Category Archives: Colleges and Universities

Stanford student bristles at question: “What are you going to do with a sociology degree?”

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A Stanford student writes about having to answer a question common to sociology majors:

What annoys me, however, is when people ask “So what are you going to do with a Sociology degree?” Within the phrasing and intonation of this question are often a number of subtle assumptions and judgments. The first is the implication that I’ve chosen a useless degree because it doesn’t give me a clear path or job field to enter after college. The second is the assumption that my undergraduate degree determines my next steps; that because I am getting a B.A. in Sociology, I will pursue work in this field. The ultimate frustration I have with this question, one that often comes out during the course of the conversation, is the need for the person asking me the question to fit my answer and future plans into a discrete career label such as teacher, lawyer or lobbyist. In reality, none of these is true. My degree is not useless. Nor am I required to pursue things related to sociology. In fact, my job will probably not have any sort of neat label at all.

I find these issues crop up when talking to Stanford students as well, and I often feel looked down upon for not having chosen a more pre-professional path. I’ve had numerous conversations with techie students in which it is clear that they look down upon fuzzy majors. The culture among Stanford students lauds techie degrees as practical, which ends up framing fuzzy majors as useless. Although it is true that a Stanford engineering degree offers higher salaries and a guaranteed job right out of Stanford, a liberal arts degree is not a death knell. Liberal arts degrees have tremendous value even though they don’t shepherd the student into an obvious career trajectory and throw money at them.

My degree opens up a world of possibilities to me. Although the skills I’ve gained are less quantifiable than those from techie majors, my time at Stanford has vastly improved my writing, my critical thinking skills, my research skills and my ability to put together a coherent and convincing argument. All of these are qualities that employers look for and make me a valuable commodity on the job market. Every company that employs those high-paid CS majors also needs people to do marketing, HR, management and public relations. Any and all of these options are available to me with my liberal arts degree from Stanford.

People forget that many Americans have jobs have little to nothing to do with their undergraduate department, so it’s of little concern to me that my job be related to sociology. Some of my relatives get this and some don’t, but as our conversations continue they struggle to find a job label for the future me; do I want to be a consultant? A social worker? I should be a teacher! It’s like they’re grasping at straws for a name that they know and understand, failing to realize that jobs don’t always fall into these labels. Like most adults, I will probably have a job that has a title that you’ve never heard of and that doesn’t fall cleanly into any category. What’s important to me is that I find a job that accomplishes something that I believe is a valuable use of my time; the end goal is what’s important, not the name.

Some of this argument sounds very common to the perspective of millennials  such as a career needs to be “a valuable use of my time.” But she is also making a common defense of the liberal arts and the need for these skills in the workplace.

I don’t know that I would tell students that they could do anything “with my liberal arts degree from Stanford” (is the Stanford part here much more important than the liberal arts component?) or that it should be “of little concern to me that my job be related to sociology.” I think there is plenty to sell about sociology which she hints at: a way of looking at the world that is difficult to find in other majors. The broad overview and theoretical approach sociology offers that gets at the complex patterns present in society through a set of data collection and analysis skills is very valuable. Of course, this can be packaged and used in a number of different fields but sociology is simply not just a “fuzzy major” or just another major option. In a globalized society marked by increasing levels of complexity and dynamic change, we need more sociology majors.

Sociologist argues that SATs not the best predictor of college success

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In another round of the battles over standardized testing, a Wake Forest sociologist argues that the SAT is not the best predictor of college performance:

His conclusion? SATs don’t tell us much about how well a student will perform in college.

A better predictor of college success lies in a student’s high school grade-point average, class rank and course selection, Soares said…

Soares is editor of a new book, “SAT Wars: The Case for Test-Optional College Admissions,” that takes a critical look at the SAT while calling for a rethinking of the college admissions process…

When it dropped the SAT option, Wake Forest revamped its admissions process, beefing up its written response section and encouraging students to be interviewed by an admissions officer, a move that created a huge logistical challenge for the school.

This is not a small argument: as the article notes, this is a multi-billion dollar industry.

