Doctoral Candidates Anticipate Hard Times: 'This Is a Year of No Jobs'

---

March 20—Can Strategically Aligning (or Re-Aligning) Academic Programs Help You With Your Budget Crisis?, featuring SCUPers Mary Doyle of the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Karen Schmid of Purdue University. Discussants include former SCUP presidents Marv Peterson, Joan Racki, and Laura Saunders. Learn more or register now.

---

Not that the academic job market has been great lately, but now it's looking so much worse. Fewer and fewer openings, and more and more of the ones there are have jumped off the tenure track:

Fulltime faculty jobs have not been easy to come by in recent decades, but this year the new crop of Ph.D. candidates is finding the prospects worse than ever. Public universities are bracing for severe cuts as state legislatures grapple with yawning deficits. At the same time, even the wealthiest private colleges have seen their endowments sink and donations slacken since the financial crisis. So a chill has set in at many higher education institutions, where partial or full-fledge hiring freezes have been imposed.

A survey by the American Historical Association, for example, found that the number of history departments recruiting new professors this year is down 15 percent, while the American Mathematical Society’s largest list of job postings has dropped more than 25 percent from last year.

“This is a year of no jobs,” said Catherine Stimpson, the dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at New York University. Ph.D.s are stacked up, she said, “like planes hovering over La Guardia.”

As Job Market Shrinks, so do College Grads’ Grand Plans

Pretty good for a mainstream media report:

For Alesandra LaPointe, who has prepared for life after college by doing two internships and frequenting the career center as though it were Starbucks, it is the best of times. She has a job lined up.

For Chris Moberg, who started his job search in earnest only three months ago, it is the worst of times. He doesn’t have a single job interview scheduled.

After years of plenty, the job market is shrinking. Hiring of new college graduates is expected to drop 22 percent this spring, according to one survey. The most prepared graduates are finding jobs, but others are rethinking plans dreamed up during the good times – considering bunking with Mom and Dad or an internship instead of a job.

“There are opportunities out there, but they’re going to go to the young people who are focused,… [who] know what they bring to the table … and use their connections wisely,” says Philip Gardner, director of Michigan State University’s Collegiate Employment Research Institute.

New Tool - GradShare: A Graduate Student Community

Quite a few SCUPers are not only working professionals, but also involved in being a graduate student, working toward some additional degree. Even if you're not, and you just work with or need to understand graduate students, you might enjoy GradShare, a "Graduate Student Community," that intends to create and collect a lot of the resources and information that might have kept some of us who are now permanently ABD in the game long enough to complete that doctorate, had our department, advisors, or graduate schools provided something like this.

Frankly, we don't see language on the site saying it is limited to only graduate students, and we think it could be a useful site for anyone who frequently does some literature search or other research. If it becomes a successful and active resource, it could in fact help share some of the burden of academic advising shouldered by administrative professionals in graduate schools. In these days of everyone doing more with less, that should be welcomed. If you can, please share this information with a graduate student or graduate school staffer.

One more new Web-based tool is Deadline Due, a beta of a very simple and easy to use tool that claims to return to you a perfectly formatted Harvard Reference for any complete book title of ISBN number you feed it.

What's Past is Prologue: The Evolving Paradigms of Student Affairs

Is the traditional framework for student services getting creaky? Consider these varied paradigms within which to plan the future of student services.

Read the full article here. Then use this blog's capability to comment or share additional, related resources. Thanks.

The purpose of this article is to frame—and reframe—the work of student affairs. Evolving paradigms have defined and advanced this work, which is dedicated to total student development and the betterment of society. The article promotes integrative learning as a new framework for student affairs. This paradigm, grounded in theory, research, and practice, crosses all boundaries of what, where, how, and with whom learning occurs to advance cohesive and synergistic student-centered learning. To live into this seamless model, student affairs professionals must go beyond the “what” to living into the “so what” of their work as educators and reflective practitioners.

From the October–November–December 2008 issue of Planning for Higher Education, this "SCUP Links Blog" post provides an opportunity for you to share comments or additional resources/links about the focus of the article, What's Past is Prologue: The Evolving Paradigms of Student Affairs, v37n1, pp. 23–34, by Simone Himbeault Taylor. You can read the entire article here.

Note that this issue of Planning is the first of a two-part themed volume with the overall title, Student Life. The second part will be published in January 2009. Assembled, the two parts will be available in late January 2009 for purchase as a single PDF document for your quick and easy reference.

Changing Minds in Higher Education: Students Change, So Why Can't Colleges?

Click here to comment on this PHE article!

The problem today is that when students change, colleges don't have to because they camouflage and conceal the evidence that could guide change.

Read the full article here. Then use this blog's capability to comment or share additional, related resources. Thanks.

College students have changed dramatically, and the skills needed for productive employment have changed as well. But colleges and universities have been slow to respond, often innovating in only small ways while leaving the core practices of undergraduate education the same. This article examines the barriers to transformational change in higher education in five categories: structure, information, incentives, finance, and culture. It suggests that the initial approach to overcoming these barriers involves generating better information in the form of feedback concerning student learning processes and outcomes.

From the October–November–December 2008 issue of Planning for Higher Education, this "SCUP Links Blog" post provides an opportunity for you to share comments or additional resources/links about the focus of the article, Changing Minds in Higher Education: Students Change, So Why Can't Colleges?, v37n1, pp. 15–22, by John Tagg. You can read the entire article here.

Note that this issue of Planning is the first of a two-part themed volume with the overall title, Student Life. The second part will be published in January 2009. Assembled, the two parts will be available in late January 2009 for purchase as a single PDF document for your quick and easy reference.

Please share your comments or links to related resources.

Building a New Generation of Learning: Conversations to Catalyze Our Conversation

Our newest generation of learners: If we build it, they will come; if we build it well, they—in the broadest sense of the word—will learn.

Read the full article here. Then use this blog's capability to comment or share additional, related resources. Thanks.

Rather than focus primarily on the next generation of learners, the authors argue we are best served to focus on building out our on-ground and online infrastructures for a new generation of learning—blending multiple learning modes, technologies, and techniques over the course of the next 15–20 years to serve the diverse array of students from multiple generations that will be coming our way. They offer seven catalytic conversations to start this process on the topics of blended learning, mobility, gaming, social networking, holographics, analytics, and a renewed focus on the human touch.

From the October–November–December 2008 issue of Planning for Higher Education, this "SCUP Links Blog" post provides an opportunity for you to share comments or additional resources/links about the focus of the article, Building or a New Generation of Learning, v37n1, pp. 7–14, by Mark David Milliron, Kathleen Plinske, and Coral Noonan-Terry. You can read the entire article here.

Note that this issue of Planning is the first of a two-part themed volume with the overall title, Student Life. The second part will be published in January 2009. Assembled, the two parts will be available in late January 2009 for purchase as a single PDF document for your quick and easy reference.

Teaching Graduate Students How to Teach Better

What a novel concept. Somehow this reminds of us of the comment that Bill McDonough made at a SCUP plenary session a few years ago about if we're so bright how come it took us until just recently to figure out that we should put wheels on luggage.

Tufts' approach is emblematic of a growing recognition among doctoral programs that they need to impart skills for teaching, not just research. As college classrooms diversify and the pace of technology quickens, there's a demand for scholars who have a flair for more than just a traditional lecture. More than 100 universities now have formal programs to prepare future faculty, many of them spawned by grants administered by the Council of Graduate Schools (CGS) in Washington between 1993 and 2003.