This post was written for fun as a look at some interesting overlaps between a few theorists and historians whose works I admire: Michel Foucault, Harold Innis, and James Burke.
Month / April 2013
The absurdity of numbers
Building on the same themes I discussed in “Proof of the pudding“, this post returns to the “completion agenda” in the United States and the role of for-profit colleges, the question of who is getting what out of higher education, and some issues with the concept of “human capital” as a driver of policy. Here is a link to the original post from February 20, 2011: The absurdity of numbers.
A number of recent posts on Inside Higher Ed have highlighted national (U.S.) debates on post-secondary policy and its relation to Barack Obama’s economic/policy plan. Obama has repeatedly emphasised the importance of education and research funding, even as the Tea Party have lobbied the Republicans to try to reduce funding. Meanwhile legislation has been introduced for the purpose of regulating private, for-profit career colleges, and it’s being battled every step of the way by the lobby groups associated with said colleges and by their political various allies.
All these developments relate in some way to the pressure to increase enrollments and “completion” rates—what some have referred to as the “completion agenda”—from post-secondary institutions. And that imperative is about developing a “knowledge economy”, so that the United States can remain competitive in the assumed global zero-sum game in which national prosperity is at stake.
In Canada, federal and provincial governments have taken up precisely the same strategy of pushing for more graduates, both in undergraduate and in graduate education (witness in Ontario the provincial Liberals’ goal to create 14,000 more graduate student spaces from 2002-3 levels, by 2010—see OCUFA, 2007).
Like others, I question the use of these kind of numbers as a means of gauging a nation’s success at, or progress toward, developing a sustainable “knowledge economy”. Human capital may be available, but this doesn’t mean that the “capital” will be put to use (i.e. that people, with their skills, will be able to find employment) in the immediate or near future. Are there sufficient job opportunities for those who make the “individual investment” in PSE, such that the investment will “pay off”?
The numbers conceal a potential over-production of graduates through the assumption that more college/university degrees automatically means more access to gainful employment for all those who graduate, as well as producing a more “innovative” workforce. (I’ve previously written posts about relative value vs. inherent value in education, and the policy implications.)
The focus on these numbers also hides the uneven quality of mass post-secondary education and the unequally shared burden of its increasing cost. For example, in the United States the for-profit career colleges often market to traditionally under-privileged groups who cannot access more prestigious institutions, but who ironically end up paying hefty tuition fees anyway—and finding themselves burdened with debt by the time their studies are over. It’s a debt they have trouble re-paying due to difficulties with obtaining appropriate employment after graduation.
Along with student “completion” comes the imperative to discover its causes, a search that has produced a whole range of new objects for measurement. One example is the project to measure levels of “student engagement” (gauged by the National Survey of Student Engagement, NSSE). Tests of student learning “outcomes”, and the development of standardised curricular goals, are also related to this process of environmental assessment.
Responsibility for failure must also be assigned, such as in this article where the author discusses reports that argue that “many American colleges are failing to graduate their students, at a time when the Obama administration and leading foundations are trying to ramp up the number of Americans earning a postsecondary credential.” So the university/college becomes a new target for critiques and for governmental interventions designed to ensure “quality” and positive “outcomes” for graduates.
In some ways, the obsession with numbers is really just a sign that education and its “products” are considered to be more important than ever—for their economic value—and thus they become, increasingly, sites of scrutiny for a plethora of “publics”, including not only governments but also parents, students, employers, and the media. But focussing on and rewarding outcomes, usually “completion” as either a proportion of the eligible age cohort or of the national adult population overall, means that institutions are more likely to implement “quick” technocratic fixes to what is generally a much deeper structural problem. Do we really need more graduates who are struggling to find work and to alleviate debts? How can we create a situation where these graduates are more likely to be solvent and employed upon, or shortly after, finishing their PSE courses?
A larger number of PSE graduates is only desirable, economically, if it produces the intended effect; but what we see instead could be an increase to the number of young people who are actually unable to participate fully in this economy even though they may technically possess the credentials for doing so. Unless this issue is addressed, the “production” of more PSE graduates is much less likely to benefit either the national economy or the individual graduates themselves.
