Question: What are the merits of a tenure-track job at a small college versus a term/clinical position at a major research university (R1 or R2)? I’m on the tenure track at a liberal-arts college, but on a very low salary. I have a possibility of a "clinical professorship" — a renewable term position — at an R1 university where I would earn a lot more money. But term/clinical positions are not guaranteed job security even at fancy institutions, right? Aren’t those jobs thought of as second class in the higher-education caste system? Any insights you can provide would be appreciated.
Clare Sully-Stendahl is barely old enough to vote, at 18, but the first-year university student has been making career
choices for years. “I’ve always liked the humanities and the sciences,” she says from her dorm room in Halifax. “But in high school, there was pressure to pick one over the other.”
Instead of opting for theatre or film studies classes, Sully-Stendahl decided to be strategic and chose a second science while still in high school. But, “physics and I didn’t really get along very well. There’s no way I would continue with that in a career. I chose it because I knew a lot of universities require physics for engineering, medicine, a lot of sciences . . . ”
Much has been made of the disconnect between rural voters supporting right-wing populist candidates and city folks who vote overwhelmingly more liberal. In the United States, Trump supporters are those who have been left behind by globalization and digitization. They are stranded in small communities unmoored from enterprises that would support gainful employment or in smaller cities that have been left out of the ‘new’ economy. While some argue populist politics are on the decline, we would be foolish to ignore the tensions that lie behind the surface of any Western society.
For most faculty members, the hardest thing about entrepreneurship is the marketing — figuring out how to "monetize" your academic skills and services.
It’s a tedious and time-consuming process that depends largely on trial and error. It also involves a fair amount of self-promotion, something that is anathema in faculty culture. Words like marketing and monetize tend to make academics very uncomfortable. And yet, without marketing, you’re just a person sitting around waiting for the phone to ring.
The search for effective public policy approaches for relating higher education to the needs of the labour market was a subject of much attention in the 1960s and early 19 70s, and the verdict was largely against centralized comprehensive manpower planning. This paper re-examines the role of manpower planning in the university sector, in light of new economic imperatives and new data production initiatives by Employment and Immigration Canada. It concludes by rejecting what is conventionally referred to as manpower planning, and offering, instead, a set of guidelines for improving the linkage between universities and the labour market within the framework of existing institutional and policy structures.
On s 'est beau coup preoccupe pendant les annees 60 et au debut des annees 70 de trouver des politiques efficaces pour mieux adapter le monde de !'education superieure aux besoins du marche du travail; d cette epoque on s 'est prononce en grande partie contre une planification centralisee et globale de l'emploi. Cet article reexamine le role de la planification de l'emploi dans le secteur universitaire d la lumiere des nouveaux imperatifs economiques et des nouvelles initiatives de production de donnees de la part d 'Emploi et Immigration Canada. L 'auteur en arrive a la conclusion qu 'il faut rejeter ce que l'on appelle communement la planification de l'emploi pour offrir a la place un ensemble de directives pour ameliorer les liens entre les universites et le marche du travail dans le cadre des structures politiques et institutionnelles existantes.
Michael Skolnik
The search for effective public policy approaches for relating higher education to the needs of the labour market was a subject of much attention in the 1960s and early 19 70s, and the verdict was largely against centralized comprehensive manpower planning. This paper re-examines the role of manpower planning in the university sector, in light of new economic
imperatives and new data production initiatives by Employment and Immigration Canada. It concludes by rejecting what is conventionally referred to as manpower planning, and offering, instead, a set of guidelines for improving the linkage between universities and the labour market within the framework of existing institutional and policy structures.
I’ve been especially appreciative of my colleagues this week and there are lots of reasons why.
My colleagues teach me.
My colleagues let me teach them.
My colleagues disagree with me.
How to create a targeted resumé for industry positions.
It is well known that a strong curriculum vitae is crucial when applying to positions within academia. The same holds true if you are applying for industry positions. However, an application for those types of roles will require you to submit a concise resumé instead of a lengthy CV. Many graduate students may be inclined to include all of their accumulated academic experience on the resumé with the hope that the hiring manager will be able to assess what is most relevant to the job posting. In this case, however, more is not always better, as employers prefer resumés that outline the skills and experiences relevant to the position, presented in a succinct and tailored format. Given the years of experience gained throughout your academic career, it can sometimes be an overwhelming task to condense the information from your CV into a resumé that is often only two pages long. The following recommendations are designed to help guide you through the process of converting your CV into a targeted resumé.
Ontario’s colleges share the provincial government’s belief that apprenticeship must play a greater role in addressing skills shortages and contributing to innovative, high-performance workplaces that enhance Ontario’s competitiveness.
In 2005, the report issued by the Rae review of college and university education in Ontario, Ontario: A Leader in Learning, re-stated an estimate that 11,000 new university faculty would be required by 2010. No source was cited, nor any of the assumptions that underlie the conclusion. OCUFA subsequently conducted an analysis that showed Ontario universities would have to hire nearly 11,000 full-time faculty between 2003 and 2010 to replace retiring professors and to reduce the student-faculty ratio to a level at comparable US institutions and at which Ontario could be a true leader in learning.
