what the fuck am i getting myself into with this grad school stuff

(for fr3nch)

Watching my partner go through the experience of trying to find an academic job in the social sciences Rank doesn't have nearly as much bearing on placing, as institutional support in the job hunting process. Her department gives pretty much none although some advisors are quite good at this. It would be worth talking to some of students who did place recently and some of those going through the Job market process right now. It's not just about good letters its about a getting good apprenticeship as a professional academic over the course of the Phd and having a committee that will market you to their networks. If #2 is placing people then they are clearly doing something right but it would be worth digging deeper.

lol so i was talking to a couple of friends who are going to be looking for academic jobs in the near future & one (h1story) sd p unequivocally that school #1 was the right choice. the other (b1o) sd school #2...

If #2 is placing people then they are clearly doing something right but it would be worth digging deeper.

yeahh this is one of the things that i wonder about like, as much as i get euler's point about dept. prestige & working your way into the backscratching network in the end you still need to be in a position to profit from those connections w/ faculty in the 1st place, right? like, you can end up at a school w/ a great reputation, good placement record, access to networks &c &c but if its not a place your going to be comfortable or where your own goals wont be met, than what good is it? idk, really

also i guess your gf should be p clear about her own goals from this - how badly does she want a tt position, how does she feel about teaching &c

yeah there are some more variables too. school #1 has a pretty brutal 1st year and you're already teaching in the 2nd year. also as much as school #2 might be better for her current interests, it's important to point out that she's not 100% on those interests and sorta needs time to figure out what she wants to focus on.

there are some people she can/will meet with who have strong connections w/ both schools and I'm hoping that'll make this decision more clear. that said (I'm speaking for her at this point but she does read this) I think her #1 goal would be tt.

really wish I could easily make a spreadsheet w/ placements and non-placements for every school! I'm trying to get her to demand as much from the schools but 'how many failures did your school produce' is a kinda huge factor! we recently saw someone w/ a business card that had a fr3nch masters from school #1 - this school does not offer a terminal masters. etc.

I dunno, failure at getting through grad school comes down in a big way to your personal skills: smarts, drive, motivation, focus. There can be other factors, but I'm guessing she has a pretty good idea at her abilities (though I gotta say, in my absolutely savage first year of grad school I feared daily I wouldn't make it---you folks might think I'm an asshole now but you should known me before being humiliated daily for an entire year)

But failure at getting a job after making it through, that's something you don't have as much control over. You can do everything right & still get fucked. That's why you want the forces aligned with you: as Ed says, you want a place with programs in place for placement, but you also want faculty who are in the network, fight hard for their students, and have a record of success doing so.

yeah i think the thing that is difficult is that while there are differences btw schools it can be hard to definitively know the differences, like if the TOP SCHOOL is going to have a placement rate of x% whats the difference btw that and the fourth or fifth ranked schools? 5%? 15%? and what percentage chance should you be willing to sacrifice to study in a place that seems better suited to your own research interests, & what value does working with ppl & in a place youre most comfortable have, both immediately & in the quality of work youll be able to do?

im so glad i have no interest in a tt position, i think it wld have made me crazy

yeah esp in the humanities. I told her to go into this w/ no expectation to get one as the future is gonna be even more brutal than the present. she has good reason to believe she's one of the top prospects in the country this year but there's no way of knowing how well her skills will translate into serious research.

oops she corrected me after reading this, school #2 (the possibly less prestigious one) has the brutal first year

it's looking like it's probably gonna be #1

#2's first few years are needlessly brutal. huge difference between the workload there than at #1.
+
#1 does have the 'best students' (not just word of mouth, something she observed there)
+
#1's rep seems good enough that even if she might not get tt at harvard, she's gonna get *some sorta job* as one of the only students at the most selective school

yah go to where the best ppl are. feel like the most valuable part of any school is the 'academic environment' it puts you in. the actual larnin' you can do anywhere.

a letter of application outlining my potential contribution? fu guyz. one of these days i really ought to learn how to sell myself.

actually no srsly, it's only a phd application. what am i supposed to say? "i'll do my work and other people will be doing kind of similar stuff and we'll talk about it and it'll be cool and shit"?

