Highest Rated Resources in "The Big Picture"
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Debunking the Myth of a Desperate Software Labor Shortage
- by Prof. Norman Matloff, UC Davis. " 'Vaporware.' That is the term used in the software industry when a firm announces a new product which actually does not exist. Extending the term a bit, one can say that the industry's latest vaporware is the claim of a desperate software labor shortage. The fact is that there is no such shortage. "
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Colleges not training enough workers to fill jobs, say tech firms
- Aug 13, 1998, Seattle Times " Washington state's higher-education system is failing to produce enough people to program, design or run computer systems, according to educators and industry officials....What irritates local information-technology companies is that there is no lack of people who want to work in these businesses. There just aren't enough classes available to provide the skills that potential workers need. "
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The Value of 'Learning Backward'
- Next Wave , May 31, 2002. " 'Learning backward'... is about fixing the problems that are important to you and acquiring the skills and resources you need to solve them. Learning backward happens every day and should be recognized as an integral skill of functional professionals and citizens. Graduate programs that are recognizing this have developed courses and programs to prepare students for lives after their theses or dissertations; lives in which the capacity to fix problems is a critical survival skill. "
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Intellectual Entrepreneurship: Successfully Engaging Hearts, Minds in Graduate Education
- To achieve greater diversity, we must increase awareness of the value of graduate education and devise experiences allowing minority undergraduates to explore how advanced study can engage their hearts and minds helping them fulfill their professional visions and ethical commitments. Recruiting a critical mass of outstanding Hispanic and African American students requires a change in mindset. The Intellectual Entrepreneurship (IE) program at the University of Texas-Austin is an example of this new mindset. IE is a program and philosophy of graduate education that promotes the virtues of discovery, ownership and accountability. It challenges students to be greater than the sum of their disciplinary parts to be citizen-scholars contributing both to academe and the community. By demystifying graduate education and enabling students in traditional areas of study to put their knowledge to work in the community, it is not surprising that IE has attracted a disproportionate number of minority students; 20 percent of those enrolled in IE are underrepresented minorities, while the same group comprises only 9 percent of the total graduate student body.
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"Learning To Be a Citizen-Scholar"
- " Imagine a graduate-education system that begins by asking students to think about what matters to them most and then uses their answers not only to create programs of research, but also exciting and varied career possibilities. We call this approach 'passion plus expertise,' and it is the premise behind the 'intellectual entrepreneurship' program at the University of Texas at Austin. "
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Now Hiring! If You're Young
- Norman Matloff, New York Times Op-Ed, January 26, 1998. " The real story here is more profound: the rampant age discrimination in the industry. High-tech companies save money by shunning most midcareer programmers and focusing their hiring on new or recent college graduates, who are cheaper and can work lots of overtime. "
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The Real Science Crisis: Bleak Prospects for Young Researchers
- Chronicle of Higher Education , September 2007. "[F]or many of today's graduate students, the future could not look much bleaker. They see long periods of training, a shortage of academic jobs, and intense competition for research grants looming ahead of them. 'They get a sense that this is a really frustrating career path,' says Thomas R. Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health. So although the operating assumption among many academic leaders is that the nation needs more scientists, some of brightest students in the country are demoralized and bypassing scientific careers."
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The Labor Market for Information Technology Workers
- Testimony before the Subcommittee on Immigration Committee on the Judiciary United States Senate, Dr. Robert I. Lerman, Director, Human Resources Policy enter, Urban Institute and Professor of Economics, American University, February 25, 1998.
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Graduate Education Is Losing Its Moral Base
- By Cary Nelson and Michael Berube, The Chronicle of Higher Education, March 23, 1996. " What does it mean to face an academic future in which many graduate students will have none? What are the ethics of training students for jobs that few of them will ever have? Thanks to the dramatic collapse in the humanities job market, for example, many graduate students and newly minted Ph.D.'s teach more than 30 different courses at two or three institutions and publish articles in refereed journals, before they earn a tenure-track position (if they do so at all). It is time bluntly to name the consequence: Graduate education is losing its moral foundation. "
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Reforming Graduate Education in the Sciences
- by Representative George Brown, Jr. A blunt assessment of what needs to change in higher education from one of the people who controls the purse strings. A definite must-read.
