By Melissa Dennihy. In “Too Soon?,” Cheryl E. Ball warns against going on the job market without a “(nearly) completed” dissertation. Hers is a viewpoint I have heard many times, and she raises valid concerns that A.B.D. candidates should consider. But failure isn’t the only possible outcome of going on the market while A.B.D. — taking that risk may help to propel the stagnant graduate student forward into a new phase of professional life. Read more...

By The Executive Board of the GCC. To introduce this new column, the authors asked Inside Higher Ed to pose some questions for them to answer to explain where Carpe Careers will be headed.
Q: Who writes this column?
A: The authors for Carpe Careers are members of the Graduate Career Consortium (GCC). The mission of the GCC is to help members provide career and professional development for doctoral students and postdoctoral scholars at GCC member institutions. The GCC provides national leadership and serves as a national voice for graduate-level career and professional development. Read more...

By Rocco L. Capraro. Today’s college men, as a group, are not doing so well — in comparison with today’s college women and with college men of the past. Many men are simply not attending college at all; and of those who matriculate, they are not graduating in large numbers, again, as compared to women and to previous generations of men. Coming out of high school, they are not as well prepared for college. They are reading less than girls and less than boys of older generations. In fact, if college admissions were gender-blind, the vast majority of students at our most selective colleges would be women. Read more...

By Charles Green. Like many academics, I’ve almost never left school. The students who occupy my mental energy most are the worst, not the best; the interactions with colleagues I recall most immediately the harshest; the department memos that curdle in my memory are those spiced with typos. Those stories, with the whiff of gossip, earn the most laughs from my colleague-friends. Read more...

By Bea Awoniyi and Stephan J. Smith. Recently there has been much debate about the proposed TEACH Act.  As the landscape in higher education has evolved, and most educational opportunities now require use of  electronic and information technology, institutions have been left without an effective structure for taking access for all into account. Currently, institutions have only lawsuits and enforcement actions to guide them; the point of the TEACH Act is to pave the way for consistent national guidance. The Association on Higher Education and Disability (AHEAD) supports the proposed legislation and seeks to clarify a few points. Read more...

By Rebecca Schuman. This morning, after a poor night’s sleep punctuated by weird pregnancy nightmares and hourly wakings due to the discomforts of being newly behemoth, I lumbered over to my “office” (aka the other side of my apartment), and, loins girded, prepared to see what the internet beheld. As a freelancer with many different gigs, it’s not uncommon to have to “put out fires” first thing in the a.m., as they say, but this morning, all three rings in the circus of my life conflagrated at once. Read more...

By Belle S. Wheelan and Mark A. Elgart. Calls for scorecards and rating systems of higher education institutions that have been floating around Washington, if used for purposes beyond providing comparable consumer information, would make the federal government an arbiter of quality and judge of institutional performance. Read more...

By Ry Rivard. During the annual meeting of the National Association for College Admission Counseling, admissions officials from several colleges laid out how they used students’ “demonstrated interest” to make admissions decisions. The concept of demonstrated interest isn't new — and colleges have long been wary of applicants who might not be serious — but its role has grown in a significant way. Read more...

By Elizabeth Redden. In conversations about international student recruitment in the United States, some things are taken as given: the decentralization of the landscape and the absence of a coordinated recruitment strategy at either the national or state level (save for some consortiums that are narrowly focused on marketing of a specific state), and the perceived difficulty of transitioning from student to permanent resident status if that’s what students desire. Read more...

By Kaitlin Mulhere. The gender gap in science, technology, engineering and math fields has been well-documented through various studies and reports. And increasing gender diversity in the so-called STEM fields is a key goal of groups spanning the education, government and labor market sectors. Read more...