Reference: OCUFA, 2007. Quality at risk: an assessment of the Ontario government’s plans for graduate education.
Most excellent dudes – Gender, meritocracy, & media coverage of the Canada Excellence Research Chairs
This is the first Prezi I ever tried using for a conference presentation. Thankfully both the Prezi interface and my skills at using it have improved since 2011. The presentation is about the media coverage of the announcement about the Canada Excellence Research Chairs in 2010. There were protests that no women were even shortlisted for these prestigious and lucrative awards, and the ensuing debate reflected some of the major themes in the arguments about women and (their absence from) science. I discuss two of those themes, the one being “meritocracy” with as idea of excellence as transparent, and the other being essentialist and binary notions of gender.
Market Fail – UK attempts at marketisation bring a cascade of trouble
This post is about the ongoing attempts to reconfigure the higher education “sector” in England, using a quasi-market as the mechanism. This involved a significant increase to the tuition cap, as well as reductions to funding for teaching in some subject areas. To treat universities like other kinds of products in a market is to ignore some specific institutional and organizational differences that make universities (and students) “act” differently in this context. Here is the original post, from May 7, 2011: Market fail – UK attempts at marketisation bring a cascade of trouble.
Many articles over the past little while have been looking at the failure of government marketisation efforts in England. Following last year’s Browne Review (which recommended that university fee limits be lifted), the UK government dropped the policy bomb that universities had long feared—massive funding cuts (including 40% cuts to teaching), a drop from ￡7.1 billion to ￡4.2 billion, and a marketisation scheme to be implemented through raising the “cap” on tuition fees to ￡9,000 from ￡3,290. The idea was that universities would voluntarily differentiate their fee levels in order to capture different student demographics/groups, creating a quasi-market. However, when faced with the option of setting fees of “up to” ￡9,000, the majority of universities opted to charge the highest possible price. They did this in spite of the government’s threats to penalise them in various ways for inhibiting accessibility.
Why has the UK government’s marketisation scheme failed so dramatically with regards to fee levels? Surely the less well-known universities knew that in claiming the maximum possible tuition, they would now be charging the same fee as heavyweights such as Oxford and Cambridge. The government assumed that universities would naturally want to compete for various student “markets”, relying on institutions to create an appropriate distribution. However, such a tactic doesn’t ensure that a market will emerge. That outcome still depends on the behaviour of individual institutions. Since universities operate in competition for prestige at least as much as for revenue (the two are closely connected), their “behaviour” as actors in a market is unlikely to mirror that of (e.g.) a pet food company or an automotive corporation. So the relationship between price and prestige is undoubtedly one factor in the equation; no-one wants to be a “low-cost provider”.
In keeping with this logic, students do not behave like regular consumers when “shopping” for a university degree. They don’t necessarily seek out what’s affordable or reasonable in terms of cost; they are making an estimate on the future returns from their short-term investment, and education is not something that can be traded for a “better model” later on when one has more money to spend. Students are in a bind of their own, with those lacking present income being encouraged to take on debt in order to finance their future employability.
Lastly, it’s very difficult to create “economies of scale” in education (in my opinion it can’t be done, but that’s a whole other blog post). Thus universities cannot easily expand enrolment while also keeping tuition low, offering “discount education”–though this has happened to a certain extent with for-profit, online providers, mostly in the United States.
Another important aspect of the UK government’s plan was to remove funding from teaching, already an under-valued aspect of university work (international rankings are based on research); and from what I understand, this funding was taken only from the arts, social sciences, and humanities. But it seems that that the very universities that depend most on those enrollments will now have to raise tuition even more to make up for the significant loss of revenue–more so than, say, a university focussed heavily on the sciences. Is the UK government asking students to pay more for degrees that they (the government) have demonstrably judged to be less valuable-? (NB, I don’t personally believe that degrees outside STEM areas are less inherently valuable; but they are certainly less marketable according to the logic being employed.)