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Trends in the Early Careers of Life Scientists
- Executive summary of a 1998 National Research Council report that recommends (1) the life-science community constrain the rate of growth in the number of graduate students, (2) every life science department receiving federal funding for research or training should be required to provide to its prospective graduate students specific information regarding all predoctoral students enrolled in the graduate program during the preceding 10 years, and (3) all federal agencies that support life-science education and research [should] invest in training grants and individual graduate fellowships as preferable to research grants to support PhD education.
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S.798 - A bill to establish a Commission on the IT Technology Worker Shortage
- The text of a bill introduced by Senator Warner of Virginia on May 22, 1997. Additional details may be obtained by using " Thomas " with S.798 as a search term. Senator Warner's remarks on page s5015 are illuminating. There is no mention of existing IT professionals as stakeholders. (Requres Adobe Acrobat)
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Doctoral Education: Preparing for the Future
- Jules LaPidus, Council of Graduate Schools. " The best advice for faculty members is this: In order to help students prepare for a variety of possible careers, dont train them too specifically for any one. Instead, provide the kind of education that enables them to know their fields, understand the processes of scholarly inquiry, and have a realistic picture of how they can use these incredibly valuable skills in a variety of ways, in a variety of settings, and in a variety of satisfying and rewarding careers. " (Requires Adobe Acrobat)
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International Journal of Ecological Economics & Statistics (IJEES)
- International Journal of Ecological Economics & Statistics (IJEES) ISSN 0973-1385
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Professor of Desperation
- " Bad pay, zero job security, no benefits, endless commutes. Is this any way to treat PhDs responsible for teaching a generation of college students? " Sunday Washington Post Magazine, July 21, 2002.
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Going Adjunct
- By Andreas Killen, Salon Magazine. " When all the postal workers have been sedated and locked away, will adjunct professors follow in their gun-powdered footsteps? "
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PhD's and Unemployment on NPR's Talk of the Nation
- Dec 1, 1998. " Most students figure if they spend many years and lots of money pursuing a graduate degree, the job market will be wide open on graduation day. But today's Ph.D candidates are facing a grim reality if they hope to find work as college professors; the jobs are few and the pay is meager. And as the number of positions shrinks, the pool of qualified doctoral candidates grows. Join Ray Suarez and his guests to discuss Ph.Ds and the future of academia. " (Requires a RealAudio player)
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International Mobility of Scientists and Engineers to the US. Brain Drain or Brain Circulation?
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in ImmigrationNSF Issue Brief 98-316. " This Issue Brief highlights the role of U.S. universities in acquiring, supporting and retaining foreign S & E talent, and the proportion of foreign doctoral recipients who remain in the United States for postdoctoral study as well as long-term employment. "
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The Big Crunch
- by David Goodstein. " Exponential expansion cannot go on forever, and so the expansion of science, unlike the expansion of the Universe, was guaranteed to come to an end. I will argue that, in science, the Big Crunch occurred about 25 years ago, and we have been trying to ignore it ever since. "
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Nice Work If We Can Keep It: Confessions of a Junior Professor
- by Kathy Newman, Academe , May-June 1999. " After two years on the academic ladder, a lonely, anxious, and overworked assistant professor recommends collective action to give junior faculty members more control over their situation. "
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Scientific Elites and Scientific Illiterates
- by David Goodstein, provost of CalTech. The best-written and most disturbing essay I have read on the future of academic science.
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Increasing US graduate enrollment in the sciences
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in Immigration" Should colleges in the United States adopt policies to insure that more of their graduate students in the sciences are Americans? " A Chronicle of Higher Education colloquy on the issue. May 10, 1999.
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Slaves to Science
- Salon Magazine , Feb. 28, 2000. An outsider's take on the working conditions of postdocs in science.
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Uncontrolled Experiment
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in Immigrationby Scott Stossel, The New Republic , March 29, 1999. An interesting and balanced article about the rise in scientific immigration and its consequences.
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Statistical Profiles of Foreign Doctoral Recipients in Science and Engineering: Plans to Stay in the United States
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in Immigration" The majority of foreign students who earned S & E doctorates from U.S. institutions during 1988-96 planned to locate in the United States, and almost 40 percent reported firm plans for further study or employment. Most of those with firm plans had offers of postdoctoral appointments. "
