Report Urges Govt to Bankroll Graduate Degrees

April 29, 2010
By Audrey Williams June
http://chronicle.com/article/Government-Is-Urged-to/65286/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

The United States must make it a national priority to improve graduate education and attract more students to pursue—and complete—graduate degrees, to keep the country from losing its competitive edge in a global economy, a new report from education groups says.

The report, "The Path Forward: The Future of Graduate Education in the United States," (http://www.fgereport.org/) offers several recommendations, including a proposal that the federal government bankroll a doctoral traineeship program, eventually costing $10-billion a year, that would cover the key costs of pursuing a Ph.D. for some students. The report also says that universities have a responsibility to ensure that students not only start degree programs but finish them.

However, in an economy still struggling to rebound, a federally financed traineeship might be slow to materialize.

"It would be foolish to think it would be fully funded in the first year, but I'm reasonably optimistic that it can be built over time into a fully funded program," says Suzanne Ortega, provost at the University of New Mexico and vice chair of the Commission on the Future of Graduate Education in the United States, which produced the report. The group was created with support from the Council of Graduate Schools and the Educational Testing Service.

"Lack of financial support is one of the main reasons graduate students drift," says another commission member, Gene Block, chancellor of the University of California at Los Angeles. "If you're well supported financially as a graduate student, you can make it," Mr. Block says.

Under the competitive program, students pursuing an area of "national need," as identified by the federal government, could receive a $30,000 annual stipend and have tuition and other educational costs covered for up to five years, at a total cost of $80,000 a year for each student. The commission says the proposed six-year program would initially cover 25,000 students at a cost of $2-billion for the forthcoming fiscal year and then expand to a $10-billion program covering 125,000 students in the 2016 fiscal year. The traineeship is billed as a natural extension of the America Competes Act, which was passed in 2007 to beef up the nation's investment in the sciences and is currently up for reauthorization.

Says Debra W. Stewart, president of the Council of Graduate Schools, "No matter how bad the economy is right now, we need to make progress on this as best as we can."

Keeping Students on Track
The 64-page commission report, to be released Thursday during a forum at the U.S. Capitol, doesn't just hold the federal government accountable for fixing what ails graduate education. It also makes recommendations for universities and industry.

Universities, for instance, need to keep pushing to improve the completion rates of graduate students—which hover around 50 percent in most fields at the doctoral level and are unknown at the master's level, the report says. In fact, the report calls that task "the single most important thing that universities can do at both the undergraduate and graduate levels." One thing that might increase degree completion, the report says, is for graduate schools to help graduate students "recognize the rewards of earning a degree."

Colleges can also do more to to "alert graduate students early on in their Ph.D. education of all their career opportunities," says William B. Russel, chair of the commission and dean of the graduate school at Princeton University.

Meanwhile, corporations are urged to better communicate what skills are needed for the jobs of the future, among other things. For companies, the payoff for doing that is simple: According to the report, the number of jobs requiring a graduate degree is estimated to grow by 2.5 million by 2018.

"Corporations have a great stake in doing what we can to improve graduate education because we're looking to hire the brightest and the best," says Stanley S. Litow, a member of the commission and vice president for corporate citizenship and corporate affairs at IBM.

The report also expressed concerns about retaining top-notch international students. Although graduate programs in the United States have been the leading choice of international students, other countries, such as China and India, are rapidly investing in graduate education and offering career incentives for their students to come back home and work if they do study abroad. In addition, the report notes that the share of international students enrolled in American graduate institutions has declined between 2000 and 2006 and continues to do so.

But Philip G. Altbach, a professor of higher education at Boston College, says that despite new options for international students in their home countries, "in the short run and the medium run, international students will continue to be attracted to U.S. schools. In my view, we will be better than the top universities that are emerging in China, Korea, Taiwan, and other places for a long time."

Still, Mr. Block, of the commission, called the report "a wake-up call."

UAW and Instructor Staff Union

April 28, 2010
Graduate Students to New York U.: Recognize Our Union Now
By Audrey Williams June
http://chronicle.com/article/Graduate-Students-to-New-York/65273/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
Graduate students at New York University have asked the institution to voluntarily recognize their union. Or, say the students, they will take their case to a newly-constituted National Labor Relations Board, which has recently signaled that it might restore collective-bargaining rights for teaching and research assistants at private colleges.

"We're not entirely confident that the university will go ahead and do the right thing," said Kari Hensley, a member of the Graduate Student Organizing Committee. "That's why we're planning to go through the legal channels that are available to us. We're very confident that the NLRB is ready to reverse the injustice."

The group has given the university one week to act.

In 2001, New York University was the first private institution to recognize a graduate-employee union, following a labor-board ruling the previous year that said the university's teaching assistants were workers with full bargaining rights. The union negotiated its first contract, which included a 40-percent pay increase, fully paid health insurance, and a grievance procedure.

