Dr. Julie-Ann McFann over at Around the Academy wrote a beautiful post about the new GI Bill issue. She writes from the perspective of not only the daughter-in-law of a WWII veteran who benefited greatly from the GI Bill, but also as an educator who has taught students that enlisted in the military because it was the most realistic shot any of them had at paying for a college education. She’s as cranky as I am about the whole thing.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

I think we (and by ‘we’ I mean Americans) used to be a little prone to taking the commuting portion of our college education for granted. That is no longer the case. There’s an article in the NY Times about the rising cost of commuting coinciding with the rising number of college students enrolling in online courses.

Taking some or all classes online, or earning an online degree is looking better and better to impoverished college students. It saves money and the planet.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

Author’s note: In this post we get to watch Alexa (that is me) attempt to maintain some degree of composure, dignity and professional distance with regards to the subject matter: The newest version of the GI Bill. Not to ruin the ending, but I fail miserably.

Attempt #1
I had a hard damn time writing this post—with every bit of reading I did to research it, I was torn between (a) moving to Canada and performing lewd gestures in GW’s general direction before crossing the border, or (b) getting out my vast amounts of anger and frustration by writing all sorts of politically incorrect and horribly unprofessional (and not the slightest bit educational) rantings and expletives regarding what was previously thought to be a medical impossibility, but that the Bush Administration has plainly been able to achieve. It involves heads and asses and walking and talking and I will refrain from painting the full picture here.

Attempt #2
To sum up quickly and professionally: one tiny reward the U.S. government offers its men and women who have fought for their country is the promise of some financial help with their college education. Back in the day, the GI Bill was actually pretty helpful. These days, the amount of money the government is willing to fork out for the higher education of those who served is pathetic when compared to the phenomenal pile of cash it was more than willing to spend on skipping off to war (la la la). Wow. I did not plan that last paragraph—it just came out. I may actually be incapable of writing about this while maintaining some level of detachment.

Attempt #3
Clearly, I must recuse myself from writing further about this issue. I can’t even get through one or two lines of polite explanation regarding my stance on the subject without falling face-first off the high road of distanced professionalism and into a huge, steaming pile of vehemently inappropriate vulgarities. I loathe any government that would spend vast quantities of money to send its people off to war and then wrap the promised rewards with infuriating miles of red tape that lead to not nearly enough educational compensation when all is said and done. That just came out, too!

Attempt #4
I give up. I’m too pissed to write this. The GI Bill was great and then it sucked and now, thanks to Senator James Webb (D-Va.) and Senate Bill 22, it’s getting closer to being okay again (we hope). You’ll have to read about it yourself because clearly I’m not fit to tell you about it:

Senate Passes Expanded GI Bill Despite Bush, McCain Opposition
What the GIs Deserve
Misinformation Clouds the New GI Bill
Best You Can Be Without a Degree
Mr. Bush and the GI Bill
Obama, McCain Tussle Over Veterans Issues
Gauging the New GI Bill
New GI Bill Might Finally Deliver Promise of Paid College for Vets
History is Made: New GI Bill Signed into Law

Posted by Alexa Harrington

Does anyone have summer jobs any more, or do the learning opportunities, résumé-building bullet points, key letters of recommendation, and invaluable experience of the summer internship far outweigh table-waiting wages? Summer’s half over; if you’re in the midst of your own personal interning adventure, here are some beneficial words of wisdom to assist you in milking your internship for all it’s worth:

Top 10 Tips for Interns
Tips to Make the Most of Summer Internships
Summer Internships—Making the Most
Internships Are More Important Than Ever
Inside an Ad Agency Summer Internship

And if this summer’s internship wasn’t all you had hoped it would be, you can start dreaming immediately of landing one of the most coveted internships next summer.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

And now here’s some good news (and some super cheerful flower pictures) to balance out the bad news of the previous post (and my constant ranting about the SAT). The San Francisco Chronicle had a happy story about Carolyn Barnes, a young woman who grew up with way more reality to deal with than any kid should. (The complicated childhood isn’t the happy part). After high school she attended Virginia Tech on a full scholarship, graduated in three years at the top of her class, and is now twenty years old and about to begin her five-year fellowship at the University of Michigan. (This is pretty happy, but it gets better).