I wouldn’t be surprised if more schools continued to play around with the admissions processes, both to get around some of the difficulties with particular measures but also to get a competitive advantage in grabbing good students before other schools realize what is going on (the Moneyball approach to admissions?).

Measuring faculty productivity in sociology

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A sociologist and associate dean at the University of Texas-Austin has recently put together a report on faculty productivity at his school that was undertaken to counter criticism that some faculty at the school didn’t do enough research to justify the money paid by taxpayers to support the school. The report cautions against using the same measures of productivity across disciplines:

While Musick said there was value in using the available numbers on research support, he stressed the importance of recognizing that this is valid only for some disciplines. (And one of his recommendations going forward is that the university develop better measures for research productivity of faculty members who work in disciplines without significant sources of outside funding.)

His own field of sociology is a perfect illustration of the limits of using outside funding as a measure of faculty research productivity, Musick said. Sociologists have some government support for which they can apply, but not nearly as much as do those in the physical or biological sciences, he noted. Even within fields, one’s success at obtaining funds may be based on area of expertise, not productivity. Musick said that as a medical sociologist, he has been able to win National Institutes of Health grants that some of his colleagues in sociology — people with good research agendas — could not seek.

He also said it was important to reject the idea that universities should be based only upon those fields that can attract the most outside support — even if you have a goal of producing more scientists. Musick cited as examples STEM-oriented universities such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the California Institute of Technology — both of which invest significant funds in humanities and social science programs. “They recognize that universities are ecosystems,” he said. “They recognize that to produce the best scientists, they need the humanities and social sciences and the fine arts.”

It would also be helpful to keep in mind that there is even disagreement within sociology about faculty productivity. (I assume these discussions might also take place within other disciplines.) I’ve seen some heated discussion between faculty of different subfields of sociology where productivity is measured in very different ways. A book might be considered a massive achievement in one subfield while multiple journal articles are the norm in another. Plus, you could get into the quality of such publications which can also be difficult to assess. Impact factor seems to be the favored way to do this today but that has some issues and applies only to journal articles. Additionally, we could ask what the benchmark for overall productivity is: should UT-Austin match other R1 public schools and/or places like Harvard and Princeton?

Does the availability of outside funding help explain why medical sociology is a growing subfield?

Earnings of sociology majors on list of “Best College Majors for a Career”

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The Wall Street Journal has an interactive feature where you can see income by college major according to 2010 Census figures. Here is how sociology fared: out of 173 majors (some of which I did not know existed), it was 19th in popularity, had a 7.0% unemployment rate, and median earnings were $45,000 with a 25th percentile of $33k and 75th percentile of $67k.

For median income, sociology is at roughly the 30th percentile.

In popularity, sociology ranked ahead of journalism, mathematics, architecture, chemistry, and music (among others). Top 10 in popularity: Business Management and Administration, General Business, Accounting, Nursing, Psychology, Marketing, Communications, Elementary Education, General Education, and Computer Science.

Are these figures better or worse than people would have expected for sociology?

Of course, we could also discuss if earnings are the only or best way to evaluate college majors. Other possible outcomes to consider: return for one’s money, value to society, specializing vs. having a broader focus.

How do the numbers on this list fit with the recent New York Times article that said American college students study STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) in such low numbers because they find them too difficult?

A new way to do the college search process: one comprehensive website to match students to colleges

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The policy director of an education think tank writes in Washington Monthly, itself a purveyor of college rankings, that the future of college admissions will come in the form of a single, comprehensive website that will match prospective students and colleges:

This is the future of college admissions. The market for matching colleges and students is about to undergo a wholesale transformation to electronic form. When the time comes for Jameel to apply to colleges, ConnectEDU will take all of the information it has gathered and use sophisticated algorithms to find the best colleges likely to accept him—to find a match for Jameel in the same way that Amazon uses millions of sales records to advise customers about what books they might like to buy and Match.com helps the lovelorn find a compatible date. At the same time, on the other side of the looking glass, college admissions officers will be peering into ConnectEDU’s trove of data to search for the right mix of students.

