By Joshua Kim. This February we will pack up the car and leave our small NH town for an 6-day campus tour roadshow. 8 campus tours booked. 8 info sessions arranged.
Our future class of 2019 daughter will be listening closely to the campus tour guide, checking out the classrooms, sampling the food, and investigating the student center and athletic facilities. Read more...
By Barbara Fister. As I mentioned last week, I’m working with a group of liberal arts college librarians to explore the question of whether we can contribute something valuable to the open access movement by founding a press. (It's not too late to tell us what you think. Scholars, we have a survey for that, and it's open for a few more days.) This puts participating librarians on the horns of a dilemma because it would involve taking money that we use to provide our local communities access to published scholarship in order to publish scholarship anyone can access. The practical and the ideal are in direct competition for resources. Read more...
By Eric Stoller. Sometimes a blog is like a giant basket of thoughts. Today's post is really a combination of thoughts and ideas that have been bouncing around in my head (and onto Twitter). First and foremost, I need to share Chris Schmidt's lovely thought from Twitter. With so many negative tweets being shared across the 140 character-sphere, it's nice to see Chris' positivity shining through. I wish more senior student affairs officers would post stuff like this. No actual agenda or strategy...just a great thought to start the day. Read more...
By Katie Shives. One of the best aspects of earning a graduate degree is obtaining a high level of specialization in niche areas of academia. However, this specialization can lead to a somewhat limited view of total career prospects with a graduate degree. Even though many of us have focused down to one or two areas so that we have well-developed skill-sets for our academic niche, making the jump to employment outside of academia can be difficult without knowing what to expect next. One action that graduate students can take is conducting informational interviews with individuals employed in areas where you might want to work after graduation. Read more...
By Erin Bedford. If you’re currently doing a PhD in a STEM field and don’t intend on staying in academia, you’re not alone. In many fields, the number of graduates from PhD programs is growing faster than the number of tenure-track positions, to the point of many questioning how long the current system will last. Governments and universities are realizing this and are working to help get PhD students the skills they need to be successful outside of the ivory tower, but it’s important for you to take charge of your career path and to take advantage of what’s offered. Getting a PhD gives you a spectacular set of skills. Read more...
By Matt Reed. Has anyone out there figured out how to quantify the number of students who would have signed up for a given class if seats were available?
We don’t have a system for waiting lists, which would be the most obvious way. I’m told, by people who have worked in places that had waiting lists, that they’re nightmares to manage. Apparently, when the waitlists are automated, students will game the system by signing up for far more classes than they actually intend to take, and then cobbling together the most amenable schedule they can at the last minute. As a result, the waitlists are full of people who don’t really mean it. And if you put them in automatically and force them to back out again when they’re clogging the system, you create a manual processing nightmare in financial aid. Read more...
By Matt Reed. The latest from the Community College Research Center -- “Community College Economics for Policymakers: The One Big Fact and The One Big Myth” by Clive Belfield and Davis Jenkins -- is a must-read. Belfield and Jenkins argue that current policy debates around community colleges are misguided because they fail to account for one big fact and they incorrectly believe one big myth. The big fact is that the personal and social returns on investment in community college education are substantial and growing. The big myth is that community college’s financial troubles are the result of inefficiency. Read more...
By Matt Reed. Libby Nelson, of Politico, asked the other day on Twitter why it is that graduation rates at two-year for-profit colleges are higher than at community colleges, even though graduation rates at four-year for-profit colleges lag their public counterparts.
The standard move would be to explain why graduation rates are a poor measure of community colleges, especially when those rates are based only on the IPEDS cohort (first-time, full-time, degree-seeking students, who are a distinct minority of our student body). And that’s true, as far as it goes. But there’s more to it than that. Read more...
By . The first assignment of the semester always generates cries of dismay. I use the full range of numbers available to me in my grading rubric and most students earn scores that, if they were correlated to a conventional letter grading scale, would end up being a high D or low C. "Pay no attention to what the letter grade would be!" I exhort them. "The grading rubric is a guide to help you build on your strengths and recognize your weaknesses--it's a tool, not a label of your worth as a student and human being. Let the numbers guide you as you rewrite the paper, and you'll do much better on the next version." More...
By Bardiac. As most semesters approach, I get several emailed questions asking (politely) if I'm okay with students using e texts in my classes. This is especially common with Shakespeare.
I hate them using etexts for Shakespeare.
First, they want to use the totally free etexts, which seem based on 19th century editions (they're free because they're long out of copyright). But they don't really get any information about the 19th century editions, which often come with no glossing, no line numbers, and editing choices that made sense in the 19th century, but which are very different from the choices editors make now.
So there's always that delay of a few seconds while the etext folks try to figure out where we are based on asking someone to read them a line. More...
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