US academics’ salaries ‘slowly recovering’
From the archive, 12 April 1966: Battle lines drawn over student loans
At a time when state expenditure on higher education is being closely questioned, it does no harm to raise the issue again. The most persuasive argument yet raised in favour of loans comes from Dr Blaug, in an almost unnoticed paper published last year by the Manchester School of Economics. Dr Blaug's research shows that graduates reap a private rate of return on the nation's investment in them of 14 per cent a year throughout their lives. If this investment is estimated at £4,000, then their rate of return on it at the age of 40 to 50 becomes about £400 a year in salary over the student who finished his formal education at 18. Read more...
Top tips: graduate opportunities in local government
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...
Early career researchers: ever thought about teaching in schools?
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...
Regulating Distance Ed
The Stupid Things People with a Ph.D. say on Airplanes
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...
Think Like an Administrator
By Monica F. Jacobe. When I moved into my first faculty position after earning my Ph.D., I had been an academic administrator for several years — and had been an administrator some years before, too. Moving into the “faculty mindset” wasn’t hard for me at first. I was expected to focus on my teaching and research, asked to commit to service when it was needed, and was otherwise free to go about my business as I saw fit.
It didn’t take long, however, for me to start to chafe at the disconnection: I had very little sense of what was going on in the wider university that didn’t directly impact my work or wasn’t in the student newspaper. I was used to knowing more, being part of the larger project of education on campus. That’s a central part of why I sought administrative work after only a short time in a purely faculty role. It was also the moment when I realized that there really is an administrative mindset that comes with changing roles. Read more...
My radical pedagogical program
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...
Thesis Hatement
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...