But when that contract expired in 2005, the university declined to renew it. That's because in 2004 the labor board, with new members and ruling in a different case, reversed the 2000 decision. Teaching assistants at private colleges are students, not workers, and therefore can't join unions, the 2004 ruling held. NYU agreed. Graduate workers went on a months-long strike, but administrators didn't budge.

Now, union advocates are ready to try again...

Do Caps Help Adjuncts?

April 22, 2010
Issue Update: Why doesn't the union provide some help to the adjuncts?
Full article available at:
http://www.dol.gov/whd/regs/compliance/whdfs71.htm

The faculty union's contract with the City University of New York has a provision designed to prevent part-time instructors from being given a full-time teaching load. These adjuncts are allowed to teach only nine credits a semester at any one college in CUNY (typically three courses) and one other course at a second CUNY college. If a department head wants to offer an adjunct any additional work, say a section at a third college or a fourth section at the primary college, the union must approve a waiver. And until recently, the union has generally done so....

Compartive Report on Grade Inflation

Grading in American Colleges and Universities
by Stuart Rojstaczer & Christopher Healy — March 04, 2010
Aailable for download at:
http://www.gradeinflation.com/tcr2010grading.pdf

Here we report on historical and recent grading patterns at American four-year colleges and universities. Records of average grades show that since the 1960s, grading has evolved in an ad hoc way into identifiable patterns at the national level. The mean grade point average of a school is highly dependent on the average quality of its student body and whether it is public or private. Relative to other schools, public-commuter and engineering schools grade harshly. Superimposed on these trends is a nationwide rise in grades over time of roughly 0.1 change in GPA per decade. These trends may help explain why private school students are disproportionately represented in Ph.D. study in science and engineering and why they tend to dominate admission into the most prestigious professional schools. They also may help explain why undergraduate students are increasingly disengaged from learning and why the US has difficulty filling its employment needs in engineering and technology.

The Many Faces of Being and Adjunct

Contingent ABC's
By Marc Bousquet
http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Contingent-ABCs/22566/ sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
Reposted (at The Chronicle) with permission from the essential adj-l discussion list, guest artist Maria Shine Stewart offers a taxonomy of the (too often silent) majority faculty.

Adjunct acrobat: One who stays supremely flexible
Badjunct: Unfortunate stereotype
Cladjunct: Colleague with scheduling luck
Dadjunct: One balancing parenting and teaching
Egadjunct: Typical reaction upon hearing course load
Fadjunct: One who follows the trends
Gladjunct: Opposite of "sadjunct"
Gradjunct: One completing an/other degree while teaching
Hadjunct: Remember position you had before reassignment, budget cuts, etc.
Idjunct: One given to too much self-indulgence
Jazzjunct: One who recharges while commuting with innovative music
Kitkatdjunct: One who stops at vending machines rather than taking meal breaks
Ladjunct: The newbie
Myriadjunct: One who works in multiple departments of the same school
Nadjunct: Someone who gives it up
Operadjunct: Your colleague with the big voice
Plaidjunct: Your color-coordinated colleague
Quadjunct: What you become when you improvise to conference with students outside
Rapidadjunct: Colleague hired at last minute
Sadjunct: Opposite of "gladjunct"
T.a.djunct: See "gradjunct"
Unsinkableadjunct: Got zero hits
Vegetarianadjunct: One whose compassion extends to animals
Wadejunct: What you became the day you forgot your boots
Xanadjunct: One who dreams of exotic places* [*frequently, Xanaxjunct--m.b.]
Yaddayaddayadjunct: What you sound like to someone who really isn't listening to adjunct issues
Zigzagadjunct: What happens if you forget the day of the week and drive to the wrong school

An Invitation for Graduate Teaching Assistants to Unionize

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/04/13/nlrb
On Monday, the chair of the National Labor Relations Board gave a strong indication that, now that the board has new members appointed by President Obama, unions could expect it to back collective bargaining rights for graduate teaching assistants at private universities. Her remarks came as graduate students at the University of Chicago - in what could be a test case - are considering affiliation with national unions for an organizing drive.

IMS Global Learning Impact Conference: May 17-20, Long Beach

Come to Learning Impact 2010 to learn from experts about:

New digital teaching & learning alternatives that are available now
Understanding and dealing with changing student demographics
Historic U.S. Department of Education initiatives aimed at better exploitation of technology
New ways to effectively bridge the secondary / tertiary divide
Effective system-level collaboration strategies

Register at:
http://www.imsglobal.org/learningimpact2010/

Applying outside of the US

April 5, 2010
Rule Britannia
By Samuel Wren
http://chronicle.com/article/Rule-Britannia/64962/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

"...Graduate students and other academics in a tight job market might consider looking to Europe. My position came through international networks and word of mouth. The logical place to look for ads is in Times Higher Education, since British job notices all too rarely appear in American professional publications—although they really should if British universities want to cast a net broadly..."