This won’t just help the brightest, most driven kids. Bad matching is a problem throughout higher education, from top to bottom. Among all students who enroll in college, most will either transfer or drop out. For African American students and those whose parents never went to college, the transfer/dropout rate is closer to two-thirds. Most students don’t live in the resource-rich, intensely college-focused environment that upper-middle-class students take for granted. So they often default to whatever college is cheapest and closest to home. Tools like ConnectEDU will give them a way to find something better.

We can think of getting into college like this: students need to be slotted into the appropriate school. At this point, students can do certain things to improve their fit and colleges use certain information (though it often comes in a form of a narrative about students that admissions officers construct – I highly recommend Creating a Class). Our current system is highly dependent on students doing the initial legwork in searching out colleges that might fit them but as this article suggests, there are a number of students, particularly poorer students, who don’t do well in this system.

If this website idea catches on, wouldn’t it create more competition within the college market for students? If so, would middle- and upper-class students start complaining?

Also, while the article suggests a website like this is the answer to helping kids who can’t currently play the college game, doesn’t it rest on the idea that (1) people have equal access to this website and (2) that users have the ability or “cultural capital” to sort through the information the website presents? Neither of these might necessarily be true.

h/t Instapundit

London School of Economics distances themselves from sociologist who wrote about “erotic capital”

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The press has paid a lot of attention to Catherine Hakim’s concept of “erotic capital,” perhaps partly because the stories have claimed that she works at the respected London School of Economics. (See earlier posts here and here.) But the LSE now wants to distance themselves from her work:

Catherine Hakim’s Honey Money: The Power of Erotic Capital garnered some hostile reviews after it was published by Allen Lane last month, with many commentators aghast that an LSE sociologist should advocate that women use their sexual assets to get ahead.

The book’s title is inspired by the catchphrase used by prostitutes in Jakarta who ask for cash upfront for sex – with women advised to exploit their own “erotic capital” to gain professional success.

It has now emerged that Ms Hakim’s links to the LSE are perhaps looser than had been suggested. Although she is described as a “senior research Fellow of sociology” at the LSE on the book’s dust jacket and in subsequent book reviews, Times Higher Education has learned that Ms Hakim has not been employed there since 2003.

She had, with the agreement of the school, continued to work from an LSE office and use email, telephone and other clerical-support facilities – despite not being part of the sociology faculty.

The institution has now written to Allen Lane, an imprint of Penguin, asking it to correct further publications, while Ms Hakim has been asked by the LSE not to refer to herself as an LSE sociologist, THE understands.

One might wonder what would have happened had the book been good or not invoked a scandalous argument.

Additionally, if the reviews of this book have been scathing, why has it gotten so much press? Just because it is a “sexy” topic?

Princeton: our scholars must own their copyrights

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The 1709 Blog writes about Princeton University’s new Open Access policy:

[L]ibrarians and academics have long known that journal publishers monopolise the market; even as much as ten years ago the larger publishers were busy buying out the smaller ones who weren’t strong enough to compete with them. But outside of academia people are largely unaware of the struggles every electronic resources librarian faces each year as budgets shrink and journal bundle prices steadily increase. Tough decisions often have to be made, and naturally the impact is felt by researchers, academics and students.

Which is why today’s announcement that Princeton University is enforcing an Open Access policy forbidding academics from transferring the copyright in their articles to journal publishers is so significant. Academics are required to licence their work instead, so that they retain the copyright and are therefore able to reproduce it elsewhere without having to seek the permission of the publisher. This could spark a welcome trend which would allow academics and universities to maximise their outputs and revolutionise knowledge sharing. [emphasis added]

In many disciplines–particularly the sciences–scholars already pay journals to publish them.  In other words, the scholars’ universities foot some or all of the bill for peer review and editing (in addition, of course, to “subsidizing” scholars by way of salaries).  Especially in these circumstances, it seems that the scholar/university have a lot of leverage to do what Princeton is doing here since academic publishers’ leverage to push back is directly tied to their value-add.  Since, under these particular circumstances, the publishers are adding almost no value, their leverage is near zero.

