The Philosophy Job Market — Yesterday vs. Today

Very informative piece, thanks. For those interested in “asking the students,” I would recommend a growing body of what has become known as “student voice work.” The writings of Alison Cook-Sather, at Bryn Mawr, are especially insightful.

Remember the bias in your sampling of responses.  You are asking students face to face about online learning and technologies.  Have they even ever tried a blended, hybrid, or online course, especially one that was well-designed.

Some more broad surveys and research show that students are do often need to find their own online resources for learning and surviving some college courses: http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/free-range-learners-study-opens-window-into-how-students-hunt-for-educational-content-online/36137?sid=wc

And several studies show that when you ask students who actually experience blended, hybrid, or online learning (especially courses that are designed well), they not only enjoy it more and find it more convenient, but most importantly of course they learn more.  See for example the Department of Education’s meta-analysis:
http://www2.ed.gov/news/pressreleases/2009/06/06262009.html

And Educause surveys thousands of students each year about technology use:
http://www.educause.edu/2011StudentStudy
A significant percentage of students for example think that institutions need to use more technology more effectively, and that faculty need better training and support for using technology.

And about changing or choosing majors, I don’t know about general research, but in the STEM (science, engineering, math) areas, students are often not prepared for those majors, and the majority drop out or change majors because of poor support and teaching
http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/microsites/ostp/pcast_engage_to_excel_release_powerpoint__final.pdf
http://hakesedstuff.blogspot.com/2012/03/engage-to-excel-producing-one-million.html

Majors do matter, at least in STEM fields. Students are expected to master a large amount of difficult material in their 4 years, Courses build on previous courses – they are not standalone courses. Thus, a student can only get through the material if he or she follows a planned out course of study. In addition, employers don’t want to have to wade through course transcripts to figure out if a student has taken a program of study that covers the range of material that a student graduating in, say computer science, is expected to know. It is easier to merely see that the student has graduated from an accredited computer science program.

Great piece about something that often get lost in the conversation around teaching and learning–the role of the intended audience. In response to students wanting “to engage with a professor and with their classmates, they crave the serendipity of classroom discussions, and they want the discipline of going to class.” I would have to say that quality online instruction, particularly facilitated online instruction, can provide all of that. The frustration many of us have with this discussion, as my fellow commenters indicate, is that is so often an either . . . or argument.

Nothing can or should replace the F2F experience, but much can be done to provide quality alternatives that address issues of overcrowding, resourcing, and inflated tuitions, and can capture and extend the value of what is best about a powerful learning experience. There is a huge difference between ease of access to information and the design of an interactive learning experience that can provide the level of exchange the students you surveyed seem to desire.

I absolutely agree that diversification is salvation, and I mean this in terms of pedagogy and business modeling. There has never been one way to learn, and with all the tools now available and those that will continue to evolve, there are so many ways for people to learn and for both business and institutions of higher learning to support this.
 
Thanks for this thoughtful piece; looking forward to Part II.

What?  Ask students?  Why, that’s treating them as consumers!  Heavens, we shouldn’t do THAT!

It’s one thing to substitute selling/buying for teaching/learning but it’s quite another to ask students what their motives and goals for being in a class, program, or even our school actually are and to take that into account when designing everything from course goals to university missions.

It was once said that the faculty are the university.  Then came the revolution.  Now the students are the university — or at least its excuse for being in the case of research universities.  Woe to the academic who doesn’t get that change.  Rail against it all you like (I do, sometimes) but get it.

Comment on online courses stated,”…they do seek out online resources to brush up on certain subjects.” I am all for this practice in both higher education and professional training. There are important concepts that ignite culture changes in organizations. For example, “Lean” thinking demands a change to a problem saving culture. This does not happen overnight and demands many iterations for true organizational change. This same concept may also be applied to higher education. Students need a real forum to apply course concepts. The online format provides the forum for extended practice.

