By Joshua Kim. During his keynote address at EDUCAUSE 2013, Sir Ken Robinson reminisced about his own days at as a graduate student. He talked about hitting the library at the “crack of noon” for three or so hours of grueling work before hitting the pub.
Sir Ken may have been exaggerating somewhat the life of an academic in the 1970s, but his description of a typical day in the life of an aspiring academic conforms pretty well to my own graduate school experience circa 1992. Read more...

By Joshua Kim. My most productive interactions at the EDUCAUSE conference are the discussions that I have with leaders from the corporate participants. 
The CEOs, Presidents, VPs, and Directors. 
The people responsible for the strategic directions and new initiatives for the services, software, hardware, and publishing companies whose presence (in the exhibitor hall, in corporate sessions, and through sponsorships), that make up so much of the value of attending EDUCAUSE. Read more...

By Joshua Kim. Every tech person that I speak with agrees that the problems with healthcare.gov were totally predictable.  
The basic lesson that the academic tech community seems to be taking from the healthcare.gov debacle is that something similar would never happen to us.
This is the wrong lesson.
We need to learn from healthcare.gov so as not to repeat the same mistakes that the federal government made in our new platform rollouts. Read more...

By Joshua Kim. If I worked at Google I’d spend all my time pursuing one goal.  
That goal would be shift education from a scarce good to an abundant good.
That’s it. One goal. All my time. Nothing else. Education: Scarcity to Abundance.  
I figure that Google has done a pretty good job moving other things that we value from scarcity to abundance (such as information, but other things like productivity tools), why not take a run at education?
This would be very hard. Google would probably fail at reaching this goal. I’d probably fail at Google. But nothing worthwhile is ever easy. Read more...

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...