Following Your Dreams vs. Real Life Being Real Life and not a Dream

I have working in higher ed admin for 10 years, the last 3 of which were in coordinating 3 PhD programs in the Humanities. I feel you all on that crowded market.

There is an ethical aspect of not flooding the market with talent in areas where there is no need, however at times there are challenges in implementing the policy when it would have to be done by the same people whose jobs would become irrelevant or change significantly. For instance, Humanities PhDs cannot find jobs as professors. Grad programs are trying to control the number of students they admit to match the market, but the problem is that in some areas even if just one student is admitted to a program it is too many (for example, the Italian program I coordinated). Yet if that student is not admitted then a program is at risk and could close at that university. Nationally it would make sense to close more programs, but the faculty who run those programs would have a stake and are certainly not going to vote to lose their jobs.

Therein lies the challenge with colleges being the driving force behind preparing the future workforce -- of course it will be come all but Required to have a 4-year degree when they can position themselves for success. There needs to be more federal, state, and private support for developing skilled workers outside those venues to supplement college and not force it to be something for everyone, and give people who don't want or can't afford college another viable option.

That WND article tripped my alarms because it's very much like what Scott Walker has been trying to put in place in Wisconsin. Basically, treating university systems like businesses; no basic research, defunding "unpopular" fields, removing faculty from curriculum decisions, and so forth. I think he was stymied on some of this, but the goal is very much derived from the kind of thinking in the WND article you posted.

bekki: from my understanding, a big part of why there was less hiring of full time, tenure track professors was a simple money problem. The recession coupled with budget cutbacks forced a lot of universities to make those hard choices. There have been at least 2 hiring freezes in my 9 years at my current spot, and I believe they are going into a 3rd this next fiscal year.

As for training programs, there are several non-profit organizations that are trying to pick up the slack in various sectors.

Came across this in my Facebook feed, and it seems apropos to the topic.

Screw Finding Your Passion

It speaks to my "stop being so bloody ridiculous" frame of mind.

I just want to say I'm really loving this discussion. Pretty much everyone is in broad agreement, but the different perspectives bring the nuances of the topic to life.

nel e nel wrote:

bekki: from my understanding, a big part of why there was less hiring of full time, tenure track professors was a simple money problem. The recession coupled with budget cutbacks forced a lot of universities to make those hard choices. There have been at least 2 hiring freezes in my 9 years at my current spot, and I believe they are going into a 3rd this next fiscal year.

Uff da, I was pondering this thread last night, and I feel like this might come across a bit mansplainy, which is not at all my intent. Just relaying my personal experiences, and curious if you have seen anything similar to this.

nel e nel wrote:
nel e nel wrote:

bekki: from my understanding, a big part of why there was less hiring of full time, tenure track professors was a simple money problem. The recession coupled with budget cutbacks forced a lot of universities to make those hard choices. There have been at least 2 hiring freezes in my 9 years at my current spot, and I believe they are going into a 3rd this next fiscal year.

Uff da, I was pondering this thread last night, and I feel like this might come across a bit mansplainy, which is not at all my intent. Just relaying my personal experiences, and curious if you have seen anything similar to this.

I've actually seen a lot of this going on locally as there are many universities in my area that are all experiencing severe budget cuts and very likely hiring freezes as well. There have also been large tuition increases practically every year as well at the public universities. I don't really blame the academics for the lack of hiring, but I do very much blame politics. Yes, we've had a recession, but I also feel that our budget priorities are very much off track when what was a pretty fantastic university system becomes more and more strangled each year. And then we have politicians like Scott Walker in Wisconsin who is even doing worse things to his state.

It just frustrates me because I think it would be so valuable to us to have a thriving academic community with growing research and science and cultural innovations. But when it gets to the point when our universities are filled with low-paid adjuncts, it becomes more about survival than innovation.

Our culture of anti-intellectualism doesn't help matters either as our priorities are screwed up as a nation and not just on a local university level.

It's really difficult for people to follow their passions, explore their talents, and create and innovate when forced into survival mode. It's not impossible of course, but I'd really love to see a brilliant new renaissance era arise in my lifetime.

I'm a professor in higher ed, and here's my own perspective: sure, the crunch of 2008 wrecked the academic market that year and for a few afterwards, but there's less and less reason to now. What's happened in Iowa is further defunding of higher ed and education in general, with criticism coming from on high (namely, our governor) that a failing system shouldn't need more money. Even with tax surpluses these past few years, the excess has gone into tax cuts to business, not education. And there's less and less attention given to shared governance. Just ask the faculty and students at UIowa about the recent hire for university president, 98% or so of whom thought he was unqualified. No experience at all in higher ed admin, and he was hired at about a 20% higher salary than his predecessor at the end of her 8 year tenure.