In 2007-08, approximately 20% of undergraduates
and 22% of post-baccalaureate learners took at least one online course (U. S. Department of Education, 2011). For undergraduates, this is an increase from
16% in 2003-2004. Online education is obviously on the rise and probably for life and practicality reasons. I think it would be helpful for Jeff to expand his sample beyond f2f students when discussing what they want in higher education. Good places to start are Liberty University Online, Grand Canyon University, and the University of Phoenix. These are 3 of the largest universities in the world because of their online populations.

Agreed that I didn’t talk with students who attend a fully online program. And I hope to do that. But some of these students have taken several courses online, including those at Southern New Hampshire, which operates one of the largest online programs in the country. Might also look at the survey work from Pew Research Center about online courses. Public is still skeptical of quality. This is one place where presidents seem ahead of the curve.

That student is already part of the DirectConnect program that Valencia has with UCF.(http://valenciacollege.edu/futurestudents/directconnect/)
So technically he’s not a mechanical engineering major yet since he’s only taking his foundational courses. I tweaked the mention of that in post. Thanks for the question.

I have been in the field of online education for 15 years now and I can tell you this: building quality online courses takes time and skill.  Teaching online courses takes a lot of training and the development of skills not often used in f2f teaching.  While colleges are expanding their online offerings, they are rarely expanding their training and support staff.  In fact, just the opposite is happening.  Existing support staff is expected to train and support even more faculty teaching online.  The result?  It’s really hard to find good online courses and instructors who can teach well in an online environment.  I think a blended approach works well where students have some f2f meetings and do some coursework online.

I am curious about if and how students are different kinds of institutions react to these questions. I teach at a mid-sized, rural state institution, where many of the students are from economically disadvantaged communities (which they have every intention of returning to). On the one had, the digital revolution hasn’t made its way that far out (high-speed and reliable Internet connections are rare for most of my students when they go back home making online courses almost impossible to take), but at the same time, they are almost mercinary in their approach to their education. They have come for the credential, and if doing a few classes online *while living on campus* helps (in their mind) speed up the process, then so be it.

Just a thought. Georgetown is worlds away from who my students seem to be.

I like your idea of talking to students. It would also be interesting to learn what recent graduates think of their college opportunities once they are addressing the need both to find meaningful work and support themselves outside the walls of the academy.

 Surely you’re not implying that the research you cite is above bias, either.  I’ve looked over the meta-analysis and wonder about the conclusion that students learned more.  Their assessment of this was interesting and promoted in me a very healthy skepticism.

Majors matter because HR departments (or their Taleo/BrassRing/etc software) can and will sort resumes by major, and those applicants who don’t match the buzzwords du jour won’t have a chance.

The common thread I see here (or rather, see the lack thereof) is cost.  Do students not worry thus, or just the small selection highlighted in this article?  I have often heard that students – who are young, often naive, and not terribly money-minded – will assume they will turn out wine and roses, even if the market is difficult and many graduates are hurting.  This would certainly explain the wincingly painful notion made by these undergraduates that major doesn’t matter in 2012.  Perhaps not for a graduate of Yale or Stanford, and maybe not even then.*  To wit, there are still far more law school applicants than seats to handle them, and of course far more law school students than jobs.  When pressed, applicants and students will invariably say, “Sure, only 10% of the class will get the BigLaw positions that justify the insane cost of Law School X, and everyone else will be deciding between food and loan payments after graduation, but I’ll study super hard and get in the top 10% of my class!”  The problem, of course, is 90% of those students will end up disappointed, to say the least.

Did these respondents not see the AP report that 53.6% of college grads aged 25 and under are un- or underemployed?  Or the NY Federal Reserve report that 1 in 4 student loans are delinquent and 1 in 2 are in forbearance or deferral?  How many truly understand what it is to have nondischargeable debt not subject to the Truth in Lending Act or any statute of limitations?  Have any of these things been explicated to the students, or merely the relentless drumbeat of “You need a college education, regardless of the cost, quality, or major?”  For that matter, how many colleges have any sort of contingency operational plan in the increasingly likely event that rising defaults will force changes to student lending policy in a manner that will require banks/government to realistically evaluate the likelihood that a loan will be paid back?  Who has an alternative master plan in case student loans become a privilege and not a right for the benefit of the university?  This is all a house of cards, predicated (at best) on the belief that a college education will reap lifelong pecuniary benefits on a similar super-inflationary scale as increases in tuition, or simply (at worst) by systemic greed and avarice and the knowledge that enough of America has been blinded into believing college the Holy Grail of socioeconomic mobility that at least one college will crack $60,000/year for 2012-13 (Sarah Lawrence).  This is the very definition of First World Problems, primarily because we are the only nation in the world with a higher ed debt crisis.

