By Jonathan Thon - The Black Hole. Last week Dave wrote a post on how universities can begin keeping track of graduate student and postdoctoral fellow outcomes. With blogs such as “100 reasons not to go to graduate school” popping up online, as well as many articles increasingly critical of the state of higher education, it warrants that prospective students think long and hard about pursuing a career in academia. It is therefore imperative that accurate and unbiased information be available for each stage of academic career advancement for every field. One solution with which I wholly agree is that academics publicly disclose the career progression of their former trainees online, and pursuant to this theme I wanted to make our readers aware of a fact-finding survey by the Chronicle of Higher Education titled the Ph.D. Placement Project. More...

By Melonie Fullick. Later this week I’m going to be on a panel about the inescapable subject of MOOCs, so for this post I’m thinking through an issue I’ve been noticing since I last wrote a big post on this topic, which was during the peak of the media mayhem in July 2012. For many of those researching higher education, even those who’ve been doing it for just a few years as I have, the ongoing hyperbolic MOOC debate that has hijacked the higher ed news has been quite frustrating. Of course, there is plenty of bluster on both sides of this debate. But it’s really troubling to see many perfectly legitimate criticisms reduced to straw-person arguments about “faculty fear“ (“those teachers just don’t want to lose their jobs!”), or about how those who are skeptical must be “against accessibility”. More...

By Melonie Fullick. The Times Higher Ed in the UK had a hit this past week, regarding the issue of doctoral supervision, with an article by Tara Brabazon titled “10 truths a PhD supervisor will never tell you”. Worth noting alongside that one is a recent article by Leonard Cassuto that appeared in the USA’s Chronicle of Higher Education, regarding doctoral attrition, which has long been notoriously high (at least in the United States – an average of around 40-50 percent). Attrition rates in Canada are, as far as I know, not generally available though some numbers from eight of the “U-15″ were published in this article from Margin Notes blog (and a longer discussion of completion rates and times to completion is here). More...

By Melonie Fullick. I first came across the term Critical University Studies (CUS) when it was mentioned in a 2012 Chronicle of Higher Ed article by Jeffrey J. Williams. The likely reason I hadn’t heard of this “emerging field” was that it seems the name hadn’t been used very much before, other than by Williams and Heather Steffen as discussed in the article – though Christopher Newfield has been described as one of the scholars who “helped to found” the field. Because the term wasn’t coming up in the framing of daily discussions I’d been seeing and papers I’d been reading about the critique of academe, I didn’t think about CUS again until recently, when a colleague in the UK, Dr. Martin Paul Eve, wrote to me about a project he’s working on that addresses some similar issues (he also wrote this blog post). Since my name was being connected to the aforementioned emerging field, I figured I’d better look more closely at what’s been said about it. More...

By Melonie Fullick. Recently, the American Historical Association (AHA) posted a policy statement that caused some controversy among academics, because of its recommendation that universities should allow junior scholars the option of a 6-year embargo on electronic publication of their dissertations.
The argument goes that younger or early career researchers (ECRs) need the option of an embargo because widely-available dissertations might not be acceptable to publishers in book form. Some universities make it mandatory for students to submit their dissertations to an open online database, so the embargo would ensure that ECRs have the option of keeping their research private until it’s ready for publication. Read more...

By Jo VanEvery. Everyone knows that you have to publish. And yet, many academics struggle. Even if you don’t struggle with the actual writing, you may find it hard to submit your work. Sometimes your fears about submitting lead you to publish in not quite the right places, affecting your ability to secure a tenure-track job, a grant, or a promotion.
Why are you publishing?
I have noticed that many of the conversations about publishing are focused on those secondary outcomes: hiring, promotion, grants. It’s as if publishing were like those cards the coffee shop gives you: 10 stamps and you get a free coffee; write articles for X number of publications and you’ll get a job/promotion/grant. More...

By Jo VanEvery. This is a post for those readers who are starting something new this fall:

• a PhD program
• a tenure-track job
• a new role like director of graduate studies, head of department, etc.

Although you may have officially started already, it is the beginning of the fall semester that will feel like the real beginning. More...

By Léo Charbonneau. Last November, the New York Times declared 2012 the Year of the MOOC. Now, halfway through 2013, the MOOC momentum appears to be slowing – or, at least, shifting in a new direction. Some higher education observers go further, claiming the MOOC “revolution” is over.
For the uninitiated, MOOCs are massive open online courses generally offered free of charge by professors at elite universities to tens of thousands of people at a time. They are also a source of much breathless hyperbole about being a “game changer” or “creative disruptor” or “tsunami” that will sweep away traditional university campuses. More...

By Léo Charbonneau. The media are biased in their coverage of higher education in Canada, favouring universities over colleges. That was the contention of Anne Sado, president of George Brown College in Toronto, speaking at the Worldviews 2013 conference on media and higher education held at the University of Toronto near the end of June. “I’m not here to challenge whether university or college education is better,” said Ms. Sado. However, “I do feel there is bias around coverage between universities and colleges.”
Ms. Sado was speaking as part of a panel discussion, alongside University of Toronto President David Naylor and journalists Simona Chiose, education editor at the Globe and Mail, and Louise Brown, education reporter at the Toronto Star. More...

By Léo Charbonneau. Statistics Canada’s recent release of education data from the 2011 National Household Survey had many journalists, public policy analysts and others scrambling to interpret how the country is doing in this important area. Among the key findings: women are earning degrees in ever greater numbers, including in the STEM disciplines, while most apprenticeships are still held by men. There was also much analysis of unemployment rates by level of education. The story is a positive one: generally, the higher your level of education, the lower your chances of being unemployed. The lock-step nature of this relationship is quite remarkable. More...