Sidenote: Tracy Chapman: a singer-songwriter who actually went to college (so many don’t). This week’s NYTimes Popcast podcast features an interview with the writer who did the 1988 Rolling Stone cover article on Chapman and her reluctance even then to embrace celebrity and fame.
Great piece with smart analysis interspersed with a compelling personal story. Thank you for writing this.
May I also mention: Virtual education doesn't work. There is massive attrition, and for those who do complete courses, achievement is much lower, because most people cannot continue to commit to learning material on their own for a reward as shallow as a credential. The only reason education was ever important, as with every other meaningful human activity, is for the connections it allows with other humans. Making it about the "product" of a credential reverses the order.
Thank you, Jan! I'm not sure anyone has ever told me that they read my writing aloud to someone else. What a nice compliment. Now you've got me wondering which passages those were :)
I detest academia now for these very reasons among others, i.e., racism, white supremacy, sexism, classism, and misogyny. I make slightly more money tutoring writing this year with less stress. It's also allowing me to write a lot more. My terminal degree is an MFA in creative writing. I may not go back to adjunct teaching if I don't have too. Dr. Biden teaches at a community college. She has to be aware of this, and I am ticked she doesn't use her platform to speak against the exploitation of adjuncts and the neoliberalism and corporatization of higher education.
I'm glad to hear that tutoring is going well for you. This was a minor revelation for me, too, that the income bar is so low for adjunct work that it is really not hard to clear it with other forms of employment. Sadly the same is true for faculty salaries, when it comes right down to it, which is one reason why folks are moving to industry. Even as a coach/consultant, I know that once I put my mind to scaling the business, it would be possible to outstrip what I was earning as a full professor with 16 years of experience. It's a nice carrot to dangle.
I suppose the supply and demand imbalance that drives some of this — too many PhDs, particularly in some areas, and too few students, particularly in some areas — will eventually correct itself. At that point maybe we’ll be in a situation where the relatively few who pursue a PhD in, say, English, will have a good chance at having the kind of comfortable career your professor had.
But nostalgia is almost never recoverable. I suspect the push into virtual will continue inexorably, at least for a while. Young people coming up now will have a say in how far it goes. Certainly, their relationship with digital tech often makes me uncomfortable, but I don’t think I have a say in that relationship.
Virtual learning ought to be a boon for many students — the shy student, the disabled, anybody living in the middle of nowhere — but I think most college students recognize and desire an in-person experience. Virtual ought also to help keep college costs down, but that appears to be happening anyway:
I’ve never quite understood the Ivy angle. Your own example demonstrates that one doesn’t need celebrity teachers at a highly selective school to reach their potential. Is it just for the connections? Looking at, say, where the Biden cabinet were educated, you might very well think it was largely an East Coast elite. But maybe that’s a different question.
Frank, your opening paragraph sounds sensible, but I don't think it holds up to scrutiny. Graduate programs need to produce a certain amount of PhDs, or their own economic model doesn't make any sense. You have to have enough grad students to fund the salaries for their graduate faculty, and that calculus is out of whack with the jobs available. Universities have almost no incentive to correct it so long as their own bottom line is fine. And that imbalance has continued for decades, so if it were to correct itself, it would have done so already.
What a lower scale of PhD production would mean would be many fewer PhD programs. It's hard to imagine this not skewing toward elite institutions, in which case the majority of PhDs would come from very selective schools. But the jobs would exist at a wide variety of institutions; in fact, the majority of teaching jobs are not at selective institutions. So who wants to take a Princeton PhD to a community college or even to a non-selective liberal arts college? I was quite happy to take my Nebraska PhD to a small liberal arts college, because I saw myself in my own first-generation students.
Your final question strikes close to the heart of Smith's fallacies. Nobody with one of these new virtual degrees is going to end up on the Supreme Court or in Biden's Cabinet or in a corner office at Goldman Sachs. So the class divide remains unchanged by expanded access to higher education. What I have argued elsewhere is that public education and federal support to make college education affordable for all are the best remedies for class inequity.
