One of the sadder conversations I have had in my 15 years of writing about academic careers is, unfortunately, a common one. It usually happens when I’m at a workshop or a conference and people approach me who are enduring a rocky patch in graduate school, on the job hunt, or on the tenure track. At some point I will ask them, "How are you using your dissertation to move your career forward?"
Last fallDonald Trump theorized that the computer hacker who stole emails from the Democratic National Committee could have been “someone sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds.” But the stereotypical rogue nerd isn’t the threat that most concerns information-security officers on college campuses.
This report examines time to degree completion for a cohort of students who earned an associate degree as their first and only postsecondary degree or a bachelor’s degree as their first four-year degree between July 1, 2014, and June 30, 2015. Overall, the average time enrolled for associate and bachelor’s degree earners was 3.3 years and 5.1 years, respectively. However, as the report shows, the time required for successful degree attainment could be influenced by the pathway the student followed as well as by factors, such as stop outs and less than full-time enrollment status.
Love it or hate it, social media is no passing fad -- and increasingly it’s intertwined with more traditional academic platforms. Numerous scholars have popular blogs, for example, on which they test out new ideas and share research. Other academics have made names for themselves on Twitter or Facebook -- both to the benefit and detriment of their respective careers.
Ken Coates is a Munk Senior Fellow with the Macdonald-Laurier Institute and co-author of What to Consider If
You’re Considering University. Douglas Auld is a professor of economics at the University of Guelph.
As students at colleges and universities across the country head back to class, the nation’s media have been filled with familiar debates about tuition fees, student debt, careers and government funding. As the debate goes on, universities, colleges and polytechnical institutes will defend their work, governments will laud the contributions of postsecondary institutes to Canada’s so-called innovation agenda, and student organizations will demand lower fees. This is all predictable, producing more heat than light in the process.
With information collected on 2,400 PhD graduates, we can begin to see what humanities programs contribute to the
academy and beyond.
In May 2015, the Future Humanities conference, put on by McGill University’s Institute for the Public Life of Arts and Ideas, or IPLAI, brought together more than 130 graduate students, faculty and administrators from 26 Canadian universities (francophone and anglophone), along with a number of PhD holders with careers outside the academy and representatives from organizations such as the Canadian Association for Graduate Studies, the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences and MITACS. (For an overview of what transpired at the conference, see this video and article.)
How can Canada encourage more postsecondary students to study abroad?
Employers and higher ed institutions have acknowledged the value that this type of experience could bring to the country’s workforce. But only 3.1% of full-time university students and 1.1% of full-time college students have studied abroad as part
of their postsecondary education.
Just a tiny minority of Canadian students choose to study abroad, and that’s a problem. Here’s what some
universities are doing to try to reverse the trend.
Caitlyn Ryall had her doubts – and her fears. Then a third-year material art and design student at OCAD University,
Ms. Ryall weighed the pros and cons of heading abroad for a semester at the University of Southampton in Winchester, England. On the one hand, she felt an excitement and fascination due to her upbringing – her father is a travel writer, and she shared his wanderlust and curiosity about the world. On the other hand, she faced serious challenges: the costs were almost unthinkable (upwards of $15,000), the initial administrative processes seemed to be moving as slow as molasses, and the payoff, in terms of transfer credits, was uncertain. And it would be her first time abroad, without her traditional network of friends and family.
Though more relevant than ever, the field seems to have to continually justify its existence.
The bad news broke on a Monday night in February 2016. Earlier that day, Lisa Dawn Hamilton, acting director of Mount Allison University’s women’s and gender studies program, had received a glum surprise. Nearly two decades after its 1999 founding, funding for the interdisciplinary program was on the chopping block – a move that would effectively eliminate all four of the school’s core women’s and gender studies classes, despite a consistent waitlist and burgeoning enrolment. Although the university administration did not equate the budget cut with an official termination of the program, it was hard to see how it could survive without funding. In an email to students, Dr. Hamilton reluctantly rang the death knell: “This means that, currently, there are no plans to offer any women’s and gender studies courses in the coming academic year.”
You know, I'm a numbers guy. Yes, I'm a math guy, but no, that doesn't automatically make me a numbers guy. In fact, being a pure mathematician at the University of Waterloo, the running joke was none of us could do mental math because we hadn't seen numbers since high school.
But that never really applied to me, because I also love numbers. The Pythagoreans said that "all is number"; Plato believed that numbers were the "gateway to the divine"; Erdos and Ramanujan found "extraordinary beauty" in numbers; and a colleague recently said in a talk that "numbers transcend us, yet bind us together."
I've always found that numbers told stories.
The world has more graduates than ever before. In an era of mass expansion, the proportion of the population with
degrees is at a historical high across many nations, both developed and developing. The world also has more
newspaper and magazine articles, thinktank reports and academic papers than ever before questioning the value of
that expansion.
In recent years, policymakers have been driven by a human capital theory approach to higher education expansion:
their belief has been that as graduate numbers are grown, individual graduates with higher skill levels will boost
national productivity and be rewarded with an “earnings premium”. And universities have been happy to expand to
meet the demand for places on the basis that governments foot the bill, either through grants or student loans.
THE MOST RECENT National Science Foundation (NSF) “Survey of Earned Doctorates” raises eyebrows, not because it paints a predictably bleak picture for the job prospects of humanities PhD students, but because people are surprised that prospects for engineering and science PhDs aren’t looking so good either.
An expat explains how a temporary leave to study in the U.K. turned into a life abroad – and what the government could do to bring him back.
