Real world math

This is really in nicoleandmaggie's wheelhouse, not mine, but here goes. It's more of a link roundup than a post with a point.

• The NY Times has been running good articles on saving for college, including some that talk about what to do if parents haven't saved for college, another that tracks declining support for state institutions, and a third that explains why rating institutions won't help lower costs. There was one recently (I can't find it now) that was shocked to realize that FAFSA (and CSS, the private version) counts everything as an asset, including retirement accounts, which are dangerously treated as funds to be tapped for college. (The unmentioned corollary is that neither FAFSA or CSS has any interest in listing debts, like car loans or mortgages--just assets.)
• How likely is it that there could be significant overlap between the academics saving for retirement (below) and those who, having had children in their mid-30s to 40s, are 18 years later confronting the realities of college costs? I think you know the answer to this one.
• Although students are applying for many more colleges than before (too many, says this article), part of the reason is that they want to play schools' financial package offers against one another once they're accepted. One piece of advice from one of the articles: if you play this game, make sure that the financial aid package is for more than a year. I've known parents who have steered students to the school with the best package of aid, only to have that aid dry up after the first year when it's tough to change. 
• Over at The Chronicle, "Retire Already!"  speaks to us from a land of sunshine and unicorns, where everyone has a million dollars saved up for retirement and the only factor keeping anyone 55+ from retiring is their selfish, limpet-like clinging to jobs. But here are two hypothetical scenarios for faculty members; which one sounds more like the people you know? (Both are purely hypothetical, based on what I've read at The Chronicle and on comments.)
• Golden Child graduates with a PhD at 28, immediately lands a tenure-track job, progresses up the ladder with raises every year and the expected promotions, has a lavish retirement package, and jets off to fabulous places (or like the writer above, accepts fabulous artist-in-residence residencies) when she retires at 65.
• Regular Person finished a PhD in her mid to late 30s, gets a TT job at 40-45, and goes through several years of no raises at all, not because of merit but because of the recession and flatlining funding. Promotions are forthcoming, but because of salary compression, she makes less as an associate than her new-minted assistant colleagues. She has 15- 20 years, until "Retire, Already!" says she should stop, to save up enough money, at 6% of her salary per year or whatever the retirement plan is,  to last the rest of her life--say, 30 more years if she retires at 65.

Clap your hands if you believe

I'm not writing here much lately because, in looking at CHE and IHE and ChronicleVitae, I feel as though I've seen these issues before, some of them a lot of times, and written about many of them (ditto).

But one that I'd like to see more specific data about is a trend whereby the PhD and inventive variants are promoted as good bets for working in various unnamed industries or libraries. Aren't librarians having trouble finding work? What kinds of industries? What kinds of foundation work?  The articles I've seen tout 3 or so success stories as the wave of the future, but what are the facts?

Sometimes the Ph.D. is promoted as an enrichment degree so valuable even if you don't get a job, you'll be glad you spent 10 years doing it, which might be true if you are independently wealthy or retired.

Sometimes they even propose expanding or creating new degrees that don't have the expectation of university teaching at the end of it, as in the recent kerfuffle at Cornell.  The descriptions of what exactly graduates would do are both uplifting and stunningly vague, as though even those proposing the degree don't have much of a concept beyond mad critical thinking and research skilz--good in themselves, but how about specifics?

Sometimes, it's not only an enrichment but something you owe it to the world to treat as a calling:

To sustain scholarly inquiry, we need scholars around the country and world engaged in research and capable of critically assessing each other’s work. We need to ensure that humanities graduates at all levels — in K-12 schools, museums, local societies, media, universities, and government — have the space and time to engage in scholarship and be part of the conversation.

Well, yes. Yes, we do need scholars.  Let me add the important corollary that scholars need to eat, and have health insurance, and maybe a place to live and a car to drive, even if you're not counting expensive, frivolous extras like having children.

The article goes on to say we need to address supply and demand:

On the demand side, we must expand the number of tenure-line positions in the humanities across the nation and resist the deprofessionalization of teachers and professors.

Well, done and done, then!