Nero fiddles while Rome burns…

*The example of the Georgetown student noting that English majors were sitting next to Finance majors at his [presumably investment] bank internship is a red herring.  The screening mechanism for IB/VC/PE/consultancies is not WHAT one majored in, but WHERE one had that major.  The dirty secret is, of course, that outside of the quant roles, bankers aren’t exactly working on the intricacies of Calabi-Yau shapes or deciphering Finnegan’s Wake, so the easiest way to justify high billing rates to the clients is to show how shiny and Ivy-covered the employees are.  See, for instance, “Brown and Cornell Are Second-Tier,” which can be found on this very website, or read up on the Cravath Method of Hiring.  Note also that none of the Ivies or Little Ivies have an undergrad finance or biz admin major.

Leaving aside the ethical problems, how great would this be as a career?  Get paid to take classes in every subject imaginable?  Awesome!

While this article addresses a much needed direction, the mistake Jeff and virtually the entire community of higher education makes is that of approaching the problem as if there were a more-or-less unitary investigative target behind the broad concept of “higher education.” Such a target no longer exists.

Considering the great diversity of service providers and programs and, especially the rapidly expanding range of students and their goals, asking what students “want” in a general way makes no more sense that asking what travelers want without specifying the mode of transportation, the area traveled, and the characteristics of the traveler, especially his goals.

I have been responsible for interviewing tens of thousands of students over the past decade. Jeff is correct in noting that their views on higher education are more sophisticated and divergent than academics tend to understand.

This said, perhaps the only meaningful generalization across all of the things there are to mean by “higher education” is that students and former students find the system out of touch with the times and with their needs. The longer it is been since they graduated, the less value they attribute to their education and the more they see the content as having been inappropriately focused and taught poorly in contrast to how they are taught in adult learning environments.

This may all be well and good, but considering these “institutions of higher learning” are enjoying more than $160 billion in annual revenues directly through the student aid programs, I think they are doing quite well as “cogs” themselves.  What’s more, when 75% of those funds come in the form of student debt obligations, we better darn well be concerned as to whether or not those individual obligations can be serviced via the opportunities afforded by the education.  This is not an attack on higher education.  Just common sense.

I appreciate this post and people’s comments for how they
throw into relief questions I wrestle with in my practice and in my scholarship:  how we design educational experiences,
the relationship between those educational experiences and preparation for the
world of work, and what role student experiences and perspectives might play in
how we conceptualize both. Thanks to ssaulvolk for mentioning my work. In the program I developed at
Bryn Mawr College, undergraduate students and faculty work in semester-long partnerships,
with the students positioned as pedagogical consultants. The idea is not that
students have the answers to whatever questions faculty might be asking or that
we should defer to student desires in how we design educational opportunities.
Rather, the premise is that, together, faculty and students formulate more
generative questions about teaching and learning, learn from one another’s
perspectives, and share the responsibility for the education that unfolds in college
classrooms and how it can best prepare students for their futures. The idea is,
as Jeff Salingo put it, “to
engage the students in the debates that seem to be swirling around them but so
often don’t include them in meaningful ways.” Here’s a description of our program: http://www.brynmawr.edu/tli/
 

I’m sorry, but what the heck does this quote mean?:

“As information becomes rapidly irrelevant in the future, skill sets won’t matter as much,” a philosophy and psychology major at Georgetown told me.