Growing up in small-town Ontario, I always had a nagging feeling that Canadians who moved abroad were traitors. They had shunned our country for monetary gain, or sunshine or fame. But I’ve become one of those people – part of the nation’s brain drain – and I can assure you that it was entirely accidental.
Like me, every year hundreds of Canadians head abroad to do PhDs or postdocs, intent on gathering international experience, and every year a few of them don’t come back. In my case, I was drawn to the U.K. to do a PhD in history and, two years after finishing, I am still there, now working as an academic historian. I’d like to share how that happens and what Canada might do to prevent it from happening again and again.
I did not go abroad to get a “better” education. This is what the British think draws international
students, but this is a patronizing assumption and not a reflection of reality for most. For me, the
move was part quest for adventure and
part practical desire to get my PhD completed quickly so that I could get on with a career.
Recently, I received an email from a student asking me the name of a writer -- a writer whose book we’d been reading for two weeks. (And discussing in class. And writing about in class.) It was not a textbook, anthology or unusual digital source. It was an old-fashioned printed book containing one play by one writer.
I knew that the student owned the book, because I had seen her with it in class, and in fact, she had told me she was enjoying the reading. However, when it was time for her to do an assignment on the playwright … well, she was stumped. She just didn’t know his name.
I had to explain to her, carefully, and with what I hope was compassion, that if she hadn’t picked up his name in the class discussions so far (or, I was thinking, in the course syllabus and calendar), then she could always try looking on the front cover of the book.
As a PhD, you can think of research as one of your many useful skills, but it is not necessarily your primary identity.
One of the brow-furrowing moments for me when I read articles on doctoral education or participate in panels is when the idea that “PhDs are researchers” comes up. It’s common for commenters to refer to PhDs in this way.
This is often an intentional move, one that pushes the conversation forward from the limiting notion as PhD as protoprofessors.
In that way, it’s a welcome intervention. The idea is to help doctoral graduates see how their skills and experiences have broader relevance and value. In the U.K. and Europe, “early-career researcher” and “early-stage researcher,” respectively, are used to refer to individuals currently undergoing doctoral studies and/or within the first few years of obtaining the degree. If you think of a PhD as a “research degree” this of course makes perfect sense.
If thinking of yourself as a researcher frees up your imagination and helps you move toward a fulfilling career, then by all means embrace the term. But if it leaves you as cold as it does me, I’m giving you permission to jettison it.
Individualized programs, less coursework and scrapping comprehensive exams some of the options discussed at
Future of the Humanities PhD conference in Ottawa.
At the final panel discussion of the two-day Future of the PhD in the Humanities conference held at Carleton
University May 17 and 18, a trio of senior administrators took aim at the structure of PhD programs and completion
times. Despite it being the final event, the room was packed, prompting one speaker to quip that this is proof of how
eager the academic community is to review the state of doctoral education in Canada.
As a new hire, once you’ve worked out your relationship with your academic department — how to establish your voice in meetings, how to avoid factions, how to keep your head down and get your work done while maintaining a presence in decision-making — it’s time to think about where you fit into the rest of the campus.
When I interview faculty job candidates, I always point out that their department will want to own them, and keep them focused on the departmental curriculum and major. As dean, my job is to remind faculty members that outside their department lies a big university that needs them, too. The business of my college and the larger university can only get done if professors take an interest in campus governance and in (with apologies to those who are allergic to corporate language) innovation.
Why? Because the things that get done at the department level — curriculum approval, hiring, assessment, grievances — also have to get done at the university level. Colleges and universities have governance structures in place to do that business, and those structures vary from campus to campus. But they all depend on faculty stepping outside their departments and examining proposals from a whole-campus perspective. How would a proposed change in degree structure in one department affect another department's enrollments? What would a curricular change mean for external accreditation or time to graduation?
Your role in campus governance. None of the work you will do on curriculum or policy committees was taught in your graduate programs, and it’s a rare mentor who prepares you for how to participate in governance work. It’s mostly on-the-job training, and you’ll be expected to pick it up quickly.
Talking to a graduate student is a little like an old Abbott and Costello routine about a mythical baseball team composed of players named Who, What and I Don’t Know. Career counseling sessions can be, however, more like a double act with just two players: the student and the professional. And unlike a comedy routine, the scenes take place within the context of dollars spent in stipends, fellowships and expectations of intellectual growth
performance throughout the course, especially for those students who do poorly on the first test. Faculty and institutions provide an array of supports for these students, including review sessions, time with tutors, more practice problems, and extra office hours, but it always seems it’s the students who are doing well who take advantage of these extra learning opportunities. How to help the students who need the help is a challenging proposition.
Although the literature on institutional diversity suggests that quality assurance practices could affect institutional diversity, there has been little empirical research on this relationship. This article seeks to shed some light on the possible connection between quality assurance practices and institutional diversity by examining the arrangements for quality assurance in higher education systems that include two distinct sectors, one of which having a more academic orientation and the other a more applied orientation. The article explores the ways in which quality assurance structures and standards in selected jurisdictions provide for recognition of the differences in orientation and mission between academic and applied sectors of higher education systems. The research identified some features of quality assurance systems that recognize the characteristics of applied higher
education, such as having different statements of expected learning outcomes for applied and academic programs or requiring different qualifications for faculty who teach in applied programs. It is hoped that the results might be of interest to policy makers and quality assurance practitioners who are concerned about the possible impact of quality assurance on institutional diversity.