Category Archives: Academia

The coming melt-down in higher education – I think he underestimates the culture of prestige

The coming melt-down in higher education (as seen by a marketer)

For 400 years, higher education in the US has been on a roll. From Harvard asking Galileo to be a guest professor in the 1600s to millions tuning in to watch a team of unpaid athletes play another team of unpaid athletes in some college sporting event, the amount of time and money and prestige in the college world has been climbing.

I’m afraid that’s about to crash and burn. Here’s how I’m looking at it.

1. Most colleges are organized to give an average education to average students.

Pick up any college brochure or catalog. Delete the brand names and the map. Can you tell which school it is? While there are outliers (like St. Johns, Deep Springs or Full Sail) most schools aren’t really outliers. They are mass marketers.

2. College has gotten expensive far faster than wages have gone up.

As a result, there are millions of people in very serious debt, debt so big it might take decades to repay. Word gets around. Won’t get fooled again…

3. The definition of ‘best’ is under siege.

4. The correlation between a typical college degree and success is suspect.

5. Accreditation isn’t the solution, it’s the problem.

A lot of these ills are the result of uniform accreditation programs that have pushed high-cost, low-reward policies on institutions and rewarded schools that churn out young wanna-be professors instead of experiences that turn out leaders and problem-solvers.

via sethgodin.typepad.com

I’m one of the first to say that the next 20 years won’t look like the last 20 years in higher education when asked about the future of education. I even share many of the same sentiments as Godin. I differ in my estimate of the direct of this change.

Prestige will always skew the market and many of these universities sell prestige. Not just the Ivy League schools, but most of the large state schools do this as well. Prestige has both local and global effects. That big State U. generally has a lot of prestige in the local/regional context, whereas the Ivy League schools (not to mention the other more well-known schools) have it on a more global scale. This prestige factor isn’t going to disappear quickly. There is too much invested in it.

Prestige doesn’t just benefit the student and job-seeker. Prestige benefits the alumni all the way to the board room (and into the community). Their educational background is the foundation for this prestige in many cases. It makes them part of a larger, loose network. Prestige is by it’s very nature an illusion propped up by the schools, applicants, alumni, and their interactions with society at large. Change in this dynamic runs deep and the holders of power in this dynamic will struggle to maintain power.

With that said, I agree with Godin when it comes to the fate of those schools lacking the prestige factor (or even those at the lower rungs). They are the ones who will either change or perish. These schools have to offer more for less. The growing education markets both within the country and abroad are beginning to eat their lunch.

Korea’s ‘hourly lecturers’ struggle to make ends meet // and regret spending all those years and all that money getting their PhD

Korea’s ‘hourly lecturers’ struggle to make ends meet

While South Korea’s economic upturn is being touted as a “model case” for economic recovery from the recent global economic slump, not everyone in the country is seeing the benefits of the alleged robust performance of the Asia’s fourth largest economy that would host this year’s G-20 summit, including some who are highly educated yet struggling their make ends meet.

Literally called “hourly lecturers” for their lecture-for-pay based contracts, the nation has many Ph.D. holders who are not hired full-time by a university for a college, but provide lectures.

via koreatimes.co.kr

This article is a good awareness raiser, but it doesn’t give some of the more important facts.

There are an abundance of PhDs in Korea. Most of those are looking for tenure-track professorships. These have traditionally provided good pay, status, and security.

In years past, when there were much fewer PhDs (and an explosive growth in students), getting a job was much easier. However, with the reverse being true now (many PhDs and a saturated student market) it is extremely difficult.

Hourly lecturers now commonly work at many universities at the same time. They fill any untended class available for roughly W1.5-2.0 million per semester (depending on school and program). The more ambitious of these lecturers may teach 6-10 courses at 5-6 universities. To make a living wage, you will sacrifice any semblance of a life (and, let’s face it, the quality of instruction has to suffer).

Through this sort of hustling, as well as volunteering with academic organizations and attempting to put together time to publish, they build their network and qualifications. Most, who continue to work this angle are likely to find a tenure-track position (somewhere in Korea if they are willing to leave Seoul). Many give up and settle for other types of jobs (or stay at home moms–and less often dads).

Here are some challenges that make it more difficult to eventually land a job.

(1) Your PhD. Where did you get it? If it isn’t a popular place (regardless of program quality) for professors in your field to have graduated from, you’ll like have trouble. This is one of those times when the old boy network is in full force. This is really true in Korea and elsewhere. Aside from that, if you went to a top program in the field, then you’re likely ok, too.

(2) Undergraduate. This is one of those hidden secrets in the Korean academia. If you didn’t do your undergrad at a top school in Korea, you are going to have a VERY difficult time finding a tenure-track position regardless of where you did your PhD and how well published you are. This is a one that even most Koreans don’t understand until they come back with degree in hand and confident that they have done all the right things to assure a good job.

(3) Location. Many universities in Seoul, but everyone wants to live/work there. If you’re not flexible on where you are willing to work, you’d better have the right background for numbers 1 and 2 above.

