This is my final post as guest blogger and I must say that many of the responses demonstrate what’s wrong with higher education.

My first set of posts built on my recent Chronicle article, “America’s Most Overrated Product: A Bachelor’s Degree.” It continued to discuss the dismal results of undergraduate education and the terrible lack of disclosure to prospective students about their prospects of success and growth there, and proposed solutions. Rather than engage on the issues, most of the responses were deflective: for example, blaming the problem on K-12 education, that hermeneutics was more valuable than literature’s universal themes, or most often and most surprising, ad hominem attacks. For example, commenters called me, not just my ideas, for example, “off the deep end.” To bolster such claims, commenters went to my personal Web site and noted, for example, that I am an…

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When I ask clients, “When did you start procrastinating?,” I often hear responses like this:

“When I was in junior high school, I got this big, hard assignment. I knew I should get started right away but I always found something more fun to do. I waited until the last minute when the adrenaline pushed me to crank it out. I was afraid I’d get a bad grade because I had done it so last-minute but, lo and behold, I got a good one. That gave me the message that by procrastinating, I’d generate the adrenaline to get me to do the task. Before long, I was procrastinating on most unpleasant tasks — I was addicted to adrenaline.”

Of course, procrastination tends to reduce the quality of the work produced, not exactly the sort of lifelong work habits we’re trying to engender in our students. So, you might want to try one or more of these procrastination deterrents:

— Offer a few-minute…

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Even higher educators, some of society’s highest achievers, are subject to procrastination. In fact, higher educators are particularly tempted to procrastinate because they face challenging tasks that have long-ahead deadlines: a grant proposal, the syllabus for a new course, completing a research project, drafting a committee report, etc.

Of course, procrastination can hurt the quality of your work — something thrown together last-minute is rarely as good as work done deliberately. I’ve often seen procrastination impede people’s careers.

Set a big goal. Goethe said, “Dream no small dreams because they have no power to move people’s hearts.” So, what’s an exciting, beneficial-to-society goal that, if you put your mind to it, you could potentially achieve? Even if you’re not sure you could achieve it, might getting partway there be beneficial enough?

Perhaps your…

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Chronicle Review Deputy Editor Alex Kafka invited all of us Brainstormers to respond to a thought-provoking essay in The American Scholar by William Deresiewicz, The Disadvantages of an Elite Education. Here are my reactions:

++ Deresiewicz writes, “Graduates of elite schools are not more valuable than stupid people, or talentless people, or even lazy people.” I disagree. The graduates of elite schools, on average, have attributes that make them more likely to cure cancer, develop interventions that reduce poverty, etc. And they’re less likely to commit murder, robbery, or become drug addicts or dealers. That makes them of above-average value to society. Of course, all people have value and should have certain rights simply by virtue of being alive (for example, basic shelter, food, health care, and education), but I find it hard to accept that all people are of equal value.

++…

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You’ve had enough: You’ve tried as hard as you can yet can’t find a good-enough job in higher education. (You mean, you don’t want to continue driving 30 miles to a campus on which you can’t park to teach three classes a week for 15 weeks to a group of underprepared undergraduates, for which you are paid a total of $5,000, with no benefits? Where’s your dedication to The Cause?) ;-)

What the hell do I want to be when I grow up?

It’s often scary. By the time that most aspiring academics have finished their doctorate and spent a year or three trying to land a sustainable position, they’re around 30, when many of their peers outside of academia are in full career flower: six-figure-income, power and influence, and a job title their parents just love to brag about.

And there you are, still fumbling around, toting a copy of What Color is Your Parachute or the results of the…

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Yeah, it’s tough . . .
But don’t give up just yet.

You decided to spend a lot of money and some of your prime earning years getting a doctorate, assuming it would lead to a position as professor or higher ed administrator.

Yet, despite applying for a number of positions, you’ve landed no more than a part-time temp job that pays less (with no benefits) than you could have earned as a high school teacher.

Before giving up

Before giving up, consider trying one or more of these approaches. Here, I use a tenure-track professorship as the goal, but similar strategies can be used in seeking a position in administration.