Am I missing something?  How does this statement contribute to the discussion on majors?
Is this student just secretly preparing for a career in corporate communications/press relations?  I ask because it appears she/he threw out an utter nonsense/BS non-statement and a seasoned pro like Selingo took it hook, line, and sinker.   

Good post Jerry

As a Business academic (yes, I know that many of you will regard this an oxymoron), it seems to me that one thing that is often overlooked is that universities–and academics–have many customers (and yes, I, too, detest thinking of our relationships, particularly with students, as customer-provider relationships, but bear with me).  We need to satisfy a number of different consumers of our products. We need to satisfy students, many of whom do not really know–as this article unwittingly reveals–what is in their best or at least longer-term interests.  We need to satisfy their parents, many of whom are footing at least a hefty portion of the bill for their children’s education.  We need to satisfy the employers who will eventually hire our graduates.  We need to satisfy various professional organizations that our graduates have satisfactory level of knowledge and skills to practice competently in their professions and occupations.  We need to satisfy government which heavily supports in many different ways tertiary education institutions, and we need to satisfy the society which pays the taxes which allow the government to provide that financial support.  All of these different “consumers” have different, and sometimes conflicting, short and longer term requirements, but what they all want at the end of the day is literate, numerate graduates with adequate knowledge to contribute appropriately in the workforce and employees and in society as citizens. 

Certainly we should be asking students what they want or expect from their university experience, as Jeff Selingo points out, but their views and requirements should not determine what is offered; rather, it should be regarded as another source of information which we  consider, evaluate, and incorporate–along with the views and requirements of the other “consumers” of our product–when we make decisions about what and how we provide tertiary education.   As professionals in both education and in our particular disciplines, we must be the ones who weigh out the requirements of our consumers and decide what and how we will offer our “product.”  We must sometimes be courageous in asserting our expertise against the shortsightedness, narrow-mindedness, and expediency requirements of our various customers.   

And, we should note that the “product”–the educational program–offered by one tertiary institution is not necessarily the “product” that should be offered by others.  Determining your market, and then shaping your program to meet the needs of that market–and then making sure that your consumers know what you are offering and how it benefits them, will allow each tertiary institution to be the best for its “customers.”  The history of business is littered with defunct companies which provided what the customers thought they wanted, but then found out it wasn’t what they actually needed.

Well, yes, that’s what they do NOW because we have majors.  If we didn’t, they’d develop another system. 

well…there it is, the wheel…spokes out to vocational or professional prep, but at the center, though the there seems to be some reluctance to say the words, is liberal arts education…foundational habits of mind that will serve kids in any number of careers, some of which  don’t even exist today.

The previous system, as I alluded to below, was the Cravath System of Hiring, which can be summarized as “Ivy or bust.”  The Cravath system never went away for “elite” employers (ie. consultancies, law firms, professional roles with the fed gov’t, investment banks, VC/PE/HF, academia, and elite tech & pharma firms*), and in these days of hundreds of applicants for every job, I fear the Cravath System has never been stronger – at least as an initial screening mechanism to junk 90% of the resumes at a single blow. 
 
*For the tech stuff, the “Ivies” can be substituted for MIT/CalTech/Carnegie Mellon/etc

I really enjoyed reading this article but wonder if there is
bias.  I wonder if any of the students surveyed tried taking an online
course of any kind.  I never thought of online courses the way it was
described by the student from Valencia.  The online professor is there for
you just like the F2F professor are.  The only thing that is missing is
the lectures, in my opinion.  I enjoy taking online courses, I am taking
one now for my Doctorate.  Online school is convenient for my life style
as a mother, wife and educator.  Some students cannot handle the online
atmosphere because of the discipline they need to have.

As for choosing a major before going to college, I wish I
would have waited until I took a few classes before I chose.  At this time
I know I picked the wrong major, I changed it and still picked the wrong
thing.  I did not find my passion or career that I wanted until Graduate
school.  My focus in the beginning was where the money is, this is the field
I want to be in.  Know that I am older and wiser; I went with my
passion which is helping other help themselves so I do this through education.