By Katie Allen. Despite what Osborne says, many people with degrees are being forced to take low-skilled roles away from their expertise. One of the many things George Osborne is likely to hail in his autumn statement on Thursday is the long-awaited recovery in Britain's jobs market. More...
08 décembre 2013
Britain's economic recovery failing to boost graduate job prospects
Why have academics been so slow to work with students on sustainability?
Simon Kemp asks what is preventing academics and students going green together given the obvious wins when they do. Earlier this year the National Union of Students (NUS) awarded 25 student unions a share of £5m over two years through the Hefce funded Students' Green Fund to develop high impact sustainability projects for the benefit of local communities and students themselves. More...
UK ranks above US for research quality in government report
By Claire Shaw. BIS study finds UK producing less academic research in science, mathematics and engineering than a decade ago. The UK is producing less research in science, mathematics and engineering than a decade ago, but has surpassed the US to be ranked first for its research quality, according to a new report. More...
L’échec progresse en licence
Blog Educpros de Pierre Dubois. Note d’information de la DEPP, Réussite et échec en premier cycle (Samuel Fouquet, octobre 2013). En 2010-2011, 41% des bacheliers 2008 entrés en L1 étaient en 3ème année de licence, après deux années réussies sans encombre. Les bacheliers 2002-2004 avaient fait mieux : le taux d’accès à la L3 était de 43%. Le taux a dû encore se dégrader dans les promotions suivantes de bacheliers (bacheliers professionnels plus nombreux à l’université, conséquence de la réforme du bac pro en 3 ans au lieu de 4). Le plan Licence a échoué, mais cela tout le monde le savait déjà. Et maintenant que fait-on pour changer la donne ? On change seulement les intitulés des formations (projet d’arrêté sur le cadre national des formations) ? On rend encore plus illisible et inefficace le dispositif Admission post-bac ? Suite de l'article...
What If I Paid You To Study In The Library?
By Brian Mathews. If I paid you to study in the library you would likely take me up on the offer. And if I paid you and your group to study there together, then you would definitely use the library more often. That’s the gist of a recent economics study: Letting Down the Team? Social Effects of Team Incentives. More...
WordFlow for Distraction-Free Editing
By Amy Cavender. Writing — it’s one of the things we do a lot, and many of us here at ProfHacker are often on the lookout for new tools that can help us with the writing task. One of the most essential tools (other than some good ideas, of course!) for getting the writing task done is a good text editor. We’ve covered text editors before, of course, and have been particularly fond of plain-text editors, whose power Lincoln reminded us of last year. We also like being able to access our files from anywhere, so some of the editors we’ve looked at have been online: Jason introduced us to TextDrop, and George called our attention to Drive Notepad. More...
The Rise of the Machines Edition
By Erin E. Templeton. We at ProfHacker like books. Apparently so do many of you. The New York Times ran an article earlier this week about the “Allure of the print book.” Esquire followed with “The Revenge of the Printed Book.” Newsweek, which ended print circulation last year in favor of pure digital circulation, has announced that it will resume hard copy in February 2014. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos announced Amazon Prime Air this week that consumers may begin to receive their purchases via drone as early and June 2015. Not to be outdone, UPS announced that they too are working on entering the drone delivery market. The New York Times reports that Google is also getting into the robot game. Slate claims that the drone-delievery idea is “hot air,” perhaps akin to those jetpacks we were promised in my youth . . . In a separate article, Slate takes a rather different tack by claiming, “Birds will attack delivery drones.” More...
There’s No Business Like Edubusiness
By Allison M. Vaillancourt. You may have gotten a Ph.D. because, like Lloyd Dobler, you didn’t want to “sell anything, buy anything, or process anything.” But if you think you can avoid the corporate world by going into college teaching (or kickboxing), think again, says Jeanne Zaino, a political-science professor at Iona College, with tongue firmly in cheek. Those people in your class who you thought were students are customers shelling out big bucks, who you must therefore please, she writes. Zaino offers a few tips for Ph.D.’s on navigating this brave new corporate world of higher ed. Read more...A Sense of Camaraderie
By George David Clark. November can be a long month for academic job seekers, perhaps the time when academe seems coldest. With several fields holding their national conferences shortly after the holidays, many applicants will know in these first weeks of December if they will have an opportunity to interview. Until then we wait and practice the morbid algebra of the market: x ads minus y internal candidates, divided by the number of qualified applicants equals … well, it’s not pretty. In the anonymous space of job wikis or the comments streams of The Chronicle’s blogs, job seekers seem suspicious, jaded, angry, arrogant, and entitled by turns, but more than anything else our worrying strikes me as deeply lonely, quick to pit the individual against a faceless system. It’s when I read our posts that I feel most isolated from my peers and colleagues.By contrast, I had a profound experience of community in my field this past July when I participated in the annual Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Read more...When the Old Rules for Success No Longer Apply
By Allison M. Vaillancourt. A friend of mine who recently assumed her first senior-level position asked to schedule some talk time to discuss the topic of organizational politics. She has moved around and up through the years and has generally been regarded as a superstar wherever she’s been. But what worked in the past doesn’t seem to be working now, and she’s having trouble making sense of her new organization’s culture—and, more important, what it takes to succeed in her new role. Read more...