Contribution to what? To the university community? Your field of research? Do you have a research topic and/or a potential thesis advisor? You can always go the route of "I believe my background in X makes me a strong candidate for pursuing future research in Y". Try to highlight something in your CV that you're particularly proud of -- from the I'm sure you're bringing some academic skills to the table that the typical student is not.

Argh, memories of scholarship applications coming back: "Please outline how your proposed research will benefit your country"

http://www.thenation.com/article/160410/faulty-towers-crisis-higher-education?page=full

one of my favorite writers

I think the problem is not 'higher education is dying' but 'america is dying'

Not a bad article, a lot better than most articles on the subject, but you can summarize the whole thing with this line: "Yet the liberal arts, as we know, are dying." College enrollment continues to skyrocket because people have realized that they're better off spending two years in college and coming out of it with a clear vocation and marketable skills than spending four years in uni (plus several more if you continue to grad school) and not having a clue what you're going to do with your life. All disciplines are affected by this, but liberal arts especially. Universities should aggressively promote "practical" disciplines, protect their intellectual property, and use that income to help underfunded departments (as well as things that benefit all students like dorms and students centres, which Dereisewicz thinks are wastes of money because they don't have anything to do with teaching or research).

Some of his claims are real howlers though ... like the notion that university admins and presidents only care about the "stock price" and don't have their institutions' best interests at heart? That's like saying politicians only care about the next weeks' poll numbers. Once you reach that level, padding your resume becomes a lot less important than building a "legacy", IMO. And this is straight-up BS: "A scientific education creates technologists. A liberal arts education creates citizens: people who can think broadly and critically about themselves and the world."

i haven't read the article yet, but "university admins and presidents only care about the "stock price" and don't have their institutions' best interests at heart" caught my eye and reminded me of this http://chronicle.com/article/The-College-as-a-Philanthropy/125176/

universities have always been corporations first and foremost - don't let any noble ideals get in the way of that

always? everywhere? if that's true then they're pretty much the worst corporations ever, at least in britain and europe, but even in the u.s.

I don't think 'always' - but certainly there's been a trend over the last decades toward something that emulates market competition - schools are competing w/ their 'product' (4 year experience + what the name/degree can do) rather than w/ their education. like, just cause they're non-profits doesn't mean that the operation can't trend in the direction of a private corporation - from the top (CEO salaries and perks) to the middle (economically efficient hiring/teaching = adjunct/ grad student world) to the bottom (tv ads/image/aforementioned 'product')

there's still not price competition, for the most part, but I think there will be, inevitably.

Not a bad article, a lot better than most articles on the subject, but you can summarize the whole thing with this line: "Yet the liberal arts, as we know, are dying." College enrollment continues to skyrocket because people have realized that they're better off spending two years in college and coming out of it with a clear vocation and marketable skills than spending four years in uni (plus several more if you continue to grad school) and not having a clue what you're going to do with your life.

yeah otm, I think this is at the heart of it. I think the semi-universal liberal arts education was, overall, a competitive advantage for the american economy but also maybe not built on a structure that will be sustainable in coming decades.

Some of his claims are real howlers though ... like the notion that university admins and presidents only care about the "stock price" and don't have their institutions' best interests at heart? That's like saying politicians only care about the next weeks' poll numbers. Once you reach that level, padding your resume becomes a lot less important than building a "legacy", IMO

are those things (considered to be) unrelated? the 'stock price' seems to be quite related to the general idea of what an institutions' 'best interests' are (rankings, money, talent) and 'legacy' is going to overlap with that too. whereas what we might consider the true 'best interests' (a serious increase in tenure track positions, huge cuts in high-level admin salaries) isn't happening anywhere.

always? everywhere? if that's true then they're pretty much the worst corporations ever, at least in britain and europe, but even in the u.s.

― caek, Monday, May 9, 2011 7:23 PM (3 hours ago) Bookmark

haha I was taking the piss (think I'm using this birriticism correctly) a little. on cynical days I think that the business of all private universities is long-term horseracing.

endowments don't fund themselves (well, they did until the finance market crashed! ha ha, take that david swensen.)