Unless you’re a star, a cv is unlikely to make you stand out from the pack. Here are some ways that mere mortals can rise from the crowd:

— On your website, post a video of your teaching. If you’re not currently teaching, ask a friend or colleague who is…

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Tim Russert’s untimely death from a sudden heart attack reminded me of the dramatic 50+-year-long gender disparity against men in health care research and outreach.

Many more men than women die of sudden heart attack and at an earlier age than do women of breast cancer. Indeed, sudden heart attack is the #1 cause of premature death among men over 40. Yet, more money per capita is spent on breast cancer research. And regarding outreach, there are a trivial number of prostate cancer ribbons compared with the number of pink ribbons against breast cancer. And have you ever seen even one ribbon against sudden heart attack?

More broadly, men die 5.3 years younger than women, and spend their last decade in worse health. There are more than four widows for every widower. Yet when I searched PubMed, which indexes 3,000 medical journals over the past 58 years, I found 22,304 articles with …

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Recently, I attended my assistant’s master’s-degree commencement ceremony at San Francisco State University.

We entered the auditorium to Jamaican percussion. Then, the African-American emcee introduced the retiring chair, a white man who said that his vision for the counseling department is to create a program in counseling the incarcerated, disproportionately minority. He introduced the keynote speaker, an African-American woman who spoke of the need to continue fighting for the underrepresented while an audience member waved a large Latino-Power flag. Next, a Latina professor praised an African-American student who had died. Then that professor handed out four student awards: three to Latinos and one to a white male who had been transgendered and did his thesis on transgender counseling. Finally, the graduates walked across the stage. Some added African-American or Latino shawls to…

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A more-engaged, better-served student? In many cases, could be . . .

Ralph Wolff, Executive Director of the Western Association of Schools and Colleges likes to convene “blue sky” meetings. That’s a loftier (pardon the pun) way to describe a brainstorming session. He urges, “Sky’s the limit. Think big. Think breakthrough. Think unconventional.”

Here’s an unconventional alternative to the traditional lecture course that could be called, DiversiSections. It’s a very specific type of online course that would be disseminated nationwide.

It dovetails with MIT’s making all its syllabi available nationwide, the recommendations in a new book, Disrupting Class, by Harvard professor Clayton Christenson, and with Carol Twigg’s work at the National Center for Academic Transformation (NCAT). Their research and a priori arguments suggest that DiversiSections would be particularly beneficial…

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Sometimes, we need a summer’s break from things academic, but if you might enjoy a book on improving teaching and learning, here’s a good list.

Pat Cross forwarded it to me. It was created this year by a number of members of the POD Network, the national association of faculty developers. At the end of this list, I suggest four other books that may also be of interest.

Angelo, T. A., & Cross, K. P. (1993). Classroom Assessment Techniques (2nd ed.). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Bain, K. (2004). What the Best College Teachers Do. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Cooper, J. L., Robinson, P., & Ball, D. (Eds). (2003). Small Group Instruction in Higher Education: Lessons From the Past, Visions of the Future. Stillwater, OK: New Forums Press.

Bean, J. (1996). Engaging Ideas: The Professor’s Guide to Integrating Writing, Critical Thinking, and Active Learning in the Classroom….

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I just met with Terry Smith, executive vice president and dean for academic affairs at Columbia College (Missouri). He liked my ideas on how to boost retention and encouraged me to share them with you on this blog.

So, here’s the smorgasbord I presented to him. Perhaps you might find one or two items worth tasting:

Attract the sorts of students likely to persist at your college. And here, I’m going beyond high school GPA and SAT:

Step 1. Identify a pool of your college’s seniors who are happy at your institution. One low-cost way to recruit them is to use the cap-and-gown order form. Simply attach a request for volunteers to be interviewed.

Step 2. Hire an excellent interviewer. Rather than a retention consultant, use an ethnographic researcher or journalist to interview each of those students to answer this question: What made Columbia College such a good fit for you and a good…

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Of course, no one set of criteria can apply to all courses or instructors, but I thought I’d share with you the four questions I usually ask myself when developing a course:

Will it substantially improve my students’ skills in general reasoning, writing, and oral communication?

Especially in an undergraduate class, my most important goal is to help my students grow in those crucial skills, which will serve them for a lifetime, in and outside their career.

