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By Katy Meyers. The graduate school job market outlook is frightening. The top option when searching “PhD job market” online is an article titled “The Ph.D. Bust: America's Awful Market for Young Scientists.” That’s not very optimistic, and the article argues that not only will 35% of graduate students with PhDs not get a job, but the situation is getting worse each year. Another article, “12 Reasons Not to Get a PhD,” argues that the degree takes too long, has left almost 34,000 PhDs on food stamps, and the job prospects within or outside of academia are diminishing. Read more...

By Matt Reed. Over at the Chronicle, Jeff Selingo has a strange little piece calling for getting rid of tuition remission benefits for “faculty brats.”  The argument is twofold: tuition benefits for the children of faculty are regressive, he asserts, since they apply to full-timers but not to adjuncts; and they contribute to a certain blindness on campus to the reality of tuition increases.  In his words, the benefit “smacks of an entitled ivory tower,” and therefore offends a sense of fairness. To which I say, it’s a case of asking the wrong question. Selingo never uses or acknowledges the term, but “employee discounts” are common across many industries. They aren’t considered elitist or scandalous there. Read more...

By Matt Reed. Every so often I’ll hear something that doesn’t especially resonate in the moment, but that won’t let go of my brain. It sort of sinks its claws in until I finally deal with it. That happened a little over a week ago at a conference at UMass. The topic of the panel was helping transfer students succeed. It featured a speaker from HCC -- Mark Broadbent, our transfer counselor -- as well as transfer counselors from several nearby four-year colleges and universities. Much of the discussion was pretty much what I had anticipated: the importance of aligning coursework as early as possible, helping students set reasonable and realistic expectations, and the like. Read more...

By Matt Reed. I have to admit liking this idea a lot, even though I’m having trouble imagining how it would work.  Henry Ford Community College, in Michigan, has announced that starting next year, it will refrain from cancelling classes for low enrollment.  (It will retain the right to cancel classes for lack of faculty to teach them, which seems fair.)  The idea is to ensure students that once they’re in, they’re in. Apparently, the mechanism will involve posting a minimal schedule first, and then adding sections as needed.  That way, students won’t have classes cancelled out from under them.  They may not get optimal schedules, but the ones they get, they can keep. Read more...

By Susan O'Doherty. I will admit that the idea for this post originated in a place of cranky defensiveness. The comments on last week's post, as on a number of previous posts, seemed to presuppose that because I was writing personally, I must be unaware of current research and thinking in my field. The only explanation I could initially think of was that the commenters assumed that because I don't teach at a university I must not be educated or intelligent. I started to write a clever, biting response, but on reflection, I realized it is possible that my writing just doesn't read as smart or educated to some readers. I can live with that. Read more...

The top Republican on the Senate Budget Committee is questioning how the National Endowment for the Humanities awards its education grants. Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama sent a letter this week to Carol M. Watson, the acting chairwoman of the NEH, in which he demanded the agency explain its peer-review process for funding grants that explore “very indefinite” questions. Sessions pointed to seven grants the NEH funded that seek to explore the following questions: “What is the meaning of life?”, “Why are we interested in the past?”, “What is the good life and how do I live it?”, “Why are bad people bad?”, “What is belief?”, “What is a monster?”, and “Why do humans write?” Read more...

The University of Kansas has ended the suspension of a professor whose Twitter comment about the National Rifle Association angered many -- but the professor will not be returning to class this year. David Guth "has been assigned additional non-classroom responsibilities in the William Allen White School of Journalism and Mass Communications for the remainder of the semester, including various service and administrative assignments," said a statement from the university. Read more...

More than 330 consumers have received financial compensation as a result of complaints they have made on a new federal database about the lenders for their student loans, according to a report released Thursday by the U.S. PIRG Education Fund. The report examined the results of complaints filed with the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's public Consumer Complaints Database. The 330 represent about 8 percent of all complaints filed. Another 500 borrowers (about 12 percent of complaints filed) had complaints closed with non-monetary agreements, such as changes in collection proceedings. Read more...