I think the semi-universal liberal arts education was, overall, a competitive advantage for the american economy but also maybe not built on a structure that will be sustainable in coming decades.

agreed.

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/BradDelongsSemi-dailyJournal/~3/XpqhCLoBVPw/why-is-the-higher-education-market-failing.html

last paragraph's a good one

But, as I have said, I don't think I understand what is going on--couldn't Yale pull a lot of students it wants from Harvard and Princeton by undercutting them by $5K a year? We do know that HYPSM tune their financial aid policies in the hope of making it not worth any student they want's while to attend Berkeley, with some success. But why doesn't Berkeley fight back effectively? A $3K a year surcharge for 750+ SAT students that gets you private-college levels of residential support and class sizes?

lol, why doesn't yale just make college free for all who qualify

Texas on the vanguard of something bad once again

lol, why doesn't yale just make college free for all who qualify

it already started to w/ people who have families that make less than a certain amount. harvard and yale (and friends) can do this, cause

a. shitloads of money
b. relatively few poor people that qualify

but that's just a strategically move that has the appearance of being generous. (if they really wanted to help the world they could triple their class size.)

strategically smart move*

well, yeah! that's why yale reducing its tuition cost by $5k wouldn't do a damn thing - the only people who it would affect are already affluent enough that money isn't a consideration for them. I was kind of being sarcastic there.

college is already a 'losing' prospect for elite universities in the short-term because even at sticker price, these colleges lose money on every student they take. they bank on the possibility that out of a class of 1000, 10 of those dudes are gonna become billionaires, and 2 of them are gonna donate tens of millions of dollars to build a new library or w/e.

oh gotcha you were making fun of delong

I read your statement as its own thing

I mean anyone who thinks that colleges fund multi-million dollar student halls by charging high tuition rates is pretty stupid. the money comes from other sources. the business of elite colleges is making the undergrad experience so much fucking fun that when you are 50 and swimming in gobs of money you are going to think "I owe this all to Harvard" and will then summarily write them a check for a cool 50 mil.

well yeah w/ the harvard and yales, but mid-tier colleges don't operate w/ that model

(but still charge the same tuition)

I claim no knowledge of the way mid-tier colleges operate *dusts self off, walks away*

haha

Texas on the vanguard of something bad once again

this was really frustrating because no1's entirely wrong, but it seems like the worst way of improving anything

i feel like this kinda bolsters my theory that the right has become institutionally incapable of achieving anyhting except through bullying & force but enh

We do know that HYPSM...

i kept reading this wondering why he thought middlebury was an elite school

In this case the right just wants to end public education in the USA & since research is what keeps American unis a nice place for ambitious smart people to work, if they can end research then they can more readily justify shutting the public unis down, since way fewer smart ambitious people will want to work for them.

haa yeah its probably stupid to believe those dudes have any real interest in improving anything for students so why not just act like dicks

They care about minimizing public expenditures. They care about their own children's educations but don't want to pay for anyone else's.

Plus research is weird & who cares about complex functions of several variables or the gay Shakespeare or whatever.

I'd bet a lot of their kids go to UT tho!

actually I went to college in TX with one of the leaders of this push, at a fancy private liberal arts college; I was a scholarship kid funded by oil money, & it was a pretty conservative place on the whole. Could tell stories but this is too public.

still, rick perry went to a public tx college, kay bailey hutchison went to a public tx college...I'd bet if you looked at the top ranks of the texas republican party you'd have a majority of people w/ a public college somewhere on their resume.

I'm willing to believe that they're not necessarily trying to destroy public universities, they're just stupid.

I'd bet if you looked at the top ranks of the texas republican party you'd have a majority of people w/ a public college somewhere on their resume.

might be willing to take this bet i mean someone is sending their kids to baylor & rice

whats frustrating is that the think tank ppl in that article do seem to have some legitimate problems w/ the UT system (& those issues certainly exist outside texas too) but again theres no interest in trying to reach compromise or find best outcomes. idk. i do think a lot abt things like low graduation rates, student workloads, usefulness of undergraduate courses &c & i think that theres some value in looking outside the academy for solutions

yeah Lamp I pretty much agree; if we could talk this stuff out without having their anti-state agenda in the b/g, that'd be great. As it is we can't.