Serendipity35

A new book, There Is Life After College by Jeff Selingo, is out this month. It looks at stories of 20-somethings and their experiences in and out of school and how those experiences shaped their success in the job market.

He looks at factors such as the skills that proved most helpful, in an attempt to discover why some students prosper, while others fail.  (There is a free preview of the book's introduction.)

Jeff Selingo previously wrote College (Un)bound and there is some crossover, such as the need for students to understand the jobs (especially ones that did not exist a few years ago) available to them and the need to be lifelong learners. 

There Is Life After College is about after college and the concerns about that time come not only from students but from parents. Parent are anxious about their college-educated child to successfully landing a good job after graduation and their own or the student's significant debt which (especially in an uncertain job market) may leave that child financially dependent on their parents for years to come. Both parties may well ask, "What did I pay all that money for?"

While Selingo's earlier book may have answered that question with thoughts about alternatives to the degree, such as MOOCs or competency-based degrees, this new book looks a lot at that Return on Investment (ROI).

Does where you go to college matter? Most of the data says it does. The better schools get more students to graduation on time and their name recognition value is real. My one son is in finance and for many of the Wall Street banks and firms he interviewed with they only wanted to look at Ivy League graduates. There is a nice interactive visualization tool from Jon Boeckenstedt that shows graduation rates by the selectivity of the school. The ability of the nation's oldest and wealthiest colleges to graduate white men who end up wealthy is real. Not that less selective schools mean no chance of success, but it may come with more effort required. But the really surprising take on this kind of data to me was that it's not that you should choose a college because of its graduation rate, but that the college will select you based on your propensity to graduate.

For the book, Selingo conducted a survey of young adults who had at least some college experience and were born between 1988 and 1991, giving them some time to start a career in their mid-twenties. Based on that survey, they divided the transition from adolescence into adulthood by new college graduates into three groups: Sprinters, Wanderers, or Stragglers. This charts appears in his newsletter. 



The full results of the survey are in the book, but one result was that two-thirds of new college graduates fail to find meaningful employment in the years after they leave school. They either drift from job to job, live with their parents or work part-time gigs that don’t require a college degree. 

Of course, there IS life after college, but the book taps a trend we see of more difficult and longer transitions to post-college life and looks to suggest ways that graduates can market themselves. He suggests that process to plan for a young professional starts at the end of high school through college graduation. Seems like this book would make a good high school graduation gift.

 

How would a university without majors, lectures, and traditional classrooms look and operate? Those are questions that Christine Ortiz will be dealing with the next few years after she leaves her jobs as Professor of  Materials Science and Engineering and Dean of Graduate Education at MIT. She wants to start a nonprofit university that will be radically different from the university we know now.

In a recent interview with chronicle.com, she discussed some of her early ideas.

At its core, it will be project-based learning with longer rather than shorter-term projects. She sees it as closer to the graduate-education model, though it is for undergraduate study.

It will be virtually online, but there will be a physical campus and buildings. rather than "classrooms," there will be large, open spaces and big centralized laboratories where no one really has their own individual laboratory - an "integrated giant laboratory."

Taking inspiration from the MOOC, the traditional lecture is chunked into many smaller (5-10 minutes) learning objects.

The academic structure is transdisciplinary without departments. 

She sees tenure as a mismatch for this type of university and wants to investigate alternative models, She also sees many talented doctoral students and postdocs that are unable to secure jobs in academia as a pool of potential faculty.

Ortiz mentions that this radical approach has been talked about before. She references a former MIT president, Charles M. Vest, who spoke more than a decade ago about the emergence of the "metacurriculum." This would be a virtually open metacurriculum that would be emerging and some will say has already has begun .

Call it Education 2.0 or a way to address The Disconnected. It is an evolution that Ortiz is hoping to get into early. 

Udacity, a provider of MOOCs, announced this month their Nanodegree Plus which guarantees its graduates will land a job in their field within six months of completing the program, or get their money back.

