Monday, January 28, 2008

Universities overproduce Ph.Ds

College students are getting a raw deal, a recent New York report asserted. The problem is they're taking too many classes from part-time, or adjunct, professors. But that same report unwittingly revealed something about how higher education is more culpable than it likes to admit when it comes to creating the problem.

The issue is a huge one in higher education far beyond New York, with about half of the nation's college faculty now on part-time contracts. Adjuncts are cheaper for colleges, but they often lack the time and resources for focused teaching, and research shows students' performance suffers if they are taught by part-timers too often. In its report last month, a 30-member commission called for New York's state (SUNY) and city (CUNY) systems to alleviate the over reliance on adjuncts by hiring 2,000 more full-time faculty for their 87 campuses. But just one page away, the report also called for adding at least 4,000 new doctoral students.

There's a connection between those numbers that deserves more attention. In many fields, there are already too many Ph.Ds awarded for the full-time academic posts available, creating a surplus of likely jobseekers. That pool becomes adjuncts, who command wages and benefits so low that universities find them irresistible hires. "It's not uncommon to have a disconnect like this in higher education, in which people are both concerned about the difficult career prospects being faced by recent Ph.D. graduates and concerned there aren't enough Ph.D. students," said Michael Teitelbaum, of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The ideas, he said, "often don't get connected. It's puzzling."

Adds Jeff Crane, an adjunct who teaches two art courses at SUNY-New Paltz: "There's this tendency to turn a blind eye to things like that and not make those kinds of equations."

Of course, some adjuncts have other jobs and like working part-time. But many are adjuncts by necessity. Crane, an artist, says he likes working part-time so he can paint, but thinks he should be paid equitably. He earns about $5,200 per semester for teaching two courses. The national average for full-time assistant professors is about $60,000, and $100,000 once they get tenure. Crane says many of his colleagues work mostly for the health insurance, which, unlike many places, New Paltz offers to adjuncts.

Teitelbaum is quick to point out New York may have good reasons to add doctoral students. They will help improve the state's standing in the research sector, and of course, many may find work in the private sector. But if they come seeking full-time professorial jobs, some will be disappointed.

It's well known that jobs in, say, philosophy, are rare. Even at the very top doctoral programs, only one in 10 who start will end up teaching at an elite research university, according to Brian Leiter, whose blog "Philosophical Gourmet" tracks the field. In fields like history, recent numbers show the market improving, and there will be more jobs as baby boomers retire. But some fields like American and European history still have such a surplus that even community colleges now commonly look only at candidates with a doctoral degree.

It's not just humanities. Groups such as the Business Roundtable have grabbed headlines with urgent warnings about the need to ramp up production of American scientists. In fact, Teitelbaum testified to Congress last year, there is no evidence of a shortage of scientists and engineers - particularly on the Ph.D. track. In the life sciences, the U.S. is awarding twice as many doctorates as two decades ago, but has no more faculty jobs, according to one recent study that prompted the journal Nature to editorialize that "too many graduate schools may be preparing too many students." A 1998 National Research Council made much the same warning.

Nonetheless, universities keep flooding the academic pipeline. The latest federal data show about 45,600 Ph.Ds were awarded in 2005-2006, 5.1 percent higher than the year before. It was the fourth straight increase and tied for the highest percentage gain since 1971.

Faculty like having graduate students around. They're good intellectual companions, and they bolster a professor's research efforts. Particularly in the sciences, they also often come with funding from sources such as the National Institutes of Health, which doubled its budget between 1998 and 2003. But funding usually leads to more slots for graduate students, not for professors. That's why the percentage of science Ph.D.s moving on to "post-docs" (temporary university posts where they do research while continuing to apply for faculty jobs) is surging - from 43 percent to 70 percent in physics, for instance, in just a few years.

Of course, universities could cut back on using adjuncts and pony up for better wages and more full-time jobs. Some, like Rutgers in New Jersey, have agreed to add tenure-track positions, and the American Federation of Teachers is pushing for legislation in 11 states to require more teaching come from full-timers. But with universities already under fire for skyrocketing prices, it's probably unrealistic to expect most will pay more than the going rate for a captive labor pool.

Saying "no" to students definitely isn't easy. If education is good, it seems to follow more is better. And when qualified students come to a university - particularly a public one - it can be hard to justify refusing them the education they say they want. But if public universities (and really that means legislatures and taxpayers) won't pony up for more full-time faculty, higher education will have to take more responsibility for its role in creating the oversupply problem. "We have flooded the labor market with Ph.Ds who can't get jobs doing what they've been trained to do," said Cat Warren, a North Carolina State English professor and state American Association of University Professors leader, who recently gave a talk to graduate students at nearby Duke warning them to be realistic. "I think we have to think very hard about that."