I should not be so cynical about this, but it is crazymaking to read something like this--"we must expand"--when none of this, none, zip, nada is in the power of ordinary academics to do.  We can try, but we do not control the money. Let me repeat: We do not control the money. We have little say over how it is spent, how salaries or research funds are allocated, and did I mention having no control whatever over allocations from the state or Board of Regents or whoever determines the university's budget?  For most of us, simply retaining a line when someone retires instead of having it snatched back by central administration is cause for feasting and dancing around a sacred idol.

When I was little and saw Peter Pan, there was a scene where Tinkerbell was dying and we all had to clap our hands and believe if we wanted to make her well.  Without more facts, these articles seem to me to be saying "clap your hands if you believe, and you will make it so."  I wish these confident assertions were true, but I want some investigative reporting rather than opinion pieces to tell me how they might be.

Was there ever a time of idealism in college?

Dean Dad has an interesting post about artists and the advice being given to them:
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But where some variation of “follow your dreams” would have gone when I was in college, I heard “learn a trade” and “get good at living on very little money.”

He continues:

What I didn’t see, though, was youthful idealism.  I didn’t see what I used to think of as teenage bravado.  I saw some very young people who had been forced by circumstance to act in ways that used to be the province of their elders.  I saw young adults, rather than teenagers. 

In many ways, that’s great.  Given the very real economic obstacles many young students face, a certain gritty realism is appropriate.  And if memory serves, teenage bravado can be wearing in its own right.

But that “bulletproof” teenage stage -- that, in retrospect, relies on a base of economic security -- serves a purpose.

Dean Dad's take on this is interesting, for he sees it as a generational issue, whereas I see it as a class issue.

Although I went to college in a time that was supposed to be somewhat idealistic, the people I knew at public universities never went through a "bulletproof" stage of economic security where they thought "follow your dreams" was good advice. Idealism costs money, either immediately or in the future, and they knew it.

That's not to say that people weren't idealistic, or that they didn't do the same stupid things that college students have always done, but they understood the "gritty realism" of the consequences. The idea that you could throw yourself on the economy like a trampoline and bounce back wasn't part of the equation.

Private universities or elite publics--sure.  My friends who came from upper-middle-class professional backgrounds knew they could do whatever they wanted. If they made money in the summer working for their parents' friends, it went toward backpacking in Europe and not toward next year's expenses.  It's not that one was wrong and the other right, but they were different experiences.

I've been thinking about this because of reading other Mid-Century Males, Jack Kerouac and other Beats in particular.  Kerouac didn't want to be tied down, which may be the understatement of the decade, but whenever he got the urge to travel, which was most of the time, he had two things going for him: (1) plentiful manufacturing or service jobs that he could get easily and then leave and (2) like Allen Ginsberg, a family that, though not wealthy, would scrape up the money for bail for him when he got in trouble with the law.

The same seems to be true for the following decade, the 1960s, as I mentioned in a post about a year ago in talking about Sara Davidson's Loose Change:

What I actually took away was that people in those days could quit, drop out, or do any damn thing they felt like doing, and there would be someone or something to pick them up afterwards: plentiful jobs, more jobs than there were applicants, seemingly;  a network that would allow the main character, with just a phone call from one of her parents, to go to Europe and work as a translator in Italy; and a generous system of social service benefits that wouldn't let them fall into poverty.  They could change the world--or at least the upper-middle-class white women in the book could--because the world was going to support them financially no matter what they did.  I realize that that's probably not true, but it has a truthiness to it and seems true, given what Davidson describes.

  I think Dean Dad is right, but only partially so.  The idealism gap, if you can call it that, was always there for some students, but now it's hitting the class that used to be told "follow your bliss," and that's what speaks to the troubling reality that he's talking about.

Do you have a 5-year academic plan?

Karen Kelsky, of The Professor is In, shares a success story of a student who had a 5-year plan in graduate school and is now about to win tenure at an R1. She shares one of the years of the student's calendar and adds the result. It's pretty inspiring:

This student obtained, in total, some $200,000 of research funding in graduate school (in cultural anthropology–a field that does not have massive grants), in addition to her basic TA funding package.  She had several publications before finishing, and secured a tenure track position at an R1 institution in her first year on the market.  She is solidly on track for tenure, and this past year she won another major research fellowship that gave her a year’s leave time for new fieldwork on a second project.

