Recently, Laura McKenna, reporter for the Atlantic, wrote about her frustrations in trying to find scholarly articles without the access afforded to people with university affiliations. If you do not possess a college identification card, the hundreds of thousands of full-text articles from databases like JSTOR are either very expensive or inaccessible (McKenna shelled out…
Read More "Free the Research! Make Academic Journals Accessible to All"
I understand that young people often use the word "like" as a sort of placeholder; that is, a way to pause briefly before carrying on with their thoughts. While I know I am not the first person to rail against the overuse of "like," I still believe it is worth pointing out to students how…
Over the past several months, there has been much talk about how teachers make a heck of a lot of money. I read and listened to several of these reports as I waited for the water to boil for my ramen noodles. This week, the Chronicle of Higher Education released data showing the average salaries…
Read More "Rolling in the Big Bucks! (Just Kidding) A Snapshot of Academic Salaries"
Last week, the Modern Language Association (MLA) held their annual convention in Los Angeles, California. Some 8,000 professors, graduate students, and others in the humanities field were in attendance. They shared papers, listened to lectures, and awaited word from the organization's executive director, Rosemary Feal, about the state of the job market for those involved…
Read More "Well, Good Luck With That: No Jobs in Humanities"
Does more equal better? When it concerns students' essay scores on the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SATs), that may well be the case. Milo Beckman, a fourteen-year-old student at Stuyvesant High School in New York conducted a study among his peers after becoming frustrated with the scores he received on the exam. Beckman took the exam…
A new study, The Falling Time Cost of College: Evidence from Half a Century of Time Use Data by Philip S. Babcock and Mindy Marks has revealed the college students spend much less time studying today than they did in 1960-- a drop of 13 hours per week. From the study: Using multiple datasets from…