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Researchers' Assessment of NCLB Shows Need for Improvement

With the reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act looming on the horizon this year, the Civil Rights Project/Proyecto Derechos Civiles (CRP/PDC) at UCLA's Graduate School of Education & Information Studies recently completed a collection of essays containing several critiques of the law as well as proscriptions for change.

CRP/PDC K-12 senior researcher Gail L. Sunderman edited the 280-page book, titled Holding NCLB Accountable: Achieving Accountability, Equity, and School Reform, which was published by Corwin Press. "We not only looked at the problems with No Child Left Behind, but we came up with ways to make it better," says Sunderman, the project director on a five-year CRP/PDC study examining implementation of the 2002 No Child Left Behind Act and the co-author of NCLB Meets School Realities: Lessons from the Field. "It's time to reauthorize the bill, so we kind of geared the book toward coming up with research-based ideas of what needs to be addressed and what needs to be done to improve the law."

The essays were written by several noted education scholars, including Stanford University's Linda Darling-Hammond; Robert Linn of the University of Colorado; Johns Hopkins University's Robert Balfanz and Nettie Legters; Boston College's Walter Haney; Goodwin Liu of the University of California, Berkeley; and Russell Rumberger of the University of California, Santa Barbara. The collection analyzes the law's accountability and assessment system, the capacities of states to implement the law, and the impact of school reform.

Harvard University's Daniel Koretz asserts that the accountability system is not research based. "We know far too little about how to hold schools accountable for improving student performance," says the testing expert. Jaekyung Lee, an associate professor of education at the State University of New York at Buffalo, compared the nation's report card - the results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) - to state assessment results. He found that, since the implementation of the law in 2001, federal accountability measures have not improved educational levels and narrowed achievement disparities. "Based on the NAEP, there are no systemic indications of improving the average achievement and narrowing the gap after NCLB," Lee says.

Three researchers from Harvard - Michael Kieffer, Nonie Lesaux and Catherine Snow - revealed what needs to be done in terms of adequately assessing English-language learners. And Mindy Kornhaber of Pennsylvania State University described how to develop a system of multiple measures. "What we have now basically relies on standardized assessment," Sunderman says.

In terms of school reform, the researchers found that many of the law's measures - such as the definition of highly qualified teachers, the design of testing and accountability regulations, and the reliance on mandates - actually retard school reform and have made it even more difficult for high schools serving low-income students to do their jobs.

In the section on the capacity of states to implement the law, Sunderman and CRP/PDC co-director Gary Orfield wrote in a chapter together about how states are responding to problems they are having due to their limitations, and University of California, Berkeley's Heinrich Mintrop looked at the ability of states to intervene in low-performing schools. "He finds that states are able to intervene in about 2 to 4 percent of the total number of schools in a state," Sunderman says. "And, if you compare that to the percentage of schools being identified as low performing under the No Child Left Behind Act, there are a lot more."

Some of the prescriptions that the researchers presented include: the creation of a fair accountability system that informs the goals of students and improves instruction; the adequate support of low-performing schools and districts; and the complementing of in-school reform in low-income schools with out-of-school reform of housing, poverty, and health care.

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Australian parents make big sacrifices to avoid government schools

HALF the Australian parents who send their children to private school are finding it a financial strain, and one in 10 families spend more than half their take-home pay on their children's education. Research has also found that about a third of parents who send their children to independent (private) and Catholic schools allocate more than 15percent of their household income to their children's education. Close to 12percent of parents with children at independent schools, and 1.3percent of Catholic school parents, reserve up to half their income for school fees, the report, commissioned by BankWest, found. Some parents - Catholic school (4percent) and private (1.3percent) - dedicate between 50 and 75percent of their household income to school fees.

The report said that 53percent of independent school parents and 47percent of Catholic school parents found paying for their children's education was financially tough. A BankWest spokeswoman said the survey dispelled the myth that only the well-off were educating their children at private schools. Figures show more than 369,000 students attended private schools in NSW in 2006. About 739,000 students attend public schools.

The report found that the average cost of sending a child to an independent school was $14,201 a year, more than double that of Catholic schools. It also found that, on average, independent school parents spend an extra $2300 a year on uniforms, extracurricular activities, textbooks and stationery. Parents had to find $1600 for Catholic schools and $1200 for public schools.

Executive director of the Council of Catholic School Parents Danielle Cronin said she was not surprised by the research, and that while Catholic schools tried to keep fees down, they were a strain on some families. "I think Catholic schools have a very diverse population in terms of socio-economic statistics," she said. "I believe that Catholic schools probably aren't enrolling financially needy families simply because the fees are prohibitive, even though some of the fees are quite low compared to independent schools."

In the report, parents cited the standard of education, discipline, better academic record and resources as the main reasons for sending their children to private schools. They also said the better focus on social values, networking opportunities for their children when entering the workforce, religious education and social opportunities for the parents were important.

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