At the risk of going on too much, I'll confess that I could have been more ambitious in my college selection. Stephen and some of my other mentors were fantastic, but my peer group at that college was often subpar. My own potential might have been greater if I'd made it into an elite school as an undergraduate or found an "in" through a power broker. In this regard, my story diverges from Tara Westover's. She went from Brigham Young to Cambridge, and from there to Harvard. But she really lucked out twice with influential mentors. A more equitable system would take money out of the equation, or at least diminish its influence, in allowing students to pass through the more competitive gates. Because once you're inside, as you suggest, the network determines everything that comes next.
"A colleague of mine who did his undergrad at St. Lawrence University (a fine liberal arts school) and his PhD at Iowa, confessed that his own graduate program would not hire him. Iowa wants faculty with Yale, Harvard, and Stanford degrees so it can compete in the scarcity game."
I experienced the same thing, albeit not in academia. I went to law school at Georgetown and Emory, with my degree issued by Emory, but when I wanted to apply for a job with Emory's Office of General Counsel years later (after being a partner at the 5th largest law firm in the country), I was told not to bother because the General Counsel only wanted applicants with degrees from Ivy League law schools.
I'm sorry to hear that, Deborah. It's surprising, because I would think that Georgetown and Emory degrees would be considered elite. When you look at Raj Chetty's research, it's pretty clear that the Ivy League is overwhelmingly populated by rich kids, and so we should place an enormous talent asterisk next to those institutions -- not that they aren't graduating talented people, but that they are superior only in wealth, not intelligence. One of my other mentors, who had attended Princeton, said that the brightest students he taught at Nebraska were as bright as anyone at Princeton, but that the difference was at the bottom end of the cohort. The bottom end at Princeton was simply dull, whereas public universities see some truly alarming levels of academic preparedness. But the rationale for diversity, which includes socio-economic diversity, is that different life experiences bring different skill sets. I think this applies to institutions, too. If all you have is an Ivy League echo chamber, you're not necessarily achieving more creative results. Smith's conversation with Levitt is a good example. A University of Chicago prof interviewing a Carnegie Mellon prof -- and the world outside that bubble might as well not exist. Which leads to serious errors in judgment, as I hope my essay shows.
Sidenote: Tracy Chapman: a singer-songwriter who actually went to college (so many don’t). This week’s NYTimes Popcast podcast features an interview with the writer who did the 1988 Rolling Stone cover article on Chapman and her reluctance even then to embrace celebrity and fame.
Great piece with smart analysis interspersed with a compelling personal story. Thank you for writing this.
May I also mention: Virtual education doesn't work. There is massive attrition, and for those who do complete courses, achievement is much lower, because most people cannot continue to commit to learning material on their own for a reward as shallow as a credential. The only reason education was ever important, as with every other meaningful human activity, is for the connections it allows with other humans. Making it about the "product" of a credential reverses the order.
Great analysis Josh. I actually read some portions out loud to Tom by way of emphasizing my own experience.
Glad you got to spend time with a teacher who had such a powerful impact on you.
Thank you, Jan! I'm not sure anyone has ever told me that they read my writing aloud to someone else. What a nice compliment. Now you've got me wondering which passages those were :)
I detest academia now for these very reasons among others, i.e., racism, white supremacy, sexism, classism, and misogyny. I make slightly more money tutoring writing this year with less stress. It's also allowing me to write a lot more. My terminal degree is an MFA in creative writing. I may not go back to adjunct teaching if I don't have too. Dr. Biden teaches at a community college. She has to be aware of this, and I am ticked she doesn't use her platform to speak against the exploitation of adjuncts and the neoliberalism and corporatization of higher education.
I'm glad to hear that tutoring is going well for you. This was a minor revelation for me, too, that the income bar is so low for adjunct work that it is really not hard to clear it with other forms of employment. Sadly the same is true for faculty salaries, when it comes right down to it, which is one reason why folks are moving to industry. Even as a coach/consultant, I know that once I put my mind to scaling the business, it would be possible to outstrip what I was earning as a full professor with 16 years of experience. It's a nice carrot to dangle.
I suppose the supply and demand imbalance that drives some of this — too many PhDs, particularly in some areas, and too few students, particularly in some areas — will eventually correct itself. At that point maybe we’ll be in a situation where the relatively few who pursue a PhD in, say, English, will have a good chance at having the kind of comfortable career your professor had.
