THAT TECH JOB

 

Want a Job in Silicon Valley After Yale? Good Luck With That
Yale's position is especially surprising. U.S. News & World Report ranks the university at No. 3, behind Princeton and Harvard, and it is one of the nation's most selective schools, admitting only 6.3 percent of its applicants last year. The Ivy League school has a $23.9 billion endowment, second only to Harvard's. Yet, starting next school year, the college will use archrival Harvard's famed introductory computer science course, CS50, because it doesn't have an equivalent course of its own. Though some Yale students view the move as humiliating, the computer science department considers it an innovative partnership. Since 2007, Yale's computer science department has consistently tied for 20th in U.S. News & World Report's ranking of computer science Ph.D. programs. For the past 10 years, Yale has never risen above 40th among recipients of U.S. National Science Foundation money for computer science research.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-03-06/want-a-job-in-silicon-valley-after-yale-good-luck-with-that

Ranking of CS Departments based on the Number of Papers in Theoretical Computer Science
http://projects.csail.mit.edu/dnd/ranking/
http://from-a-to-remzi.blogspot.com/2013/05/introducing-remzis-index-of-prolific.html
http://cs.brown.edu/people/alexpap/faculty_dataset.html
We feel there is a lack of transparency and well-defined measures in the methods used by U.S. News to rank CS departments in theoretical computer science (and other similar rankings). Over the past several months we have developed a ranking based on a hard, measurable method for the top 50 U.S. universities. To make this possible, we gathered information about universities from various resources as described below.

How Technology Is Destroying Jobs

Rapid technological change has been destroying jobs faster than it is creating them, contributing to the stagnation of median income and the growth of inequality in the United States. Technological progress is eliminating the need for many types of jobs and leaving the typical worker worse off than before. Median income is failing to rise even as the gross domestic product soars. The same technologies making many jobs safer, easier, and more productive were also reducing the demand for many types of human workers. MIT academics foresee dismal prospects for many types of jobs as these powerful new technologies are increasingly adopted not only in manufacturing, clerical, and retail work but in professions such as law, financial services, education, and medicine. We need new social policies to handle this (longer periods of education and apprenticeship, more leisure time, people paid not to work, for example).

2013 Unemployment among recent college grads who majored in information systems is substantially above average for all college grads. HardTimes.2013 Georgetown

Technology is Destroying Jobs
- IBM Lays Off Thousands
Marriot is laying off information systems types at their headquarters in Bethesda, MD. They will outsource the function, so employment should increase in the firms that pick up the business, though not necessarily in the USA.

The Technology Age is taking away jobs and what to do about it. Ted Talk

 

THAT TEACHING JOB

University Inc. Campus Commercialization and The CEO Salary
The highest-paid person in American academic life, according to The Chronicle, was Maurice Samuels, who received $35.1 million, including a bonus of $14.5 million for reaching investment goals, as senior vice president of the Harvard Management Company, which manages Harvard University's $22.6 billion endowment.

Enough’s Enough Contract teaching at a Canadian University

So what makes a mild-mannered Physics instructor turn into a seething rebel? The blunt answer is that I, along with many of my colleagues in Higher Education in Canada, the U.S., the U.K. and Australia are being shamelessly exploited by our employers. We do not have permanent jobs, we have to eke out an existence by patching together many temporary contracts to try and earn enough to survive on.
http://www.cbc.ca/thecurrent/episode/2014/01/27/the-income-gap-between-tenure-faculty-adjunct-contract-professors-in-canadian-universities/

ARE MFAS WORTH IT?
WE SPOKE WITH DOZENS OF MFA GRADS TO ANSWER THAT TRICKY, PERENNIAL QUESTION. HERE'S WHAT THEY HAD TO SAY.
- The AWP reports that 20,000 creative writing MFA applications were sent out this past school year. The Iowa Writers' Workshop—the U.S.'s original "MFA program," founded in 1936—received 1,382 of those applications: a 9% uptick from last year's 1,267.  So why are the numbers of (mostly creative writing) MFA programs and applicants growing?