At the University, there's a lot of attention paid to time-to-degree, and at the Ph.D. level that's always favored STEM, unfairly IMO. While it's a serious ethical issue not to flood the market with more Ph.D.'s than there are jobs, the unanswered question is just who will teach the huge numbers of undergrads in gen ed courses? Adjuncts are only part of the answer there. It's also still the case that the graduate college here and in many other places judge faculty by the placements of their Ph.D. students, while they pay lip service to alt-ac employment. And suggesting that a History Ph.D. should do a Ph.D. for the main purpose of an alt-ac job isn't, IMO, sustainable or practical. See Marc Bousquet on this. https://www.insidehighered.com/views...

That said, there is good work being done here and at a lot of other places. Many students are curious and want to learn. I see them, especially those who take their studies seriously, improving every year they are here studying. What happens after that, I'm afraid, is something I can't control. PS I'm in the humanities. When I teach Western Civ I and cover Athenian democracy, I really hope I'm driving home to them how important it is to be a good citizen by being knowledgeable, thoughtful, and responsible about how we contribute. That is in particular the contribution of all the humanities.

I would feel more confident about recommending people follow their dreams into higher education if the loans that resulted were less punitive to their future success.

I'm also more worried about the future of K-12 than higher ed, at least in the US. Everyone is focused on trying their magic bullets but I really think there are some actual answers we just refuse to accept on what will work in education. Too much money is involved to create clarity of purpose.

The lower rung is a hot mess and the upper rung is a money pit, so I don't see a lot of rosy dreams about education. Just a long hard fight on multiple fronts. I believe in and participate in that fight, but I would never sugar coat it to people entering (or dreaming of entering) the field.

Yeah. I keep worrying we're going to keep pushing the hard work up the ladder so that a college degree someday resembles what a high school degree used to be.

DSGamer wrote:

Yeah. I keep worrying we're going to keep pushing the hard work up the ladder so that a college degree someday resembles what a high school degree used to be.

My husband and I (he teaches physics at a CC) wonder the very same thing. Fewer and fewer students come prepared to do college level work.

concentric wrote:
DSGamer wrote:

Yeah. I keep worrying we're going to keep pushing the hard work up the ladder so that a college degree someday resembles what a high school degree used to be.

My husband and I (he teaches physics at a CC) wonder the very same thing. Fewer and fewer students come prepared to do college level work.

Right. So to what end do we make college free? Wouldn't it be better to have totally free, quality K-12?

You need to have "passion" to be good at your work without hating it, because it's going to take a lot of work. That could be a lot of things for many people, but it's equally NOT going to be some things for some people. I can work 100 hour weeks in the hospital without getting depressed. Apparently I really, honestly do like the work I got into. But it's got to be Anesthesia or some kind of pharmacologically interesting field. I did get depressed doing the same volume of work in Pedia - that would never have worked out. I hate sticking kids with needles.

Said the same thing to my cousin. HIs dad forced him into Engineering so he could finish with something "marketable." He hated it. Flunked everything despite himself. He gave it as good a shot as he had it in him. I knew he liked drawing so I suggested Architecture instead. Not to be an Architect, mind, but just so he could appease his father and be halfway to where he really needs to be. Heh. He finally had it after a few years, went hard core Fine Arts and did well enough to score a sketching gig afterwards. I keep telling him to make a comic, since that's his first inspiration, but apparently doing posters and logo design pays a whole lot more. Shrug. If it pays the bills, I guess.

DSGamer wrote:
concentric wrote:
DSGamer wrote:

Yeah. I keep worrying we're going to keep pushing the hard work up the ladder so that a college degree someday resembles what a high school degree used to be.

My husband and I (he teaches physics at a CC) wonder the very same thing. Fewer and fewer students come prepared to do college level work.

Right. So to what end do we make college free? Wouldn't it be better to have totally free, quality K-12?

I agree with the emphasis on quality. I wish I knew how to grasp what's going on K-12. Obviously there are huge differences from district to district. Locally, the schools in Iowa City have a good rep, but big surprise, it's a college town.

In other nearby areas, I've heard plenty of stories about HS teachers being proud that their students don't have homework, freeing them up for extracurriculars. Sports is big, of course, and show choir is also a thing around here. Plenty of HS teachers have given up on trying to control smart device usage (and most in higher ed don't know what to do about it either). I've also heard many stories about elementary school students having more homework than HS. That's all pretty anecdotal. But that doesn't fix the cost/funding issues in higher ed, which are all too real. Students have to pay too much, so no wonder they all come in saying they're pre-med. CC's could really use a lot more funding, since I agree there are too many students going after 4 year degrees.

