By Sarah Marsh. Read the advice of our expert panel on graduate jobs in local government, and share your own ideas in the comment thread.
Ami Beeton leads the National Graduate Development Programme (NGDP)
The public sector is dynamic: Once a council has invested in a graduate they will want to retain them. In reality this is not always possible at the host authority but I think the sector still provides a challenging and dynamic place to work with a number of opportunities available for the right people. Read more...

The dream may be to walk straight into a permanent lecturer post, but for many this is unrealistic. Zara Dinnen talks about her experience of working as a school PhD tutor. The academic dream may be to walk straight from a PhD into a permanent lecturer post, but the reality is that many PhD students and early career researchers (ECRs) find themselves looking outside universities for work.
In the final year of my PhD a colleague emailed me about The Brilliant Club (TBC), a non-profit organisation that helps to widen access to top universities for outstanding pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds. As a PhD tutor at TBC, you go into secondary schools to deliver university-style tutorials to small groups of primary and secondary school pupils. You accompany students on university trips and talk to them about the university experience as a whole. Throughout the programme, you're trained, supported and encouraged to feel engaged in the working practices of the organisation. Read more...

By Laura Sjoberg. “My main job [as an assistant professor at insert-flyover-university-here] is advising presidential policy on public religious life.” I actually heard a Ph.D. tell his neighbor that on an airplane.
I know that there might be more worthwhole topics for my first post in months (I haven’t been a total slacker, I have been doing some programming), but none is more pressing …
I have made back-to-back trips to conferences (first ISA and then MPSA) this week, and have connected through Atlanta each time, providing me with the rare opportunity to ride the airplane with other political scientists who I do not know personally.
In these journeys, I have realized that political scientists are weird animals, and we say dumb things to strangers on airplanes. More examples below the fold.
I know that we are rarely let out of our university worlds, and even more rarely let out in packs. But that seems to be no excuse for losing our brains. And, through careful study, I have identified a number of ways we lose our brains on airplanes. Read more...

By Adam Kotsko. First, you need to read good books. To get the most out of those books, you need to talk about them with other people who are also trying to work their way through them. In addition, you need to write about them in a disciplined and focused way. Both of these tasks require supervision and guidance by more experienced learners — preferably those who have already gone through an educational program that takes both discussion and written analysis to the highest level.
Second, for some types of skills — such as language acquisition, mathematical manipulation, and technical lab skills — there’s no way around requiring carefully targetted and supervised exercises. Preferably, these exercises would be developed and overseen by someone with a high degree of technical proficiency and experience in the field in question, as such a person would have the best view of which skills were most valuable.
Finally, for command of facts, limited use of rote memorization can provide a baseline, but the main focus should be on learning how best to search for information and assess the trustworthiness of the sources found. All of this is best done in close dialogue with someone who has a lot of experience with research. Read more...

By Rebecca Schuman. Getting a literature Ph.D. will turn you into an emotional trainwreck, not a professor. Who wouldn’t want a job where you only have to work five hours a week, you get summers off, your whole job is reading and talking about books, and you can never be fired? Such is the enviable life of the tenured college literature professor, and all you have to do to get it is earn a Ph.D. So perhaps you, literature lover, are considering pursuing this path.
Well, what if I told you that by “five hours” I mean “80 hours,” and by “summers off” I mean “two months of unpaid research sequestration and curriculum planning”? What if you’ll never have time to read books, and when you talk about them, you’ll mostly be using made-up words like “deterritorialization” and “Othering”—because, as Ron Rosenbaum pointed out recently, the “dusty seminar rooms” of academia have the chief aim of theorizing every great book to death? Read more...

By Sean Nyhan. “Why is it that internationals are always at a disadvantage?” This was the question posed by a prospective student from India, reflecting on the application process to American universities. Written in the MIT “admissions blog,” the student’s full comment will offer more perspective:
“In my case, the testing cost alone is more than $230, which is a huge cost…as I’m in India, there’s an additional…‘security surcharge to test in India and Pakistan’ of $22. And I’m not exactly rich. Add to that, some universities don’t even offer application fee waivers for international applicants. So why is it that internationals are always at a disadvantage?? Fortunately MIT offers application fee waivers for international students.”
International student testimonies, like the above, make it clear that costs incurred during the application process are sometimes not routine. Application fees, standardized testing, and the translation and mailing of transcripts can stretch students beyond financial comfort.
Like MIT, the University of Chicago also allows international students to apply for an application fee waiver, “If your family makes less than or around $75,000 a year” – well beyond average annual household income in the developing world. However, they are a minority, and even the notion that international students can face financial disadvantage shares no consensus among admissions professionals. In contrast to MIT’s practice, for instance, the neighboring University of Massachusetts approaches international students much differently:
“Since international students must verify that they have adequate finances to pay for their education, requesting a fee waiver indicates that they do not have adequate finances and therefore would not be able to enroll. For this reason, we do not waive application fees for international students.”
As these conflicting policies make clear, not only does no standardized system exist to exempt international students from application fees – similar to the “application fee waiver” developed by NACAC and College Board for disadvantaged American students – but vastly different perceptions of America’s international student community exist as well. Read more...

By Aaron Smith. As total student debt passed $1 trillion last year, more than 35 percent of repaying borrowers under age 30 were at least 90 days late on their payments. The first three months of 2013 were the worst on record for student loan defaults. A college education still pays, but rising tuition, low graduation rates and burgeoning debt levels are pushing postsecondary credentials out of reach for too many students. Meanwhile, the government is expecting to earn a $34 billion dollar profit on federal loans next year. Read more...