As it turns out, in most cases students will pay the same (increased) price for their degrees no matter where they choose to enroll; but clearly they won’t all be getting a better “product”. One reason is that the tuition money is replacing government funding that had been cut, rather than augmenting current income in order to increase “quality”. If the funding estimate of cost per student was considered insufficient to begin with, then it makes sense that universities would raise the level of tuition to the maximum possible (￡9,000). So it seems there might be a fundamental disagreement between universities and government about the “cost” of educating a student in a certain discipline or area of study (not a surprise).
On a more theoretical level, I don’t believe it’s possible for students to “receive” a uniform education since every person brings something different to, and takes something unique from, their educational experience.
Overall I think this is a good example of some of the problems with trying to marketise education as a “product” with an inherent economic/monetary value. Universities in Britain are now stuck between the proverbial rock and hard place: if they charge higher fees (i.e. above ￡6,000), they are more likely to be penalised by the government for inhibiting accessibility. The necessity for this stop-gap measure demonstrates the failure of the initial policy to establish the desired equilibrium. Such radical policy change within a short period is likely to have deep effects on the British universities, including changes to student decision-making and to the faculty workforce.
Guardian UK: Live Q & A
This Guardian live chat had as its theme, “How do you promote female leadership in higher education?”
Here are the “best bits” of the chat, from the Guardian’s summary.
I also wrote a brief follow-up post of my own, “Leading the pack“, on May 25th 2011.
Who will hire all the PhDs?
The latest article I’ve written for the Globe & Mail looks at the question of whether Canada produces “too many” PhDs. This is something I’ve also discussed in past blog posts and presentations. I still think there is a huge disconnect in the way the government imagines PhDs as “skilled workers”, and the reality of their apparent job options. In the future I’d really like to do more research on how people come to see themselves as “successful” or not in a PhD programme, and how that affects their career decisions. The full text of the article is below.
A persistent theme in current discussions about graduate education and its outcomes is the question of whether Canada is “producing too many PhDs.” While enrollments (and numbers of PhD graduates) have increased with the encouragement of policy, more of these grads now struggle to find employment that matches the level and nature of their education – particularly employment in universities, as tenure-track faculty. The situation in Canada is not as dire as in the States where just this week it was reported that three quarters of faculty work as adjuncts, but accounts of under-employed PhDs working as waiters and cab drivers have become more common.
The question of precisely how many PhDs we “need” is one that’s directly tied to our ideas about the purpose of doctoral education. Debates about the ideal number of PhDs tend to be framed in terms of the academic job market, more specifically the demand for tenure-track professors at universities, because of the assumption that the PhD is intended primarily for those who want a career in academe. This assumption permeates doctoral education, partly because a doctorate is required in order to become a professor – professors are the primary educators of new PhDs.
Yet for 30 years or more, the availability of these jobs has been declining. The traditional academic career has become a focus of debate and critique because while PhD programmes have grown, tenure-track hiring has not kept pace. Universities have seen their resources reduced relative to the number of students enrolled, and they’ve coped partly by hiring contract faculty for undergraduate teaching. Meanwhile, we hear reports of hundreds of applications per tenure-track position, and of increasingly inflated expectations for applicants. Each cohort faces competition from the unemployed grads of previous years, as well as applicants from other jurisdictions such as the United States, Australia, and the U.K. Those who don’t find long-term faculty jobs may end up working in low-paid, unstable contract teaching and postdoctoral positions. This is why a now-infamous article in the Economist claimed the PhD is a “waste of time.”
In the past, there has never been a 100 per cent correlation between getting a PhD and becoming a professor, but the situation now seems more acute. With all the un/under-employment horror stories circulating, why do governments want to keep raising the number of PhDs? One reason is that they don’t view the PhD as a route exclusively to the professoriate. The logic of the “knowledge economy” suggests that increasing the number of people with advanced degrees – known as “highly qualified personnel” – leads to more innovation, and thus more economic development. What governments want are not more professors, but more well-educated people in many areas of the workforce. What governments can’t do is ensure that some students are keen to graduate with plans to enter those other areas, as opposed to academe.
Can there really be a purpose for the PhD other than as preparation for the tenure track? For more academics and students the answer is now “yes,” but in many doctoral programmes outcomes other than permanent academic employment are not viewed positively. Those who pursue them may receive less institutional support and faculty mentorship, because PhD supervisors are usually faculty who have primarily worked within the university, and they’re less likely to have cultivated professional relationships elsewhere.