And I really think that education in general has dropped far below entertainment and profit in terms of cultural priorities. Today we live in a world of distraction and lack of focus, it seems to me. So many students, especially the ones my husband teaches (since CC is open enrollment - an important part of its mission) have NO IDEA how much work it really takes to do well in a subject like physics. Some shape up, but there is always a decent amount of attrition. But there should be better opportunities for these students to make a decent living. I also agree with what Mike Rowe has to say - hard work is necessary for anyone to succeed.

Thanks for the reply bekki, I figured similar things were going on in other parts of the country. And thanks for your personal perspective, concentric. What you talked about lines up with a lot of what I've been reading and hearing, particularly the unique difficulties that humanities majors are having, compared to STEM majors.

And Duchess, I totally agree that a lot of the problems we have in education start much earlier in the pipeline. The achievement gap (or opportunity gap) is something we have been struggling with ever since I started at my current institution, which is 9 years now.

Part of it is our increased focus on standardized testing as a means of measuring academic success - not just the students but also the instructors - part of it is how school's funding is tied to property taxes. High school teachers feel that they have their hands tied teaching to standardized tests, the results of which have bearing on the standing of their employment. They aren't able to spend the time they'd like to really improve the critical thinking and problem solving skills that are necessary at the collegiate level, and also valued by the job market. The end result is you have higher anxiety in students who take literally hundreds of standardized tests by the time they graduate high school, teachers in constant fear of losing their jobs based on unrealistic metrics set by people who don't have a background in education, and frustration from university professors who feel they are spending more and more time doing remedial work to get incoming freshman up to speed.

While I think there are a lot of lessons that academia can learn from the business sector, there are issues when we try to address qualitative problems with quantitative solutions.

nel e nel wrote:

...there are issues when we try to address qualitative problems with quantitative solutions.

Ding ding ding!

Educations has a lot of problems, but I think that sums the largest. Addendum, those quantitative solutions are spawned by people that do not understand the problem being addressed, and do not understand numbers at all. They could not define "quantitative".

The result is a cloud of systemic, nuanced incentives that turn good teachers into sh*t teachers. Those incentives are far more insidious than "I fear for my job" or "teach to the test". At the rollout of the last assessment system I heard more than one of my previous peers independently come to the conclusion that they need to purposefully bomb every third year in order to get a raise. And they were correct! For two years there was a massive collusion between higher ed and highschools to pump out students with "college credit" from courses that weren't any better than a stack of dvd's, all in order to pump up numbers on both ends. That finally fizzled, not because anyone cared at all, but because the assessment algorithm mutated randomly.

From the students' perspectives, the only lesson that is clearly and consistently delivered across K-12 is "appearances trump everything". Screw understanding, motivation, curiosity, communication, organization, persistence, literacy, numeracy, expression, or compassion. Look like success. If the School Performance Score isn't up to 84.6 by May we're all f*cked.

Danjo Olivaw wrote:

From the students' perspectives, the only lesson that is clearly and consistently delivered across K-12 is "appearances trump everything". Screw understanding, motivation, curiosity, communication, organization, persistence, literacy, numeracy, expression, or compassion. Look like success. If the School Performance Score isn't up to 84.6 by May we're all f*cked.

And as you well know, on the teacher side you can only go to so many staff meetings where the principal is giving you pep talks about test prep before you want to tear out your hair or throw pens or something. It's like having two minds, one where you know what makes teaching good and learning valuable, and then the one which has to agree to all the horrible methodology they keep tossing at you because it's a district mandate.

Anecdotally... when I was an 8th grade science teacher (and how I arrived there is a long and slightly sad story which boils down to: because I can pass a test that says I'm qualified) I stepped in to take over a class where the teacher just stopped coming/caring (another slightly sad story). I'm a fairly well principled person and even I found myself teaching entirely to the state test they had to be prepped for near the end of the term. Due to the extremely weird circumstances surrounding me taking this class over there were decently frequent visits from the principal who thought that me teaching entirely to the test was the best decision I could make as a teacher and was full of nothing but praise for my direction. That left me cold.

To this day I feel like I served those kids poorly by taking that route. There was so much battle in just getting them to be organized, take notes, think logically, and not hurt themselves or others (more sad stories there) when I finally found (begged for, borrowed) materials for labs that actual class content was the least of my worries. All I had was a handful of excuses by the end, and no job offer from the obsequiously grateful principal who told me I was an objectively good teacher but that someone with 15 years of experience had applied for the same job so have a handshake and a glowing reference.

