Undated photo of Tent City from the Bridgewater State University Website.

In each of the six Novembers I have taught at Bridgewater State University, a small but growing band of students have lived in tents for five nights. It’s part of the International Tent City program, designed to raise awareness of homelessness and simulate the tent cities homeless people live in throughout the world.

Some students spend a night in the tents for extra credit in a class; others spend all five nights (and last week, when this year’s event was held, that was pretty hearty given temperatures that dipped below freezing). The program has become so popular in its six years I heard unconfirmed reports of alumni coming back to spend a night or two in the awareness-raising event.

The timing of this Pete Earley post on his decision to not spend time pretending to be homeless and write a book about the experience contrasts nicely with Tent City at Bridgewater State. Book publishers have loved this idea ever since George Plimpton suited up to train with the Detroit Lions and write Paper Lion. It can be entertaining reading, but it doesn’t get to the heart of the experience. Continue Reading »

I call bullshit on this post, as I tend to do with this particular blog, which is essentially a place for college professors to bitch about their students (if you have or will have college-aged children I suggest taking a look at this site somewhat regularly to get a feel of what the people you’re paying to educate your kids really think about your kids):

Overheard

Two students were talking about a trip to California, during which time they’d have a day for just one Disney Park.  Which one to choose?

“Dude, just go on Wikipedia and get a list of rides for each park.”

“No way, Dude! I want to be sure I get the right information!  I guess I should go to a Disney site, right, to make absolutely sure?”

Ahhhhhhh.  I see.  So when it is REALLY important, then, they DO know places to look to be sure they are getting the right information!!!!

Not sure why this is shocking: Universities are failing at teaching social media

The only people who still think colleges are about job training are, well, everyone not in the system. Colleges and universities like to think they are above the petty work of vocational training, except when it comes to selling the school to prospective parents and their students.

In my experience, there are an alarming number of college professors who still see email as a burden as, in the words of one former colleague ”it means students can contact me on the weekends.” And this was a professor in a communication studies department.

With that mindset, maybe college students are better off doing what they have always done: figuring out how to use and dominate the technology on their own.

Every vote helps, and every time you share the link to my SXSW panel proposal on your social media outlets of choice, you save a puppy.

Well, I may be making that last part up, but it would be great if you could visit this link, vote and share so I can talk about the “Higher Ed Crisis: Remaking The U.S. University” at SXSW in March.

Just submitted by first ever SXSW panel proposal. Once voting opens, I’m going to pull out all the stops to ask for your help. Here’s the solo presentation I’m pitching:

Higher Ed Crisis: Remaking The U.S. University

More people are enrolling in college than at any other time in U.S. history. While policy makers give half-hearted lip service to worries about a higher education bubble, they still pump money and incentives into increasing enrollment. High school guidance counselors are judged by how many students go on to college. And four-year, public and community colleges, which are getting the greatest influx of the new breed of students, play up the promised land myth: get into college and you’ll get a good job.

But the myth breaks down on the first day of classes. Academics see themselves not as providing job training but as living up to the university roles of research and turning students into well-rounded people. Those are worthy goals, but for the majority of students that means a fear of failure and a career in a cubicle. University career services help students polish resumes but not on how to start a business.

This talk offers a big-picture solution to the higher ed crisis.

Five questions this talk will answer:

1. Should you send your kid (or yourself) to college?
2. Why don’t more colleges encourage students to take risks?
3. How can we reverse the anti-entrepreneur culture in higher ed?
4. What does the perfect college degree for the new economy look like?
5. Which schools/programs/majors are getting it right?

Funny comic about choosing a college major. See more. And choose your major wisely, says the guy who majored in sociology as an undergrad.

OnlineUniversities.com came out with an optimistic infographic last week about how college classrooms are going digital.

But as someone who makes as much as a quarter of his income from teaching college classes in any given year, and who also spends a good amount of time speaking at conferences trying to help professors incorporate technology and social media into their curriculum, the view from the trenches is very different than the iPad-in-every-backpack proponents would have you believe.

This is not to say that tech isn’t changing the way we teach and the way students learn: it most certainly is. But probably not as fast as some people outside of higher ed think it is.

Read more at ReadWriteWeb.

I haven’t made any secrets here or in other areas of my life that my current career plan is to enroll in a PhD program in the fall of 2012. If all goes according to plan, I’ll make tenure at some college just before I turn 50. If all goes according to mainstream media consensus about the state of higher education, I’ll spend the rest of my life teaching as an adjunct for crap wages (fortunately, I’m designing a PhD program that can transfer well to the private sector if it comes to that, and I still have some faith in my ability to write while carrying on a full teaching load).

I’ve been thinking about this for quite a spell and teaching for the past 4.5 years. During that time I’ve started reading a lot of blogs about higher education as I play the “is this really what I want to do with the rest of my life?” game.

Every industry has its own bloggers, but the higher education blogs are rather interesting in the sense that they generally fall into two hardline categories:

1. We’re anonymous (or sometimes not-so-anonymous) professors who are pissed off at the world because our jobs aren’t as cushy as we though they would bet. We pretty much hate our students—almost as much as we hate their parents.
2. We really love our jobs and aren’t ready to concede that there’s anything wrong with the academy or the way we do things.

Continue Reading »

The Chronicle of Higher Education is out with its list of Great Colleges To Work For. Not as many local entries as you may expect — perhaps because Boston is an employer’s market when it comes to higher ed jobs. Having talked with both students and faculty there, I’m not surprised that Endicott College in Beverly was one of the best-ranked local schools:

“With nature trails, three private beaches, and a Georgian mansion called the Tupper Manor, this oceanfront campus feels like a retreat. To this picturesque workplace, the college brings in local and national higher-education leaders for speaking events and provides on-site personal-teaching consultations on topics like classroom civility and curriculum development.”

While the list is somewhat hard to navigate, it was an interesting read. It is also a good resource for parents and students looking at colleges, as you can filter it to consider the factors that students should consider important (i.e. quality of classroom instruction). Locally, Endicott is the only school to make the list when you look at teaching environment.

This map shows the location of the schools that made the honor roll:

There was a time when the average grade — meaning the grade most college students got in most classes — was a C. That’s not to say that people liked getting a C, just like NHL players don’t particularly like regular season ties and casino visitors don’t like breaking even.

Those days are seemingly over, according to a new study, as the average grade seems to be A. If you click through that’s not a typographical error: in a review of 200, four-year colleges, 43% of the letter grades given in 2008 were A’s, up 28% from 1960 and 12% from 1988. If you took a college class in 2008, there was only a one-in-10 chance that you got a D or an F.

Did you expect anything less in the generation where every kid gets a trophy for playing Little League and we have a mentality that has seemingly dropped the words “pursuit of” in the part of the Declaration of Independence that deals with happiness? At the end of each semester I field more than a handful of complaints from students who are shocked that I’m giving them a C for the class. A typical interaction sounds like this:

Continue Reading »