic Workforce survey of more than 10,000 part-time faculty members, finding that their median pay per course in 2010 was $2,700.

$2,700 per class. If you teach seven classes per year, that's $18,900. 

The article ended with an interview with Terry Hartle, the senior vice president of the American Council on Education. The move towards shifting the teaching load to the migrant laborers of academia didn't really bother him. That's was just part of the trend. He was most concerned about the disparity between tenured faculty at public colleges and private and research colleges. Because these organizations and unions only care about tenured faculty. 

There's been lots of talk about MOOCs and online college education in the past year. I contributed to the discussion pretty early on, and as a result, I get press releases from ed-tech companies nearly every day now. Awesome. 

But that's not the real big story in academia right now. The story is that a whole lot of house elves are doing the teaching work, and some day, they are going to get really pissed off. 

Assortive Sorting at Princeton

[Too much great stuff to blog about today. Not sure where to start. I also woke up in the middle of night thinking of an outline of a book. I predict a bad parenting day.]

I just LOVED Ross Douthat's op-ed in the NYT .  

Douthat begins by talking about a Princeton alum who told current students to hurry up and find a man, because they'll never find such a huge group of smart guys again. 

Her betrayal consists of being gauche enough to acknowledge publicly a truth that everyone who’s come up through Ivy League culture knows intuitively — that elite universities are about connecting more than learning, that the social world matters far more than the classroom to undergraduates, and that rather than an escalator elevating the best and brightest from every walk of life, the meritocracy as we know it mostly works to perpetuate the existing upper class.

You know that assortive mating is one of the leading theories for the rise in autism rates. Just saying.

Douthat's article doesn't really go beyond a crack at Ivy League elites, but I'm going with that. That's enough for me. 

Jezebel points to some of the assinine comments on the article. 

Packaging the Teenager

I have a lot of sympathies to Suzy Lee Weiss, who's op-ed about the artificiality of the college admissions racket is still getting lots of attention. 

Like me, millions of high-school seniors with sour grapes are asking themselves this week how they failed to get into the colleges of their dreams. It's simple: For years, they—we—were lied to.

Colleges tell you, "Just be yourself." That is great advice, as long as yourself has nine extracurriculars, six leadership positions, three varsity sports, killer SAT scores and two moms. Then by all means, be yourself! If you work at a local pizza shop and are the slowest person on the cross-country team, consider taking your business elsewhere.

Although there aren't enough activities for kids like Ian, there never seems to be enough teenagers volunteering to help out. His swimming class is so packed with volunteers that sometimes there are more volunteers than diabled kids in the pool. Same goes with his art classes and bowling league. At the library, there are always more volunteer tutors than kids who need help. 

Why? Because teenagers need stuff to put on the college resume. Some of the volunteers genuinely want to help and are awesome kids; others not so much. 

Suzy doesn't want to do fake-volunteering and doesn't have a Tiger Mom to push her to do this stuff. Does she deserve a spot at Penn anyway? 

Lower Teaching Loads and College Tuition

A new report by the Education Sector finds that the rise of college in tuition is related to a decline in faculty teaching loads. 

Not sure about that. Adjunct professors, who have made up the teaching gap, are pretty cheap. 

The Talented Poor and the Barriers to Elite Colleges

Much has been written about a new study by Caroline Hoxby and Christopher Avery, which found that talented, poor kids are not graduating from elite colleges at the same levels as rich kids. The New York Times reports, 

Only 34 percent of high-achieving high school seniors in the bottom fourth of income distribution attended any one of the country’s 238 most selective colleges, according to the analysis, conducted by Caroline M. Hoxby of Stanford and Christopher Avery of Harvard, two longtime education researchers. Among top students in the highest income quartile, that figure was 78 percent.

This  is great research, which provides awesome data. It brought national attention to a topic that's important to me. The next step in the research should be qualitative. Someone actually needs to talk to these kids to find out why they don't apply to elite colleges and what changes need to be made to get that kid from Camden into the lecture hall at Harvard. 

My guess is that some kids aren't going to elite colleges, because of an information gap. They don't know about those schools and don't realize that they will get substantial discounts on tuition. They don't have the same information networks that exist in wealthy suburban neighborhood. No high school provides great information about colleges to their students, except for the fancy private schools, but kids in suburban areas learn about college rankings, safety schools, SAT test prep centers, and the benefits of padding the application with phony after-school activities from peers and the communtiy. Poor kids don't get that. 

I think that poor kids are also not applying to far-off elite colleges, because they don't want to. Their networks and their community are local. They don't want to throw themselves into a vastly different culture, where they don't have the right clothes and don't share the same cultural references. 

But these are just my guesses. I would love to run me some focus groups.  

Academia. What Next?

Check out Michael Bérubé's Humanities Unraveled and Timothy Burke's Late Afternoon of the (Academic) Elites.

So here the debate stands: We need to remake our programs from the ground up to produce teachers and researchers and something elses, but since it is not clear what those something elses might be, we haven't begun to rethink the graduate curriculum accordingly. (Anyway, we're not trained to do that! All we know how to do is to be professors!)

I don't see any sign that academia is reforming itself. The number of exploited workers continues to grow, and unfair elitism has intensified. Tuition keeps rising. I honestly don't know where it's all going. I guess I'm just happy to be watching all this unfold from the outside. 

 

Relevant: Megan McArdle's American New Mandarins. 

Why Women Drop Out of PhD Programs

From an article in the Guardian.

Young women scientists leave academia in far greater numbers than men for three reasons. During their time as PhD candidates, large numbers of women conclude that (i) the characteristics of academic careers are unappealing, (ii) the impediments they will encounter are disproportionate, and (iii) the sacrifices they will have to make are great...

Women more than men see great sacrifice as a prerequisite for success in academia. This comes in part from their perception of women who have succeeded, from the nature of the available role models. Successful female professors are perceived by female PhD candidates as displaying masculine characteristics, such as aggression and competitiveness, and they were often childless.

As if all this were not enough, women PhD candidates had one experience that men never have. They were told that they would encounter problems along the way simply because they are women. They are told, in other words, that their gender will work against them.

So, outright sexism and a hostile work environment are pushing women out of academia. Nice. 

AP Classes On Trial

A couple of weeks ago, I posted a quick link to an article in the New York Times that reported that Darmouth College had stopped accepting the credits for high school AP classes. I added a quick "good," after the link. A friend has been grilling me about my reaction to the article, and we've had an interesting back and forth about the benefits of AP classes. I thought I would open up the debate on the blog. 

I have no direct experience with AP classes. My kids are too young for them, and my high school only offerred AP Biology when I was in school. My reaction came from the perspective of a former college professor.

I am skeptical whether a high school class would have the same rigor and expectations of a college class. Elite high schools might provide the equivilent of a college class, but there is too much variation in high schools across the country. I also thought that these classes did not benefit the student, who would skip necessary introductory classes in college and be unprepared for the requirements of upper level college classes. 

My friend thought that AP classes helped students control college costs. His own experiences with AP classes were very positive, and he felt that they were the equivilent of an introductory college class. 

Curious what the Apt. 11D gang thinks about this.