And they wonder why there is a 50% attrition rate for teachers entering the field.

I have many more stories from my teaching days, and I wish I could say this was the most frustrating one.

EDIT: And I was pretty sure if I heard one more boy say he wanted to be a sports star and one more girl say she wanted to be just like a Kardashian I was going to blow a fuse. 4 years of hearing "dreams" like that made me deeply sad about the nature of ambition. But then again, middle school. Maybe high school career aspirations are less shallow.

My mother is a librarian. That's her career. She trained in library sciences and has run the school library for decades. Ever since No Child Left Behind (I think that was the law that started this latest insanity) she has been forced in her "free time" to become an expert at administering tests and preparation tests. Something about her background working with computers in the library.

So she's talked to me a lot about just how insidious the testing has gotten. Even with regular updates from her, though, I'd never heard of intentionally failing a test. They should scrap that law entirely.

Following one's passion, or bliss, or true calling requires several elements, I think. I've tried to categorize them. These elements aren't distributed equally in American society.

Knowledge of possibilities. What does a paranormal musician do? Is that even a thing?

Access to opportunities. Is there a college that teaches paranormal music, or is it self-taught?

Resources and supports to pursue opportunities. Can I afford school or equipment, or to move to a location that's a hotbed of paranormal music?

Personal circumstances aligned toward or against pursuing an opportunity. Can I even escape my current situation, whether grinding poverty or a golden trap? Do I want to?

For the 45 minutes until someone blows logical holes in the side of this, I'm proud to have made a Big Theory with an acronym that makes a word(-ish).

H.P. Lovesauce wrote:

Following one's passion, or bliss, or true calling requires several elements, I think. I've tried to categorize them. These elements aren't distributed equally in American society.

Knowledge of possibilities. What does a paranormal musician do? Is that even a thing?

Access to opportunities. Is there a college that teaches paranormal music, or is it self-taught?

Resources and supports to pursue opportunities. Can I afford school or equipment, or to move to a location that's a hotbed of paranormal music?

Personal circumstances aligned toward or against pursuing an opportunity. Can I even escape my current situation, whether grinding poverty or a golden trap? Do I want to?

For the 45 minutes until someone blows logical holes in the side of this, I'm proud to have made a Big Theory with an acronym that makes a word(-ish).

Yeah, but you missed a trick. Your acronym should be KRAP, not KARP.

I'm currently student teaching in a senior high school (math) and there are definitely issues with many students not having the fundamentals they should know at their grade levels. There are several sophomores and juniors who still have trouble solving for y in an equation, even at honors level, and basic fractions are a disaster without the help of a calculator (and even then...)

It's not the students aren't capable because they are very capable when they put their minds to it, but they've been passed forward so many times in the earlier grade levels whether they knew the material or not that by the time they are in high school, they have many gaps, and unless those students are intrinsically motivated to come before or after school (or during lunch) for extra help, they continue to have those gaps that will eventually go with them to college.

Unfortunately, it's very difficult to catch them up during class time because there is a large amount of material that teachers are required to cover per the curriculum and so there aren't really extra days available to go slow even though many students really need it.

90 minute block scheduling doesn't seem to help matters either, but I think all the high schools in my area are using it. Yesterday, I was teaching factoring and they had to learn factoring through GCF, difference of squares, and sum or difference of cubes. Most of the class were conked out and overwhelmed by the time they got to cubes. People's attention spans just aren't normally so long even at the adult level, so I really empathized with them.

And that's not even getting into all the issues involving the standardized tests, so-called "reform" by the privatizers and other political matters, and all the many problems students have in their home lives that make it difficult for them to focus on their educations.

One thing that could be said about taking a riskier path is that unless you are in a highly in-demand profession, the likelihood is that work is going to suck. Even if you get a decent full-time job with apparent security and future investment savings, jobs can go away and in the U.S., some asshole will blow up the financial system every 15 years or so.

So you might as well take the sucky job that most facilitates your pursuit of your passion.

I think there is a false dichotomy in jobs either being your dream or not.

Like many things it is a balance of what you do and do not enjoy.

The whole "follow your dreams" concept really should govern a series of life choices and consequences.

Maybe you work some unenjoyable job but it gives you the flexibility to pursue art, writing, music, etc. Maybe you have a lucrative job you enjoy but you allocate your free time to reaching in some fashion. Maybe you focus full time on creative projects and scrape by on earnings from that (e.g. writing music while playing the occasional gig at the corner bar).