Does the course optimize the ratio of student benefit to instructor time?

Sure, my students would benefit more if I created an individualized program for each student, gave lots of writing assignments on which I provided careful line-by-line feedback, and made myself available outside of class 24/7. But the opportunity cost to me of that would be too great.

At the other extreme, I could just trot out off-the-cuff lectures…

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Now that we’ve entered June, many of us finally feel we can take a deep breath and slow down a bit.

Leave it to me to flog you back into action, at least for a little while.

I’m going to put on my faculty developer’s hat here. (I was on the POD national core committee for three years.) Now, when perhaps you’re not as harried by exigencies as during the school year, may be a good time to muse about how you could take the courses you’ll teach this summer or fall to new heights.

Just imagine if all your students were rapt, fully engaged in your lessons and assignments. At the end of the course, not only did they learn much of enduring value, they stood as one, and awarded you a standing ovation (and superlative student evaluations).

Of course, there’s no magic formula for achieving that, but here are a few low-tech tips that may boost your odds:

++ Often, the best ideas for…

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Following publication of America’s Most Overrated Product: A Bachelor’s Degree, I received a fat packet from a Harry Stille, who, after retiring from the South Carolina Legislature, started the Higher Education/Policy Center.

That packet contained a variety of statistics on the four-year colleges in the San Francisco Bay Area, where I live. I was particularly saddened to see that, except for UC-Berkeley, which attracts an unusually high-performing student body, the graduation rates, especially at the public colleges, is frighteningly low.

Of course, the term “four-year” college is a misnomer. Most students at such institutions don’t graduate in four years … if at all. Here are the six-year graduation rates for these colleges and the 25th %ile of their students’ SAT scores.

San Francisco State: 880 SAT, 40 percent graduate in six years.
Cal State East Bay: 770 SAT, 43 percent…

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Have you ever met someone — perhaps at a conference — like this? He or she is just a little too eager to befriend you. And before long, you know why: The person is looking for a job or otherwise wants something from you? I don’t know about you, but I usually find myself then wanting to resist. My unconscious thought is something like, “This person doesn’t like me, s/he’s just trying to network me. And if s/he were that good a job seeker, she wouldn’t need to do that.”

So, whether you’re trying to land a job or otherwise profit through networking, you might want to remember the ancient Chinese aphorism, “If you ask before a proper foundation is laid, it will not be granted.”

Or if you feel you don’t have the time to lay much of a foundation, actor Spencer Tracy’s advice pertains. He said, “Never let ‘em catch you acting.” I say, “Never let ‘em catch you networking.”

My Chronicle article America’s Most Overrated Product: A Bachelor’s Degree argued that four-year colleges should not admit underprepared students.

A number of posters to the Chronicle Forum disagree. Here are their arguments and my responses:

Criticism #1: Marginal students struggle even with a college degree. Why would you discourage them from getting even that?

My Response
As my article documented, every year, four-year colleges enroll hundreds of thousands of students who graduated in the bottom half of their high-school class, the large majority of whom learn little, acquire much debt, and have only a 1/3 chance of graduating even if given 8 1/2 years.

Those students will likely learn more and have a brighter career future if they choose an option other than four-year college: an apprenticeship program, community college, career college, the military, or a launchpad job at…

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A few weeks ago, the Chronicle published my article, America’s Most Overrated Product: A Bachelor’s Degree.

One of that article’s contentions is that each college’s student recruitment materials be required to include a report card containing such information as graduation rates and average student growth in thinking skills, writing, etc. disaggregated by SAT score bands.

I’ve been pleased that the article has generated national interest: It has been republished in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Dallas Morning News, and I was interviewed about it on a number of shows including National Public Radio’s Talk of the Nation. I’ve received so many supportive emails from professors, administrators, students, and former students.

The article has also generated many responses in the Chronicle’s Forum, not all positive. In this blog post, I list the major criticisms of my call for …

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I’m delighted to be a guest blogger here. After all, you have so much potential for making a difference. I’ll do my best to make my posts worth your time.

I’ll be writing about:

- Improving higher education: Why we must, how we should.

- How to make the most of a career in higher ed.