Category Archives: Professional

Almost half of recent college graduates did not get jobs in their field of choice. The majority of these underemployed appear to work in the retail or restaurant industries. Among those working in the retail industry, 78 percent had desired to enter a different industry prior to graduating. Similarly, 81 percent of those graduates working in the restaurant industry had wanted to enter a different industry. This study once again showed that many of our recent graduates are currently underutilized.

“McKinsey on Young College Graduates,” Will Kimball

When I worked at a public university I was always surprised to find so many professors in favor of raising tuition. Not all of them would admit it, but the consensus seemed to be that the more expensive an education becomes, the better the students. Many professors would rather send off the difficult students to the community colleges– or to a poorly paid job– than have to deal with trying to teach them.

Some students, it was commonly said, are simply not college material. The real issue isn’t about who can or cannot learn; it’s about money and time. The less well-prepared students are more expensive in every way. They need more personal attention, which means smaller class sizes, and it can be a challenge to convince them that learning is worth the time and effort. Too many people think it’s just not worth it.

This CEPR report worries me because some people will use it to argue that too many people are going to college; that college is too expensive given that we don’t need as many graduates as we already have, and so on. It’s the classic reactionary push against social progress. Maybe (now that the debt crisis is over) we ought to be expanding those fields– research, science, education itself– that require a college degree.

About 15 years ago those of us interested in using computers to teach– we were teaching composition or literature classes– saw ourselves as fighting against academic Luddites who refused to understand that these new communication technologies were both beneficial and inevitable. This is the future, we would say, and we should welcome it and use it to our advantage. That wasn’t the only development in our field, however.

Alongside this technology we also saw the rise of a higher education system in which the ordinary standards of professional life– established over decades– had been eroded. The tenure track academic was being replaced with the poorly paid itinerant adjunct without health care, a pension, or any job security. I’ve long believed that our technological optimism was used as a kind of trojan horse to help destroy the profession.

Times have changed. I don’t mean to suggest that there we have lost our technological optimism. We have not. I think, though, that the technological emperor has begun to seem more and more naked. Multitasking is dead. There’s been a conference on “The Dark Side of the Digital” and more and more faculty– not surprisingly, in California (see here and here)– are resisting the online dystopias. We’ve come full circle.

As I’ve said, we were overly optimistic and this new-found realism is a helpful sign; I am hoping it does not presage a new form of academic Luddite. Resisting ineffective or immature online technologies, however, is only one-half of the picture. We also need a political movement dedicated to re-professionalizing academia. If that is ever going to happen it’ll have to include a savvy understanding of online technologies.