Discouraged yet? You’d better be. If you’re thinking about going to school for that name-your-popular-humanities-major-here PhD, think about this. You are going to go into great debt (or your parents are), you’ll spend at least 4 years abroad (but likely longer), you’ll come back to Korea and either have no job or have to hustle for at least a couple years (making less than 25 million a year), and then maybe, just maybe, you’ll find a professorship in a saturated education market that is resulting in the closing of scores of universities (in other words, your job isn’t safe). Don’t even get me started on the changing procedures of tenure, which are becoming more and more like those in the States (massive publication), but without the same reduction of class hours and the maintenance of an actual ten year framework (more than 2x as long as you’d find in the U.S.).

So, please. Don’t do it. Don’t go this direction. This is not the career path you really want. Spend the same amount of time and pursue directions that will provide you with more options professionally and more rewards financially.

If you do decide to run the gauntlet, good luck, and I hope to see you there.

Author, 17, Says It’s ‘Mixing,’ Not Plagiarism – What is Plagiarism?

Author, 17, Says It’s ‘Mixing,’ Not Plagiarism

Jens Schlueter/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Helene Hegemann in Berlin.

BERLIN — It usually takes an author decades to win fawning reviews, march up the best-seller list and become a finalist for a major book prize. Helene Hegemann, just 17, did it with her first book, all in the space of a few weeks, and despite a savaging from critics over plagiarism.

via nytimes.com

Is plagiarism being reconsidered? Great, now what I’m I going to lecture on? 😉

Really, though, this is a fine line. If you are using something that I wrote, I want credit. I don’t think that is too much to ask. In a work of fiction, how about asking me for permission? In an academic work, cite me.

This is a slippery slope. I hope that this is not the future.

Growth of Unpaid Internships May Be Illegal, Officials Say – rationale on p.2 could be student teaching

Convinced that many unpaid internships violate minimum wage laws, officials in Oregon, California and other states have begun investigations and fined employers. Last year, M. Patricia Smith, then New York’s labor commissioner, ordered investigations into several firms’ internships. Now, as the federal Labor Department’s top law enforcement official, she and the wage and hour division are stepping up enforcement nationwide.

I’m not comparing these unskilled internships to a teaching practicum, but the rationale on p.2 that lower income students are disadvantaged by this practice, isn’t much different from student teaching.

Think about it, for 3+ months, students not only have to work full-time at a school for no pay, but they also have to pay tuition to the tune of thousands of dollars. How many people (both the haves and the have nots) have decided against teaching for this very reason?

Not only do aspiring teachers have to pay to work that semester, but they also need to either load-up on courses the other 3.5 yrs or add another semester onto their 4 yr degree. This is an antiquated and unnecessary requirement that should (and likely will) die off in coming years.

While this experience can be (not always is) beneficial, the investment simply isn’t worth it. For most student teachers, the experience is nothing more than an introduction to the teachers’ lounge and the teaching of a unit and not the apprenticeship under a master teacher as many would like to claim.

Why not pay student teachers. If they are ready to intern, they are certainly ready to be teacher aides. Pay them as such. Instead of the lump taking notes in the back of the class for a month or so, have them monitor students, give feedback, and generally increase teachers’ ability to individualize instruction and then pay them for it.

For their part, universities have to stop treating (and charging) student teachers as full-time students. A fee is certainly called for, but the full cost of tuition, which most have to pay, is a terrible burden. The rising cost of university education is already putting these students out into a world where they are only going to make as little as $18,000 in some areas, yet they could have many thousands in student loans. The most unfortunate students will be paying these loans longer than the mortgage on their homes (if they can qualify for one with an already huge debt load).

There are programs that are doing this, but most are for those who already have degrees and are getting MA’s or advanced certification, or those who are in under-served fields or regions. These need to be the norm and not the exception in our teacher education system.

It is unwise and immoral to continue as we have.

What do you think? Not a fully formed idea, but certainly an ongoing concern of mine, particularly the role that I do and will continue to play in this.

Writers Association of Korea suspends publication of government-funded periodical : National : Home

Writers Association of Korea suspends publication of government-funded periodical
The move is in response to ARKO’s demand for a confirmation letter to receive government subsidies

The Writers Association of Korea (WAK), a progressive association of writers, held the ceremony in place of publishing its periodical “Artists Open Tomorrow.” WAK has suspended publication of the periodical in protest of the fact that ARKO is demanding a letter of confirmation that applications for government subsidies will not participate in or lead demonstrations. The writers engaged in readings of their poetry and novels that would have been published in the periodical. WAK made the decision not to publish Artist Opens Tomorrow on Feb. 24.

Choi Du-seok, executive editor of Artists Open Tomorrow said, “We have decided not to accept subsidies for the periodical’s publication in protest of ARKO’s policy of demanding a confirmation letter in which writers must confirm that they will not participate in or organize demonstrations.” Choi added, “We think this is a policy in which the government is gagging writers’ conscience.”
via english.hani.co.kr

Just to highlight, “ARKO is demanding a letter of confirmation that applications for government subsidies will not participate in or lead demonstrations.”

This is a shame and should be protested. To put this in perspective, academics and unionists are the primary leaders (traditionally) of protests in Korea. This organization is really the sole funding source for many academic publications. Academics have to publish to be promoted (keep their jobs) and Korean publications are really the only publications that many of them can publish in. Therefore, this policy is a heavy-handed swipe at political activists and their livelihoods.

It’s disgusting. What else can I say?

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