 

The Academy’s Dirty Secret An astonishingly small number of elite universities produce an overwhelming number of America’s professors.
http://www.slate.com/articles/life/education/2015/02/university_hiring_if_you_didn_t_get_your_ph_d_at_an_elite_university_good.single.html

Both Clauset’s and Oprisko’s research suggests most universities are not very successful at generating professors, and most people only get doctorates because they intend to go into academia. Should these lower-prestige institutions even bother granting Ph.D.s at all? Clauset’s findings suggest that upward career mobility in the world of professors is mostly a myth. Yes, being a professor isn’t simply about making it to the top of the heap. But imagine if you had to start your chosen profession knowing that unless you were among a select few, you might never land a job.

he United States prides itself on offering broad access to higher education, and thanks to merit-based admissions, ample financial aid, and emphasis on diverse student bodies, our country can claim some success in realizing this ideal. The situation for aspiring professors is far grimmer. Aaron Clauset, a co-author of this article, is the lead author of a study published in Science Advances that scrutinized more than 16,000 faculty members in the fields of business, computer science, and history at 242 schools. He and his colleagues found, as the paper puts it, a “steeply hierarchical structure that reflects profound social inequality.” The data revealed that just a quarter of all universities account for 71 to 86 percent of all tenure-track faculty in the U.S. and Canada in these three fields. Just 18 elite universities produce half of all computer science professors, 16 schools produce half of all business professors, and eight schools account for half of all history professors.

The elite schools are producing so many job-seekers on the faculty market that they can’t hire them all themselves, so the vast majority end up at less elite schools. That means that even if you manage to be admitted to a Ph.D. program at a prestigious university, the chances are slim that you’ll stay at that university, or even a similar university, when it’s time to get a faculty job. In fact, after graduating with Ph.D.s, only about 10 percent of faculty move “up” the academic prestige hierarchy as defined by the Science Advances study (with “prestige” being determined by the university’s ability to place faculty at the widest variety of other institutions). Most faculty instead slide 25 percent down the scale. Female graduates of elite institutions tend to slip 15 percent further down the academic hierarchy than do men from the same institutions, evidence of gender bias to go along with the bias toward the top schools.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9095589

Just Look at the Data, if You Can Find Any 2013

Manage Your Career: We need more openness about the job placements of Ph.D.'s. Contingent instructors are now 76 percent of the academic labor force, earning about $2,700 per course, on average, without job security, benefits, academic freedom, or any say in institutional governance. Prospective graduate students should be skeptical about what programs—even reputedly top ones—say about their placement rates. Graduate-school enrollments soar during recessions.

THAT LAW DEGREE

 

 

2013 “You Can Do Anything With a Law Degree”  That’s what everyone says. Turns out everyone’s wrong. This boring reality conflicts with expectations.

LAW GRADUATE EMPLOYMENT DATA 
2013, 11.2 percent of law school graduates were still unemployed nine months after graduation. If you really could do anything with a law degree, then those unemployed graduates would probably be doing something. Meanwhile, the national unemployment rate for recent college graduates was 10.9 percent. So, compared with other recent students, law school grads appear to have a leg down on the competition. The average debt: $122,158 for private school graduates and $84,600 for public school graduates. And that’s just the cost of law school—those figures don’t include undergraduate loans or credit card debt.

Get Engineering Degree, Earn Big Bucks

If the potential to make money is the biggest determinant of what you choose to study in college, think hard about an engineering discipline -- specifically oil. That's because the major with the greatest earnings potential, for both bachelor's degree and graduate degree holders is petroleum engineering, according to a report on NPR.org's Planet Money. Citing data compiled by Georgetown University's Center on Education and the Workforce , the report said median earnings -- half are above and half are below -- for petroleum engineers is $120,000 annually, whether they have a bachelor's degree or higher.

 

DOES THE WORLD NEED MORE DJ'S OR MORE DOCTORS?

 

2013 A popular DJ can easily earn $100,000 for a single night's work.

The upper echelon of DJs can earn between $500,000 and $1 million. Not only do they get paid to do live shows, but DJs also make fortunes from merchandise sales, licensing, music sales and endorsements. In other words, DJs have become the new rockstar. And just like their Rock'n'roll counterparts, DJs now have private jets, mansions, groupies and celebrity boy or girlfriends…

September 7, 2008 Unboxed When Academia Puts Profit Ahead of Wonder

[... University “tech transfer” offices have boomed from a couple dozen before the law’s passage to nearly 300 today. University patents have leapt a hundredfold. Professors are stepping away from the lab and lecture hall to navigate the thicket of venture capital, business regulations and commercial competition.

None of these are necessarily negative outcomes. But more than a quarter-century after President Jimmy Carter signed it into law, the Bayh-Dole Act, sponsored by the former Senators Birch Bayh, Democrat of Indiana, and Robert Dole, Republican of Kansas, is under increasing scrutiny by swelling ranks of critics. The primary concern is that its original intent — to infuse the American marketplace with the fruits of academic innovation — has also distorted the fundamental mission of universities. ...]