All of that would be good and wonderful enough. But in addition to using her brain to move herself in a happier direction, she’s planning on using her educational acquisitions (that full noggin of hers) to help ‘empower the poor.’ She’ll be working toward her doctorate in political science and public policy when she starts at the Univ. of Michigan, and wants to use her understanding of the subject matter — on both a personal and an intellectual level—to ‘become an expert on social welfare policy.’ See? Good and happy news. Someone with a kind soul who is using her powers to help her fellow humans.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

The bad news is this story about tenured faculty positions being slowly made extinct. Not a shocking bit of info as it’s been going on for quite some time, but distressing nonetheless. Colleges and universities have been steadily decreasing their tenured-professor numbers for the past few decades, all in the name of budget cuts, saving money, and lots of other super important reasons that have nothing whatsoever to do with the pursuit of knowledge.

Back in the day, if you were teaching at a college or a university it was pretty much a given that you were a professor and that at some point in your career you would walk through the golden gates of tenure and into the light of academic freedom. Now, sadly, landing a full-time, long-term teaching position at a college or a university is difficult enough; actually achieving tenured faculty status is an incredibly big deal. Full professors are like the rock stars of academia.

If one were to be all Pollyanna-ish and find the silver lining, one might point out that having a higher population of non-tenured professors on campus would mean less publish-or-perish stress and politics, which would leave more time and energy to focus on the students. It would also mean less research, less article writing, and less freedom to say, think and teach whatever a tenured professor might want. Focusing on the students is great; less deep thinking and fewer new questions raised and answered isn’t.

To make everything black-and-white and to oversimplify to a ridiculous extent, institutions of higher learning are here for two reasons: the education of the students, and for the pursuit of lots of new, in-depth knowledge. Spending an entire career pondering, questioning and answering one piece of the universe is how mankind figures s**t out.

A university is the environment where that questioning, researching and thinking can occur. If faculty are increasingly hired only as part-time instructors or are given two-year contracts, and are only lecturing and not writing or conducting some form of research, then colleges and universities will exist only for teaching and turning a profit. No more higher thought. No more academic freedom.

Further Reading:

The Evolving (Eroding?) Faculty Job
‘The Academics’ Handbook’
‘The Last Professors’

Posted by Alexa Harrington

I love school; everyone who knows me can tell you how pissed I am that being a professional student isn’t a marketable skill. I stretched out my college career for as long as possible, and only stopped when I looked around and saw what my perfectionist tendencies and my exemplary GPA were doing to my family (it turns out it’s not possible, for me, anyway, to be a straight-A student and a good mother and wife).

As much as I adore school and wish it to be the answer to all professional and career-related bumps, quandaries and questions, I must say that I agree with Penelope Trunk’s post: Seven Reasons Why Graduate School Is Outdated. I do think that getting a graduate degree is necessary for some individuals and for the pursuit of some professions. But I also understand that the professional world is changing, the cost of higher education is rising, and it’s not a small thing to spend tens of thousands of dollars to get a degree you may not necessarily need or ever really use.

People don’t stay in the same career for fifty years like our grandparents did. There’s a lot of motion in the workplace and along the career path. Everything looks to be in a pretty constant state of flux, and the people who seem to be adapting the best are the ones who are capable of learning as they go and switching lanes mid-stride.

Getting a huge dose of education at the beginning of the journey and then staying the course throughout the length of one’s career trajectory is fine if you actually stay in that particular field of interest and skill. But what if the subject matter that most interests you when you’re 22 isn’t what you want to continue working in when you’re 35?

I don’t think graduate school is outdated in all areas; I’d say it’s fairly necessary in several fields. I do agree with Trunk’s point that one should not use graduate school as a way to discover what one wants to be when one grows up, and one should perhaps rethink the idea of getting an incredibly expensive degree in an area one sort of thinks maybe they might want to earn a living at some day.

I’m not telling people to decrease their educational goals and aspirations, and I’m not trying to put undue amounts of pressure on anyone currently trying to decide what they want to be when they grow up. I’m just pointing out that Ms. Penelope Trunk made some excellent points regarding the possibly outdated graduate degree. I was in such disbelief that I actually agreed with what she was saying (being super pro-education) that I felt it was necessary to bring attention to her line of reasoning.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

I cannot believe humans didn’t come up with this until now: avoiding the tyranny of the textbook-publisher racket by renting textbooks. (Author’s note: It’s entirely possible this rental option was around a few years ago when I was in school, and I was just too snobby to even allow the idea to enter my consciousness.)

It may not be feasible to rent all of your books every term; lab books tend to actually be written in, and some texts will be kept forever as reference books. But if you could rent just a few, you’d still be saving a fat wad of cash and would be helping to limit the power of the iron-fisted, textbook-publishing regime that rules the land of academia.

According to Alan Bradford over at Geek Stew (who alerted his fellow humans to this book-rental genius-ness), Chegg.com also plants a tree for every book rented, which means you’ll be saving the bacon of trees on several levels.

Posted by Alexa Harrington