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Graduate School
Another study links aerobic exercise to increased cognitive performance:
Start running and watch your brain grow, say scientists
Running (a lot of it) was found to improve the performance of mice on tests of memory. The mechanism: increased neurogenesis.
There's a fair amount of evidence that exercise boosts cognitive performance in people, too. A few overviews:
So, grad students and postdocs, lace up your running shoes!
The title says it all: "Graduate School in the Humanities: Just Don't Go". A particularly grim line:
...some responsible observers expect that hiring may be down 40 percent this year. What is 40 percent worse than desperate?
Something that rings true beyond the humanities is the author's characterization of the reasons that people go to graduate school in spite of poor career prospects afterwards (hello life scientists):
I have found that most prospective graduate students have given little thought to what will happen to them after they complete their doctorates. They assume that everyone finds a decent position somewhere, even if it's "only" at a community college (expressed with a shudder). Besides, the completion of graduate school seems impossibly far away, so their concerns are mostly focused on the present. Their motives are usually some combination of the following:
- They are excited by some subject and believe they have a deep, sustainable interest in it. (But ask follow-up questions and you find that it is only deep in relation to their undergraduate peers — not in relation to the kind of serious dedication you need in graduate programs.)
- They received high grades and a lot of praise from their professors, and they are not finding similar encouragement outside of an academic environment. They want to return to a context in which they feel validated.
- They are emerging from 16 years of institutional living: a clear, step-by-step process of advancement toward a goal, with measured outcomes, constant reinforcement and support, and clearly defined hierarchies. The world outside school seems so unstructured, ambiguous, difficult to navigate, and frightening.
- With the prospect of an unappealing, entry-level job on the horizon, life in college becomes increasingly idealized. They think graduate school will continue that romantic experience and enable them to stay in college forever as teacher-scholars.
- They can't find a position anywhere that uses the skills on which they most prided themselves in college. They are forced to learn about new things that don't interest them nearly as much. No one is impressed by their knowledge of Jane Austen. There are no mentors to guide and protect them, and they turn to former teachers for help.
- They think that graduate school is a good place to hide from the recession. They'll spend a few years studying literature, preferably on a fellowship, and then, if academe doesn't seem appealing or open to them, they will simply look for a job when the market has improved. And, you know, all those baby boomers have to retire someday, and when that happens, there will be jobs available in academe.
Did your graduate program not provide you with useful skills beyond what you needed to write your dissertation? MIT can help! A piece in today's NY Times describes MIT's Career Re-engineering program for scientists and engineers.
There's definitely a need for this kind of training - people's careers and interests often evolve far from their educational background. It will be interesting to see if any other universities follow suit. One benefit: a lot of the ideas could be incorporated into graduate and postdoc programs from the get go.
The methodology report for the forthcoming NRC rankings is out. It's an interesting approach to ranking programs, but it's complicated. For those without a statistics background, I'm sure it's conceptually pretty weird.
In the short term, the NRC rankings have two weaknesses: first, they're quite late, and second, the algorithm takes a fair amount of work to wrap your head around (and I say this as a math PhD with a reasonable stats background). Most of the reactions I've seen to date harp on precisely those two things.
With a longer view, however, things may be different. In the best case scenario, people will eventually figure out the mechanism - maybe it will even serve to educate people about the many benefits of resampling. If that happens, US News-style rankings may come out looking like gross oversimplifications. Also, a lot of the reason for the delays is that this type of approach has never been used before. In a repeat of the process, the NRC won't have to go through the exercise of generating importance weights, which surely was much of the work involved. We shall see.
In the meantime, this quote from the Chronicle stood out:
In an interview this afternoon, Jeremiah P. Ostriker, a professor of astrophysical sciences at Princeton University and the chair of the committee that oversees the doctoral-assessment project, said that he does not expect the report to be released during the next several weeks, but that he would be surprised if it is not released by the end of 2009.
Ouch!
A former Clemson institutional researcher has just given an eye-opening presentation that described how the US News college rankings drove the agenda of Clemson's administration. The measures taken ranged from promising (decreases in class sizes and increases in admissions standards) to unethical (allegations that employees lowballed other institutions in US News's reputational surveys).
