Tag: NYT

The "Seven Sisters" Class of 1968

The New York Times is “celebrating” its digitization of its 1964 issues with the occasional article from “50 years ago this week.” This piece from when admissions to selective east coast women’s colleges was a news item.  Note that acceptance rates at half the schools have gone down but half remain at about the same levels they were 50 years ago.

 

How to Get a Job With a Philosophy Degree: Career Services and the Liberal Arts

From New York Times Magazine.  

Ostensibly a profile of Andy Chan, Wake Forest’s VP for “Personal and Career Development,” this article suggests a conversation about the role of career services in the context of liberal arts education. On the one side is the idea that pairing vigorous career services with liberal arts has three results: 1) students DO major in liberal arts subjects, 2) they get jobs, 3) donors (especially parents) love it. On the other is the concern that “[i]t reduces an education to the marketplace.”  The comments on the article make for interesting reading.

How to Get a Job With a Philosophy Degree

By SUSAN DOMINUS

Published: September 13, 2013

On a Friday in late August, parents of freshmen starting at Wake Forest University, a small, prestigious liberal-arts school in Winston-Salem, N.C., attended orientation sessions that coached them on how to separate, discouraged them from contacting their children’s professors and assured them about student safety. Finally, as their portion of orientation drew to a close, the parents joined their students in learning the school song and then were instructed to form a huge ring around the collective freshman class, in a show of support. 
… 
For years, most liberal-arts schools seemed to put career-services offices “somewhere just below parking” as a matter of administrative priority, in the words of Wake Forest’s president, Nathan Hatch. But increasingly, even elite, decidedly non-career-oriented schools are starting to promote their career services during the freshman year, in response to fears about the economy, an ongoing discussion about college accountability and, in no small part, the concerns of parents, many of whom want to ensure a return on their exorbitant investment.

See Also

Website of the Office of Career and Personal Development at Wake Forest

NYT 9/2013 Study Sees Benefit in Courses With Nontenured Instructors

National Bureau of Economic Research study based on data from more than 15,000 students who arrived at Northwestern University from 2001 to 2008.

Study Sees Benefit in Courses With Nontenured Instructors 
By 
Published: September 9, 2013  

While many higher education experts — and parents — bemoan the fact that tenured professors are a shrinking presence, now making up less than a quarter of the academic work force, a study released Monday found, surprisingly, that students in introductory classes learned more from outside instructors than from tenured or tenure-track professors.

 Students taught by untenured faculty were more likely to take a second course in the discipline and more likely to earn a better grade in the next course than those whose first course was taught by a tenured or tenure-track instructor, the report said.

 

See Also

  1. Berrett, Dan. “Ad­juncts Are Bet­ter Teachers Than Tenured Professors, Study Finds.” Chronicle of Higher Education September 9, 2013.
  2. Figlio at SSRN
  3. Jaschik Scott. “The Adjunct Advantage.” Inside Higher Ed September 9, 2013
  4. Safdar, Khadeeja. “Students Learn Better From Professors Outside Tenure System.” Wall Street Journal Blog
  5. Schapiro President of Northwestern Page