A more interesting question arises where the academic publishers add more value–i.e., where the publisher directly incurs the editing and peer reviewing costs.  There, the scholar/university may well get more push back.

If other colleges and universities follow Princeton’s lead, traditional academic publishers could find themselves effectively cut out of the market very quickly.

The civil rights argument against NCAA Division I football and men’s basketball

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The cover story of the latest Atlantic, “The Shame of College Sports,” is provocative and fascinating. The article is mainly about a series of court cases involving the civil rights of “student-athletes” and procuring a share of the NCAA’s football and men’s basketball profits for these “student-athletes.” After reading the full argument, it is difficult to feel much goodwill toward the NCAA.

The norms of college protests in court

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Arguments in a California courtroom revolve around this question: what are the norms governing college protests?

Sociologist Steven Clayman took the stand on Thursday, the final day of testimony. He is an expert in “speaker-audience interaction,” and has written a scholarly article titled, “Booing: The Anatomy of a Disaffiliative Response,” which examines environments such as presidential debates, TV talk shows and British Parliament. He believes audience participation cannot be prevented because members of the crowd are “free agents,” able to express approval or disapproval of what a speaker is saying.

Having watched a video of the Irvine 11 incident, Clayman affirmed that the audience response seemed to be a “normal and unavoidable” part of Ambassador Michael Oren’sspeech.

Lead prosecutor Dan Wagner then fired, “It’s unavoidable that 10 people would stand up with planned statements that have nothing to do with what the speaker is saying? . . . Are you saying that the only way to prevent [protests] is to put a straitjacket and muzzle on them?” The questions were stricken by the judge.
Ten UC Irvine and UC Riverside students have been charged with misdemeanor conspiracy to commit a crime and misdemeanor disruption of a meeting. To be convicted of the latter, one must commit an act that violates the “implicit customs” or “explicit rules” for the event. The defense team claims the defendants did neither, arguing that they were merely following the norms and customs of protests on college campuses.

So what exactly is “normal” college protest behavior? A number of colleges have faced these questions in recent years as protests have moved from just being outside the event to occurring during the event. Think the “Don’t Tase Me Bro” incident of 2007. Or witness the various pie-throwing attempts involving politicians. I wonder if this trial is then less about whether such actions are harmful but rather how these norms have changed over the decades and whether there is widely understood agreement about these changes.

Of course, this particular trial in California involves a number of contentious political and social issues.

I wonder if this case, and other similar ones, will lead to more schools creating more explicit rules about what is allowed and not allowed in on-campus protests and to make this information widely known.

Sociologist uses Twitter for class but are the students learning more?

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Stories like this are not uncommon: professors utilizing technology to engage their students (and here is another one about clicker use).

Wendy Welch is incorporating the use of the social networking site Twitter into her cultural geography class this semester. The adjunct instructor said she decided to use the social networking site in her class after having problems with students using their phones in class for less-than-appropriate purposes.“If you can’t beat them, get ahead of them,” Welch said. “That’s the way the world works now.”…

Each student was assigned a country in Africa and asked to tweet facts about their country, such as languages and population, using designated hash tags, or categories. That way, each student only has to research one country but has access to all the information they may need from other students.

Welch also plans to have students use their mobile devices or laptops to research information during class sessions, she said…

She said she hopes to “get students to understand and participate in their own education.”

Perhaps this does increase the engagement level of the students. All professors want their students to be engaged and we don’t want to be seen as being behind the times. But, I think there is often something missing from discussions about student engagement and the use of technology in the classroom: does this actually lead to higher levels of student learning or student outcomes?

I suspect professors will always try to keep up with technology as it changes and each of these changes will be accompanied by hand-wringing. However, we need to be able to distinguish between engaging students with technology versus helping them learn. Take this Twitter example from class: do students do better on tests? Do they retain the knowledge better? Can they apply their knowledge from this particular class to other settings, particularly if the technology is not present? Does technology itself help students think more deeply about the big questions of our world?

If technology alone becomes the answer in the classroom, we will be in trouble.