Canada is only “producing too many PhDs” if every student is being encouraged to pursue an academic career and nothing else. In that case, there certainly aren’t enough positions to go around. One solution is that universities should increase tenure-track hiring so that more full-time permanent work is available. Yet even if this happened, it’s unlikely there would be enough jobs to “absorb” all those currently under– and unemployed, who are still on the academic job market. Should PhD programmes be reduced in size? Perhaps, but the problem with simply reducing enrollments is that it’s likely to restrict doctoral education to those who can most easily access the right resources. This lowers the chances that traditionally underprivileged groups will be represented among faculty at Canadian universities.
What’s most important is for prospective PhDs to have a clear understanding not only of the competitive conditions for academic jobs, but also the range of possibilities opened up by doctoral education, which are far more diverse than those generally presented in graduate programmes. Those possibilities must also be developed actively through collaboration between universities, governments, other non-academic organizations and students, so that the promise of advanced education isn’t lost due to lack of mentorship, guidance and opportunity.
Viewing every doctoral candidate solely as a future tenure-track prof is no more helpful than assuming each of us should calculate our own value only in terms of clear economic benefit to the nation. The assumptions in each case conflate students’ needs with the competing agendas of governments, which view PhDs as bearers of “human capital,” and of the graduate programmes that gain prestige by educating successful professors. But PhD grads have personal contexts to consider and lives to live, and we need to make sure they’re informed and prepared enough to make decisions that will work for them. Only then will we start to see a change in the way doctoral education works, not just for the economy and for the government but for graduates themselves.
Worldviews Pre-conference Event – War on Knowledge?
This Tuesday, April 16th, I’ll be on a panel at the pre-conference event for the Worldviews Conference on Media and Higher Education, in Toronto. This should be an interesting event; the other members of the panel are: Tony Burman, Janice Gross Stein, Clifford Orwin, and Scott Jaschik, and the moderator will be Rick Salutin.
Myths and mismatches: Where from here?
This is the last part of a series of posts that was written as a response to – and a means of thinking through issues raised by – an e-course by Jo VanEvery and Julie Clarenbach called “Myths and Mismatches”. Here is the link to the original post, from January 17, 2011: “Myths & Mismatches”: Where from here?
The last series of blog posts left me all blogged out for a couple of weeks, but I thought I’d offer a follow-up post regarding my thoughts on the e-course by Jo and Julie, on career planning and professional development, and a few other things.
What I found helpful about the course was that it provided me something to respond to, and in the process I found myself thinking harder about my current decisions. And because I’m feeling “stuck” and unfocussed at the moment, this was a valuable exercise. I tried to imagine my self in a particular role, and asked: what would I look like doing this job? How is that going to happen? Where do my current actions take me in terms of that kind of goal? Fairly basic stuff, but I find writing it all down tends to help me with coherence and direction. And when I’m feeling lost, I like to focus on the tangible aims that make it easier to make decisions in the present–since they build towards something in the future.
Some of the things I’m doing at the moment in order to provide myself direction–in a few different aspects of (academic) career development:
Making a decision about an academic “subject area” in which I could work comfortably, i.e. as a member of a department or program or team. This sounds like a no-brainer, and for most people in a PhD program it hasn’t been an issue since at least the MA level. But because of the way my interests have developed, choosing an “area” has been a less than straightforward process (my degrees are in Communication Studies, Linguistics, and Education).
A related task is to work towards drawing my various projects into a well-articulated and coherent research “map” that works within that subject area. I have diverse interests, but diversity is only a strength if it’s grounded in something stable like a good knowledge base, along with a plan regarding how the various pieces fit together and reinforce each other. I know well enough how everything is related, but I need to work actively to make those connections clear to others. This is important no matter what line of work I end up following.
…Alongside the usual academic channels, I’ve been experimenting with using social media to meet new colleagues and develop professional relationships, to “network” and to share/publicise my own work, to develop opportunities for contributing to ongoing debates (such as writing articles for other blogs and web sites), and to keep up with news/issues in my fields. As a result, I’m thinking about blogging and other “public communication” as part of academics being “public intellectuals”, not just professors or employees of the university. I’d like my blog to be a way to share my ideas even as I’m developing them in other ways (e.g. through research).