As their website describes it: "Empowering yourself through learning, acquiring critical skills, pursuing career advancement. These are life-changing steps to undertake. They require commitment, hard work, and a willingness to take risks. We recognize this, and want you to know we support you every step of the way, from enrollment to getting hired. Enroll in Nanodegree Plus, and we guarantee you’ll get hired within 6 months of graduating, or we’ll refund 100% of your tuition. That’s the kind of confidence we have in you."

Naturally, such an offer requires Terms and Conditions.  

For now, students need to enroll in Udacity programs that teach the most marketable skills. The 4 offered are machine-learning engineer, Android developer, iOS developer, and senior web developer. Students must complete the courses. That seems obvious. but that has always been a point of contention for MOOCs since the majority of students in them (Udacity has four million students) do not complete all the coursework. Of course, most learners in MOOCs do not intend to finish or use the course as a path to credits or a degree. In the Nanodegree Plus, students pay an extra monthly fee.

Udacity says that it will take 6-8 months of working 10 hours a week to complete a program.

The jobs graduates get have no salary benchmarks, but Sebastian Thrun, chief executive of Udacity, said in an interview that the jobs they get will be "real" jobs and "not jobs as a Starbucks barista."

Thrun has moved Udacity away from it earlier partnerships with universities and into partnerships with companies.  

The idea of guarantees like Udacity and other for-profits is seen as a market solution, a gimmick and not feasible depending on the reviewer. Certainly, colleges are unlikely to return tuition to graduates who don't find jobs in the major, even though Thrun said he "would recommend every college president to think about this."

Wednesday, April 5, 2006 -- 8 am - 2:30 pm at NJIT, Newark, NJ

A one-day seminar designed for non-technical professionals that will give you a broad range of information about podcasts, blogs and wikis. Experts from each field will present information to enhance your understanding and knowledge of these cutting edge marketing tools. The day will include three sessions:

New Technologies in Communications: Podcasting
Podcasts, digital audio programs delivered through Internet-related technologies, can enable communications professionals to reach narrowly-targeted audiences more effectively than mass marketing techniques.

• Defining podcasts: What are they? Types of Podcasts.
• Ways that Podcasts are being used in business
• Downloading and listening to podcasts using iTunes, subscribing to podcasts, devices for viewing podcasts.
• Using Podcasts to promote products and services
• Software and hardware that works well for podcasting
• The technical steps involved in creating a podcast
• Sources of music that won't cause licensing issues (podcast-friendly music)
• Some guidelines for professional-sounding podcasts

Corporate and Organizational Weblogging: From First Steps to Communities of Practice
Organizational and Corporate Blogs are transforming the way in which groups communicate-- both within companies/organizations and to the rest of the world. This seminar will bring the participants up to full speed on the world of work-related weblogging and will enable participates to transfer knowledge and engage in informed thinking about how blogs might operate within their own organization. With a focus on using weblogs to encourage (and house, in some cases) Communities of Practice (CoPs), the workshop will engage participants in some real-life problem-based thinking about the technical, ethical, and social aspects of work weblogging, with examples and vignettes from real life weblogging situations.

Wikis At Work
Wikis are often described as "collaborative web sites" and are being used for project management, knowledge sharing and proposal writing. The benefits of this collaborative approach include reducing daily phone calls, e-mails and meeting time as well as encouraging collaboration. Internet research firm, the Gartner Group, predicts that Wikis will become mainstream collaboration tools in at least 50% of companies by 2009. Peter Thoeny, creator of TWiki, a leading Wiki program, says at least 20,000 downloads of his software are being used by businesses. Walt Disney, SAP, Adobe, Nokia, Novell and Motorola are among the corporations using Wikis for collaboration. Participants will learn how Wikis are being used and how to maximize collaboration. A special emphasis will be given to open source and commercial Wiki products, from server installation, to support and security considerations for your intellectual property.

Fee: $300 - your participation will award you Continuing Education Units (CEUs)
and includes breakfast and lunch. Register Now!

Free parking for this event is available on campus in the NJIT secured parking deck.
Directions to campus, parking and maps

Payment is expected at the time of registration. Credit cards are accepted.
Refund policy: 100% refund up to 5 days prior to the day of the event. No refund is given within 5 days of the event.

Email: techexpress@dl1.njit.edu