A calendar like this is a great idea in a lot of ways, and (I'm guessing) a lot of us have internalized a calendar something like this. Deadlines for Kalamazoo or MLA or CCCC are at such and such a time each year, grant deadlines are at always at a similar time, and so on.  I try to inform my students about deadlines in the field, too, so that they can develop a similar yearly calendar if they haven't already.

And Kelsky is also right that, as they say about the lottery, you can't win if you don't play. If you do submit to a conference or put in a grant proposal, there's a chance you'll be rejected, but if you don't submit anything, there's a 100% chance you won't get to present at a conference or get funded.

The only thing I'd add to this plan is this: it helps with a good outcome, but it can't guarantee one, because the ultimate results are often not in your hands.  You have to be flexible.

• Grants don't always happen; in fact, grants usually don't happen. The NEH funds about 6% of applications for individuals. What if, as is likely, you're among the 94% that didn't get funded? What's your Plan B? It's like being a prospective college student, in a way: what if you don't get into Stanford or your equally competitive first choice?
• Publications don't always happen, either, or at least not on a schedule and timeline that's going to facilitate the outcome you want. Your article may get rejected more than once, or your research plans may be disrupted due to a lack of funding (see above).
• Your writing might not take the direction you've planned, either. Maybe what you thought was a straightforward topic with a clear timeline turns out to be more complex than you thought, or you need more research than you thought, or you just plain need to think longer and harder about it than you originally planned. 
• Opportunities can arise that aren't in your plan. Serendipity happens, but rarely on a schedule (or else it wouldn't be serendipity). Are you going to say yes, and, if so, how does that affect your plan? 
• Sometimes life intervenes: you get the flu, or have a baby, or your family gets sick and you have to care for them. 
• Also, money isn't a part of this plan. What if you have to teach more to make more money so that you can go to conferences, or you can't afford to go to a major conference because it's being held overseas or far away? A conference costs, on average, at least $1500 unless you can drive to it; research trips cost more; and if you're turned down for a travel grant, how will you accomplish these goals? 

As a fan of charts, I like the idea of a 5-year plan in theory, but with some flexibility built into it. Do you have a plan like this?

President Obama's Plan and Mine for Controlling College Costs

Over at The Chronicle, several articles lay out President Obama's plan to control college costs.  I think a look at the bigger picture is in order. To wit:

1. Make the "job creators" who have had massive tax breaks since 2002--remember those bank bailouts?-- work a little harder at developing and sustaining solid, middle-class jobs in this country. The Dow and NASDAQ keep going up, and Marketplace keeps playing its happy song "We're in the Money," but what does that mean for people who can't get a job? We keep seeing all these worried articles about "the American people aren't spending enough," and then someone speculates, "do you suppose it's because they don't have jobs or don't feel certain about the jobs they have?" Gee, ya think?

2. Do something about the student loan crisis.  I'm not an economist, and surely economics bloggers like nicoleandmaggie are cringing at my naïveté right now, but I fail to understand why large corporations can get virtually 0% borrowing and can declare bankruptcy if they have to pay pensions, but the best we can do for students is temporarily not raising rates to 6.8% and promising that they won't go above 8.25 (and way more for parents).

Students are graduating with the equivalents of unsaleable houses on their backs, mortgage-level debt in some cases, and they do not have the privileges of corporations in borrowing or declaring bankruptcy. If you want to know why young Americans aren't buying cars, here's a tip: it's not necessarily because they're save-the-earth hipsters. They can't afford it.

3. Think before you act on the MOOC model. In what may be an example of tongue-in-cheek understatement, the Chronicle observes that "Evidence for the effectiveness of MOOCs remains thin, if nonexistent." Thomas L. Friedman is invoked as though he actually has a ghost of a clue about what is happening in education.

Again: education is a good thing, and college graduates fare better than those who don't graduate, but simply focusing on flipping classrooms doesn't help with the one-two punch of punishing levels of debt and high unemployment.  

This just in: NYTimes worries about privileged women. Again.