I imagine there will always be a disconnect between how certain skill sets are valued in the arena of jobs. The question should be are you content with the balance you can provide yourself for pursuing passions while having the fiscal wherewithal you want.

I think when it comes to a job, I'm either interested in a "find your passion" type job and would tend to enjoy the various challenges it brings *or* I'd just prefer a more mindless type of job that doesn't require much thinking or interaction with people and hence is relaxing to do. Then I would still have a lot of energy to do things I enjoy outside of work. I absolutely can't stand jobs that both bore me to death and yet still require me to think, and then I have no energy for anything and tons of stress on top of it all.

I have a lot of skillsets for things I just don't enjoy doing, so I have to be careful when pursuing work not to fall into the trap of getting a job doing something I hate simply because I'm really good at it. (And then end up having to do those things even more.)

While reading an education blog, I just saw a link to this article and it reminded me of some of our discussion here.

bekkilyn wrote:

While reading an education blog, I just saw a link to this article and it reminded me of some of our discussion here.

Any chance you could find another link? Even though I subscribe to the online WaPo, I can't read it.

I appreciate the K-12 teachers posting. I want to make it clear that I'm NOT blaming teachers - what you say supports what I suspected, that it's the focus on testing that affects things. And other cultural issues. To what extent are people's ambitions shaped by media? After all, this year we truly have a reality show presidential candidate. But yes, immaturity is a big part of why you hear the sort of thing you do from students. And that's to be expected, I guess. By the time they get to the end of high school, maybe they've moved from the sports star ambition to doctor, engineer, some sort of profession, even though they may not really know what those careers entail. But there are still many students who have good grounding in what steps to take next.

A book I found very insightful re. state school education was Paying for the Party. In a nutshell, it confirmed what I think a lot of us already supposed, that students without good family support/background in higher ed and careers suffer, and that public higher ed doesn't have sufficient "on-ramps" (the authors' phrase) to permit the degree of social mobility that many students aspire to. In particular, there aren't enough academic opportunities for many students to improve their chances in careers after college.

I'll be doing an independent study next term with a very focused young woman who plans to become a high school history teacher. We talked about what makes the transition from HS to college difficult, and her answer was that in her HS, she didn't find it necessary to study independently to earn good grades, and did not have enough experience writing to set her up well for liberal arts courses. She wants to teach HS in order to reach students like she had been. One of the independent study projects is developing a curriculum based on what we will study, and preparing a specific lesson based on it. I'm really excited to be able to work on this with her.

concentric wrote:
bekkilyn wrote:

While reading an education blog, I just saw a link to this article and it reminded me of some of our discussion here.

Any chance you could find another link? Even though I subscribe to the online WaPo, I can't read it.

That's odd. I don't subscribe to any news sites, but have no issues reading it. Most places were linking back to the Washington Post, but I did find another link: http://mmc-news.com/news-jeb-bush-ha...

Thanks! And ugh. Sure, if you earn a GPA of like 2.7 or below and major in psych, that's what may well happen. But many people do a lot better than that. Pandering.

bekkilyn wrote:

I'm currently student teaching in a senior high school (math) and there are definitely issues with many students not having the fundamentals they should know at their grade levels. There are several sophomores and juniors who still have trouble solving for y in an equation, even at honors level, and basic fractions are a disaster without the help of a calculator (and even then...)

It's not the students aren't capable because they are very capable when they put their minds to it, but they've been passed forward so many times in the earlier grade levels whether they knew the material or not that by the time they are in high school, they have many gaps, and unless those students are intrinsically motivated to come before or after school (or during lunch) for extra help, they continue to have those gaps that will eventually go with them to college.

Unfortunately, it's very difficult to catch them up during class time because there is a large amount of material that teachers are required to cover per the curriculum and so there aren't really extra days available to go slow even though many students really need it.

90 minute block scheduling doesn't seem to help matters either, but I think all the high schools in my area are using it. Yesterday, I was teaching factoring and they had to learn factoring through GCF, difference of squares, and sum or difference of cubes. Most of the class were conked out and overwhelmed by the time they got to cubes. People's attention spans just aren't normally so long even at the adult level, so I really empathized with them.

And that's not even getting into all the issues involving the standardized tests, so-called "reform" by the privatizers and other political matters, and all the many problems students have in their home lives that make it difficult for them to focus on their educations.

I just read this (don't ask...). Looks like you're in a similar situation as mine. I think anyone who cares about being a good teacher really would like to guide students to facilitate their own learning, but it's so hard once they're older. Honestly, since the rise of the internet, I think everyone's attention span is a fraction of what it used to be.