Take a look
Regardless of the steps taken, it's crazy that a magazine has such sway over a university. Judging from the comments, Clemson is by no means alone - they're just more up front about what they are doing.
Preventing this kind of gaming is one of the reasons we set up the phds.org rankings the way we did. Allowing people to set their own weights for different criteria and using outcome measures rather than focusing primarily on input measures makes it much harder to game the system.
There's an interesting piece in Slate this week about lab safety (or the lack thereof) in academic settings relative to their corporate counterparts. The author may be familiar to some - Beryl Lieff Benderly writes for Science's Next Wave.
The article describes an awful chem lab accident at UCLA and then goes on to point out that non-employees (i.e. grad students and postdocs) don't fall under the workplace safety laws that cover corporate labs. The article claims that the safety standards in academic labs are quite poor, and many in the discussion forum concur.
Lab safety sounds like yet another good reason to classify postdocs as employees rather than leaving them in their current murky state.
There's an op-ed in yesterday's Times with a great opening paragraph:
Graduate education is the Detroit of higher learning. Most graduate programs in American universities produce a product for which there is no market (candidates for teaching positions that do not exist) and develop skills for which there is diminishing demand (research in subfields within subfields and publication in journals read by no one other than a few like-minded colleagues), all at a rapidly rising cost (sometimes well over $100,000 in student loans).
Unfortunately, it's long on suggestions for good places to be and short on ideas about how to get there. For example, item 6: "Impose mandatory retirement and abolish tenure." Who's supposed to do the abolishing? Tenured faculty? That seems unlikely. And I'm not sure that mandatory retirement is legal given anti-age discrimination laws.
Mary Ann Mason and Marc Goulden have conducted a recent study of University of California graduate students. Mason's assessment in The Chronicle: "We may be losing some of the most talented potential academics before they even arrive for a job interview. In the eyes of many doctoral students, the research university has a bad reputation — one of unrelenting work hours that allow little room for a satisfying family life."
The big problem is the hours and difficulty balancing work and family responsibilities:
The number of young women who want to pursue careers in academic research declines by 30 percent over the course of their doctoral study, and the number of men by 20 percent. In explaining their decision, men are more likely to report that they do not like unrelenting work hours. One male student in the survey complained that he was "fed up with the narrow-mindedness of supposedly intelligent people who are largely workaholic and expect others to be so as well." But most women give up on academic-research careers for family concerns. As one woman in the survey said, "I could not have come to graduate school more motivated to be a research-oriented professor. Now I feel that can only be a career possibility if I am willing to sacrifice having children."
While Mason expresses a great deal of concern about the findings, I'm not so sure it's a bad thing. There are strong cultural biases in academia that push graduate students to consider academic careers at research universities to the exclusion of all other options. The result is that few people prepare effectively for anything else, and poor preparation for the outside world combined with high ratios of aspirants to positions results in career train wrecks for a lot of people. Academic careers are no panacea - the hours are long, the pay mediocre, and in most cases one has little control over where one lives and works.
While the outcome that Mason advocates - having universities become more accommodating of families - would certainly be a good thing, an even better thing would be more students moving to productive and satisfying careers in other sectors.
A new TIAA-CREF survey of junior faculty at Master's granting colleges shows that alarmingly low numbers feel prepared for their jobs at the time of hiring.
The interesting bit is Table 7, "Level of preparation for career responsibilities"
After graduate school, % "very effectively" prepared:
Conduct research: 33%
Teach undergraduates: 31%
Obtain grants: 7%
After about 5 years on the job, higher percentages report that they are working "very effectively":
Conduct research: 46%
Teach undergraduates: 76%
Obtain grants: 14%
So what exactly are graduate programs training people to do?
The comments from faculty members on the Chronicle's story show why the problem exists - basically the attitude seems to be, "Preparing students is not our responsibility," and "Back when I was in graduate school, they didn't prepare *me*"
Poor attitudes aside, there is the further difficulty that many faculty members are likely not able to train students effectively to teach, write grants, etc, because they themselves don't do a particularly good job at such tasks, having not received much in the way of training / mentoring.
These survey results really underscore the importance of programs like Preparing Future Faculty that allow institutions and enterprising students to bypass recalcitrant professors.
View archives for January 2010.
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