In "The Opt-Out Generation Wants Back In," , Judith Warner revisits the famous "opt-out" group from ten years ago. KJ Dell'Antonia gives the numbers but somehow concludes that women wouldn't want to go back:

Among the anecdotes are numbers: roughly a third of “highly qualified” women leave their jobs to spend time at home; 89 percent of those who “offramped” said they wanted to resume work, but only 73 percent of these succeeded in getting back in, and only 40 percent got full-time jobs, often at lower pay or with lesser job responsibilities. 

 I'm not sure why the Gray Lady is so obsessed with the happiness choices of women of privilege.  Maybe it's like reality shows, where viewers can think, "Okay, you're rich, but you didn't get everything you wanted, did you?"

Or maybe it's to induce schadenfreude in readers like humanities academics, most of whom will never see a six-figure salary in their wildest dreams. Idealism says that the purpose is to  make women aware of the limitations of their choices, but maybe what NYT is saying is that women are justly punished for ambition. Ouch.

At The Atlantic, Magda Pecsenye puts her finger on a possible flaw in the argument:

Blaming struggles of a limited group on personal choice is bad social science. Warner doesn't look at how well the women who stayed in the workforce are faring now, or how the men in their cohort are faring now. Without these comparisons there's no way to know if the women who opted out are doing substantially worse than they might have had they stayed in. 

In other words, "Hello, recession!"

The original participants all stated confidently that they'd waltz back into high-powered jobs when they were ready and are shocked to discover that that's not the case. As Historiann says, "No $hit, Sherlock!  Duhhhhh!  Awesome!!!  Eleventy.  Are there any other cliches and verbal representations of my eyeballs rolling back in my head that I’ve overlooked so far?"

As Bardiac says, "I'm sort of despairing here because the women the article talks about were/are way privileged; they sound like they all had college educations, and they all went to college when feminism was important on college campuses.  They all had job opportunities beyond what most people have."   

Bardiac's right. I think they thought their class privilege would trump the disadvantages of being (1) female and (2) over 40 when they tried to go back to work, which in a sexist and ageist culture is a big mistake.

But academics, and academic humanities, are seemingly in a permanent state of recession (unlike other parts of a university; h/t Margaret Soltan), which is why quitting after tenure elicits such strong emotions.

This reminds me of the "dropping out" issue that Flavia highlighted a couple of months ago.  The thing that her classmate was saying, Paul Revere-style, was that if you make the choice to leave, or opt out, or "drop out," you might never get a chance to opt back in.  And as Dr. Crazy points out, it's only an option for partnered people.

The real question, which is kind of obscured in the NYT's interest in the emotional happiness of the women it surveys, is this: how will you support yourself? And what are you doing to ensure that you can?  This is a human issue, which is another way of saying it's a feminist issue.

Likely Outcomes?

http://chronicle.com/weekly/v52/i28/28a01401.htm
From an article on the Adjunct Advocate:
"Ms. Lesko thinks that the best way to win beneficial restrictions on the use of adjuncts in academe is simply to focus on data that show, for instance, that an adjunct teaching seven classes cannot teach as well as an adjunct teaching two or three classes. Do that, she says, and the parents and students who pay tuition will pressure institutions to change because the current regime of part-time employment in higher education will be seen as delivering a lousy product. In other words, when playing to people in Peoria, aim for their wallets, not their class solidarity — and forget the rhetoric of abuse."

In a market in which the supply of potential adjuncts was roughly equivalent to the demand, Lesko might have a point, but what's the most likely outcome when looking at, as Mr. Cheney might say, the job market we have rather than the market we want?

1) Parents will surely place this issue at the top of their radar screen and demand that adjuncts be limited to two or three classes, thus ensuring better wages for all.

2) In the event that parents notice, and care, and make an issue of this, administrators will respond to this data, slap their foreheads, and immediately provide better wages with all of the unlimited funds at their disposal.

3) The data will be used to cut the number of sections given to individual adjuncts and spread among a greater number of the ever-increasing pool. This will have the effect of denying some adjuncts health benefits, since a certain number of courses taught is usually required to receive benefits, and will also ensure that those who have been squeezing out an existence teaching 7 courses will not be able to survive without getting a job at Wal-mart.