But nostalgia is almost never recoverable. I suspect the push into virtual will continue inexorably, at least for a while. Young people coming up now will have a say in how far it goes. Certainly, their relationship with digital tech often makes me uncomfortable, but I don’t think I have a say in that relationship.
Virtual learning ought to be a boon for many students — the shy student, the disabled, anybody living in the middle of nowhere — but I think most college students recognize and desire an in-person experience. Virtual ought also to help keep college costs down, but that appears to be happening anyway:
https://www.economist.com/united-states/2023/07/23/american-universities-have-an-incentive-to-seem-extortionate
I’ve never quite understood the Ivy angle. Your own example demonstrates that one doesn’t need celebrity teachers at a highly selective school to reach their potential. Is it just for the connections? Looking at, say, where the Biden cabinet were educated, you might very well think it was largely an East Coast elite. But maybe that’s a different question.
Frank, your opening paragraph sounds sensible, but I don't think it holds up to scrutiny. Graduate programs need to produce a certain amount of PhDs, or their own economic model doesn't make any sense. You have to have enough grad students to fund the salaries for their graduate faculty, and that calculus is out of whack with the jobs available. Universities have almost no incentive to correct it so long as their own bottom line is fine. And that imbalance has continued for decades, so if it were to correct itself, it would have done so already.
What a lower scale of PhD production would mean would be many fewer PhD programs. It's hard to imagine this not skewing toward elite institutions, in which case the majority of PhDs would come from very selective schools. But the jobs would exist at a wide variety of institutions; in fact, the majority of teaching jobs are not at selective institutions. So who wants to take a Princeton PhD to a community college or even to a non-selective liberal arts college? I was quite happy to take my Nebraska PhD to a small liberal arts college, because I saw myself in my own first-generation students.
Your final question strikes close to the heart of Smith's fallacies. Nobody with one of these new virtual degrees is going to end up on the Supreme Court or in Biden's Cabinet or in a corner office at Goldman Sachs. So the class divide remains unchanged by expanded access to higher education. What I have argued elsewhere is that public education and federal support to make college education affordable for all are the best remedies for class inequity.
At the risk of going on too much, I'll confess that I could have been more ambitious in my college selection. Stephen and some of my other mentors were fantastic, but my peer group at that college was often subpar. My own potential might have been greater if I'd made it into an elite school as an undergraduate or found an "in" through a power broker. In this regard, my story diverges from Tara Westover's. She went from Brigham Young to Cambridge, and from there to Harvard. But she really lucked out twice with influential mentors. A more equitable system would take money out of the equation, or at least diminish its influence, in allowing students to pass through the more competitive gates. Because once you're inside, as you suggest, the network determines everything that comes next.
"A colleague of mine who did his undergrad at St. Lawrence University (a fine liberal arts school) and his PhD at Iowa, confessed that his own graduate program would not hire him. Iowa wants faculty with Yale, Harvard, and Stanford degrees so it can compete in the scarcity game."
I experienced the same thing, albeit not in academia. I went to law school at Georgetown and Emory, with my degree issued by Emory, but when I wanted to apply for a job with Emory's Office of General Counsel years later (after being a partner at the 5th largest law firm in the country), I was told not to bother because the General Counsel only wanted applicants with degrees from Ivy League law schools.
I'm sorry to hear that, Deborah. It's surprising, because I would think that Georgetown and Emory degrees would be considered elite. When you look at Raj Chetty's research, it's pretty clear that the Ivy League is overwhelmingly populated by rich kids, and so we should place an enormous talent asterisk next to those institutions -- not that they aren't graduating talented people, but that they are superior only in wealth, not intelligence. One of my other mentors, who had attended Princeton, said that the brightest students he taught at Nebraska were as bright as anyone at Princeton, but that the difference was at the bottom end of the cohort. The bottom end at Princeton was simply dull, whereas public universities see some truly alarming levels of academic preparedness. But the rationale for diversity, which includes socio-economic diversity, is that different life experiences bring different skill sets. I think this applies to institutions, too. If all you have is an Ivy League echo chamber, you're not necessarily achieving more creative results. Smith's conversation with Levitt is a good example. A University of Chicago prof interviewing a Carnegie Mellon prof -- and the world outside that bubble might as well not exist. Which leads to serious errors in judgment, as I hope my essay shows.