Deans' Weblog: Dalhousie Graduate Studies

Addendum to Today's Post

In order to save you a couple of dollars, the OECD statistics on "the jobless young" can be downloaded as a pdf file from Bloomberg's online post.

Have a good weekend.

 

Dieter

The Value of a Graduate Education - Part II

I kept Sunny's title from last week and will try to put the topic into a different perspective. I wager that Sunny's take on the topic is much more pleasant to read than mine.

I don't know how many of you read Bloomberg Businessweek, but for those who don't, it's February 7 - February 13, 2011 edition had the following headlines attached to its cover story by Peter Coy entitled "The Kids are Not Allright." "Youth unemployment is the global economies ticking time bomb" and "Youth unemployment is driving unrest in the Middle East and hollowing out societies from Europe to the US." The online version of the article entitled "The Youth Unemployment Bomb" can be accessed by clicking here. In my opinion, the charts on "the jobless young" not included in the online version may be worth paying a few dollars and getting the paper version.

In Europe, the US and even in China, "an economy that can't generate enough jobs to absorb its young people has created a lost generation of the disaffected, unemployed, or underemployed - including growing numbers of recent college graduates for whom the post-crash economy has little to offer." [In the US, the latter are called "boomerang" kids who move back home after college because they can't find work.]

In Egypt, Mubarak coped with the youth unemployment problem by expanding college enrollment, and even five years of economic growth weren't enough to keep the heat off him.

Of course, it is widely expected that eventually growth will resume as the after-effects of the 2008 financial crash diminish. This and the retirement of the baby boomers is believed to ease youth unemployment at most, if not all educational levels. Peter Coy put an interesting twist on this belief. "That's cold comfort to the young people who are out of work now. The short term has become distressingly long. Although the recession ended in the summer of 2009, youth unemployment remains near its cyclical peak. ... What keeps the numbers from being even higher is that many teens have simply given up. Some are sitting on couches. Others are in school, which can be a dead end itself. ... What's more, when jobs do come back, employers might choose to reach past today's unemployed, who may appear to be damaged goods, and pick from the next crop of fresh-faced grads."

One consequence of the weak academic job market is that graduate students, in increasing numbers, are delaying their graduation. Delays have often been the norm in certain disciplines, but the pile up of under- and unemployed Ph.D.'s nowadays has meant that new Ph.D.'s are finding far fewer employment opportunities than their supervisors did. Post-doctoral fellowships now often turn into dead ends and underemployed careers without any security and benefits.

The flooded market also means that departments now hire new faculty members for entry-level, tenure-track positions (if available) with the kind of qualifications that would have provided tenure to previous generations. Quite frankly, I doubt that Nobel laureates like Watson and Crick or Hodgkin and Huxley, with their publication records at the time they received the prize, would make the short list of an academic search these days.

In closing I think that whoever defuses the youth under-/unemployment bomb deserves the Nobel prize.

 

Dieter

The value of a graduate education

Here in the deep winter doldrums, I struggle with brain cramps brought on by limited sunshine and cognitive vapour lock. Not a pretty picture on so many fronts...

You may have seen my Twitter plea for a blog topic (http://twitter.com/#!/SunnyatDal). My good colleague Rick Nason responded right away with a provocative question (it's pretty much the only kind of question he asks).

Would education be valued more if it were free but only one tenth of current students could attend?

The first thing that springs to mind is what we might mean by "education" - university, community college, private trade school, for profit university? I have taken the liberty of restricting the question to graduate studies given that this blog belongs to the three Deans in the Faculty of Graduate Studies.  Even in that narrower context, this is a complicated and interesting question. It invites a whole lot of clarifying questions.

1. Do you mean valued by students who get in? The students who didn't get in? Parents? The community? Employers? 
2. Does the word "free" include tuition, books, transportation, residence, food? Does "free" mean with no strings attached, or would it require service to the community on graduation?
3. What are we going to do with the other 90% of the students who could attend? Create a different form of schooling, such as technical training?
4. What would we teach this small elect group, and how would we choose them?

As Rick very well knows, "value" is one of those attributes that depends heavily on perception rather than objective measures. Usually our perception of value is shaped by cost. It's certainly the way most people buy luxury goods such as jewelry and wine . When a man buys an engagement rings, the colour of the box is an important semiotic to "value" (i.e., the blue box from Birks or the light blue box from Tiffany's). The colour, cut, clarity, and carat weight of the stone is something most of us are unable to judge. When it comes to wine, the empirical evidence is that it is easy to change perceptions (cf. http://tinyurl.com/48bpwua), and in my experience the simplest way is through the price signal. We know this wine is good, because it is expensive.

On the other hand, restricting access to graduate education to a small elite (using that word in its most positive sense) would change the perception.  Certainly universities generally and graduate school specifically are serving a much different community that they used to 30 years ago. 

There is a middle ground. Folks in my office have described in which the barrier to entry in first year and the cost of the program is very low. Thousands taking first year medicine, say. But the number of seats available for second year is very limited, and everyone knows teh rules before signing on That's an interesting model too.

It turns out there is exactly such an institution here in Canada, one which is "free". It's the Royal Military College. It is free in the sense that tuition, books, residence, meals, summer employment / training, uniforms are all paid for. But there is an obligation to serve. So the counter-example is not exactly what Rick is thinking about. Is the education there valued more than many students at civilian universities?

I suspect so. But speaking from personal experience, the other costs are much higher.

Maybe the real lesson in today's reflection is that we should think more carefully about the expectations and demands we make of students. Maybe we are not asking enough.

 

Sunny