While I won’t swap social media for more traditional fora such academic conferences, participation in the latter is restricted for me because of the expense (travel, accommodation, registration fees) and timing. Sources like Twitter are an ongoing means of conversing with others whose interests I share, engaging in long-term exchanges that keep me thinking and that open up the discussion to anyone who can use a hashtag.
I’m working on teaching through practice (even just with my small tutorial group this year) and through development of approaches and philosophies; and I’m thinking about pedagogy rather than “teaching”, about theory and overall strategy as well as classroom tactics and practices. I’m looking for ways to examples that “stick”.
And in the context of our wired classroom, where students can use laptops and Blackberries to “tune out” from course discussions, I’m trying to understand and take into account the issues involved – “student engagement” and technology in the classroom; consumerism and credentialism; cognitive development in learning; differences in learning “styles” – and translate that back into an approach that gets students interested enough to abandon Facebook in the middle of class (high hopes, I know).
I still see teaching and learning as being about relationships, communication, partnership, mutual responsibility, motivation, feedback, confidence, hard work, listening, and changing your approach when something doesn’t work. Most important to me is to create an environment wherein questions and discussion can happen. With all that in mind I’m considering things like course design (in the abstract) and how this relates to pedagogy, particularly in terms of how different aspects of the course (curriculum/readings, assignments, tutorials and TAs, lectures) all have to work together in a way that makes sense to students.
I think that’s all for today. I hope you enjoyed the series of “Myths & Mismatches” posts, and if you’re following my blog – thanks for joining me!
The future of the university…
Here is the post I wrote as a follow-up to the panel discussion at University of Toronto on March 28th.
Myths and mismatches, part 10
This is part of a series of posts that was written as a response to – and a means of thinking through issues raised by – an e-course by Jo VanEvery and Julie Clarenbach called “Myths and Mismatches”. Here is the link to the original post, from January 17, 2011: “Myths & Mismatches” Part 10: What it takes, for what it’s worth.
Here is the last post in my series of responses to Jo Van Every and Julie Clarenbach‘s e-course on “Myths & Mismatches” in academic careers. I hope you’ve enjoyed reading these posts, and I recommend this e-course as well as other materials available on both authors’ web sites.
Mismatch #5: Mismatch of Skills
As discussed in a previous post in this series, we often gain more “skills” from graduate training than we think. But the “flip-side” of that fact is that those skills are also requiredto develop successful academic career.
“Success” at an academic job involves juggling aspects of work that require both collaboration and independent, creative work; maintaining a high level of communicative competence in both spoken and written forms and for diverse audiences; working both within and without structures and time constraints, as the context demands/requires; and having both micro- and macro-level understanding of a topic or issue or project.
While “for some people, these skills come naturally”, many of us will need to learn to balance our strengths and weaknesses to achieve the necessary results; personally I think I’ll need a workaround for my introversion (I now call it being “selectively social”), for my non-linear mode of approaching things (though I’m getting much better at dealing with that), and for my chronic perfectionism about research/writing (the blog helps, I think). I worry that I’ll be too “taxed” by teaching to finish any worthwhile research, that my focus couldn’t be sustained while my attention has to be stretched in so many different directions. But then I also know that when I get into a scheduled “groove”, I often rise to the challenge and get more work done than I would otherwise.
The question posed by Jo and Julie is whether “making do” in this way is “sustainable” for you. Like students, academics “have wildly different skill sets” and while “there may be a way to bridge that gap […] it may not be worth the time and effort required”. In other words, if the demands of the job feel like “too much”, there may only be so far you can go in terms of professionalizing yourself. In my case, I ask myself whether I can learn to hone my focus for shorter periods in order to cope with the fragmentation of diverse scheduled tasks, and whether I can clobber my perfectionism and just “let go” of my writing the way others seem to be able to do. Whether I can get around feeling a disheartening sense of personal responsibility every time a student does poorly. Will “trying harder” be enough?