This report examines skill trends in 24 OECD countries over the past several decades. The skill measures used include broad occupation groups, country-specific direct measures of skill requirements from international surveys, and direct skill measures from the Occupational Information Network (O*NET) database applied to both United States and European labour force surveys. Each kind of data has its own strengths and limitations but they tell a consistent story.
This paper introduces two new concepts to the debate on job quality: the low-wage gap and low-wage intensity. These two measures provide information on the depth and severity of low wages. Using Labour Force Survey microdata, we discuss trends in these two measures, along with trends in the incidence of low wages over the 1997-2014 period. For example, in 2014, 27.6 per cent of all employees aged 20 to 64 years earned less than two-thirds of median hourly wages for full-time workers aged 20 to 64 years (or $16.01 per hour), our low-wage cutoff. In this same year, the low-wage gap was 21.0 per cent, which means that the average low-wage employee earned approximately 79.0 per cent of the low-wage cutoff (or $12.66 per hour). Consequently, low-wage intensity, defined as the product of the incidence and the gap (scaled by 100) was 5.8. This is down from an intensity of 6.3 in 1997, which was the result of a slightly higher incidence (27.9 per cent) and a higher gap (22.7 per cent). This paper also provides these results by gender, age, educational attainment, industry, occupation, employment status and province. These detailed results help identify which groups face the highest rates, greatest depths, and largest intensities of low-wage employment in Canada. Furthermore, this paper explores the implications of a $15 minimum wage on the low-wage gap in 2014. Finally, to provide a brief sensitivity analysis, we discuss (1) the results for low-wage employment in Canada using a different cutoff (two-thirds mean hourly wages for full-time employees aged 25 to 54 years) and (2) comparisons of our results to those of CIBC’s Employment Quality Index and the OECD’s low-pay data.
Among the most heartwarming experiences of my academic career has been serving on university committees. You don’t often hear a faculty member say that, but in this instance, the committees involved awards for teaching at the college and university level.
Determining the best instructors on a campus involves reading through numerous files. In doing so, one learns about the wonderful accomplishments of colleagues and the innovative things they are doing in their classrooms. Perhaps most compelling are the letters from students who describe the life-changing experiences that come from a particular teacher.
Last week, I described how what some observers might see as a bad approach to teaching -- focusing on our weakest students -- can, in fact, have good results. Continuing with that theme, let us take a look at a second aspect of good teaching -- promoting student learning -- and consider its inverse. In award letters, students regularly talk about how much they learned from award-winning professors and how new worlds were opened to them. It is hard to argue that learning is not fundamental to effective instruction.
The research PhD was created to support the development of individuals able to use the power of rigorous scholarly inquiry to advance society. If the academy is committed to ensuring the relevance of the degree for the 21st century, we need to understand how our graduates are, or could be, contributing to the world today. This information will help tremendously in raising awareness of, and increasing the transparency about, potential careers, and in informing our educational endeavours.
Statistics Canada is moving to reinstate its Full Time-University and College Academic Staff System survey, and to include information on part-timers.
The data it will reveal is bound to shed much-needed light on a growing challenge that is already well-recognized but far too infrequently discussed in academia: the recent surge in numbers of underemployed PhD graduates at Canada’s universities.
Institutions have made their best efforts to encourage graduates to think beyond university jobs, and have directed more toward careers in government and the private sector. Yet serious challenges within the system remain — for recent PhDs themselves, for the renewal of the academy, and for Canada’s future research potential.
Background/context: Over the past 40 years, the composition of the professoriate has changed substantially across all institutional types. Once predominantly tenure track, now nontenure-track faculty (NTTF) constitute more than 70% of the faculty. While these major changes have occurred, we know little about key stakeholders views (accreditors, policy makers, presidents) of these changes.
Purpose: In this article, we explore the following research question: What are the beliefs systems (logics) related to the changing professoriate of the key entities within the higher education organizational field?
Postsecondary education in Ontario has seen a number of labour strikes over the past few decades, including some protracted, high‐profile work stoppages. These labour disputes can impact students negatively in a number of ways, yet there has been limited research exploring the psychosocial and academic impact of work stoppages on university students and possible strategies to minimize these effects. This report outlines the findings of a three‐study project designed to expand on the limited, existing research in two ways. The first study analyzed data from a rare longitudinal survey, assessing changes in student responses to the 2008–2009 York University strike by teaching assistants and contract faculty over the course of the work stoppage. The second and third studies adopted a mixed‐methods approach, using focus group interviews and a retrospective online survey to understand students’ experiences of the 2015 labour strikes at the University of Toronto and York University.
Universities will have to prepare students for multiple career changes and a longer working life if they are to contribute to reducing the global inequality that is a major focus of this week’s discussion at the World Economic Forum in Davos, says the principal of McGill University.
For the past fifteen years, I’ve taught first-year writing at a small liberal arts college, and though I teach essentially the same course every semester, I never get bored. The students I work with are on the brink of adulthood, and their energy is xhilarating. They are goofy and raw, flinging themselves confidently into the world, yet they are full of self- doubt at times. With these students, I try to create a classroom environment that encourages uninhibited free thought and conversation. And yet, no matter what I do or achieve in the classroom, my pedagogical accomplishments will always be perceived as inferior to those of my colleagues. I am “contingent faculty,” otherwise known as an adjunct professor, hired each year on an as-needed basis, though
the college always seems to needme.