Dear Commons Community,

Brittany Bronson, an adjunct English instructor at UNLV and a waitress at a chain restaurant, has an op-ed piece in today’s New York Times, describing her dual identities.  Unlike some sad commentaries on the plight of adjunct faculty who struggle to make ends meet, Ms. Bronson finds benefits in being able to work as waitress as well as a professor.

“Indeed, for a young academic like myself, the job market is bleak. I’m pursuing advanced degrees and a career in the academy despite the lack of employment prospects, because my first and true love is learning. However, it will take earning a doctorate — and thus several more years of work — before I can earn a sustainable income in my chosen pursuit.

Living these two supposedly different lives, I’ve started to see their similarities. Whenever I’m trying to meet the needs of my more difficult guests (“Do you have any smaller forks?” “You don’t carry wheat bread? What kind of restaurant doesn’t carry wheat bread?”), I recite, along with my colleagues, the collective restaurant server mantra: “I need a real job.” The same thought gets passed among adjuncts in my department: “I need a real teaching position. I need to publish a book.”

She concludes:

“…not all my restaurant co-workers are college dropouts, and none are failures. Many have bachelor’s degrees; others have real estate licenses, freelancing projects or extraordinary musical and artistic abilities. Others are nontraditional students, having entered the work force before attending college and making the wise decision not to “find themselves” and come out with $40,000 in debt, at 4.6 percent interest. Most of them are parents who have bought homes, raised children and made financial investments off their modest incomes. They are some of the kindest, hardest-working people I know, and after three years alongside them, I find it difficult to tell my students to avoid being like them.

My perhaps naïve hope is that when I tell students I’m not only an academic, but a “survival” jobholder, I’ll make a dent in the artificial, inaccurate division society places between blue-collar work and “intelligent” work. We expect our teachers to teach us, not our servers, although in the current economy, these might be the same people.

If my students can imagine the possibility that choosing to work with their hands does not automatically exclude them from being people who critically examine the world around them, I will feel I’ve done something worthwhile, not only for those who will earn their degree, but for the majority who will not.”

What an inspiring outlook on life and people.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

College administrators have anxiously been awaiting the Obama administration’s new college ratings plan. They will have to wait a bit longer even though the USDOE released a “plan” yesterday that is more progress report than plan. As The Chronicle of Higher Education reports:

“The college-ratings plan that the Education Department is releasing today can best be described as incremental.

The plan, the product of more than a year of discussion and debate, is less a proposal than a progress report—an update on metrics the department is considering using in its system. It’s unlikely to assuage colleges’ concerns, but it’s unlikely to increase their anxiety, either.

Which measures might factor into the ratings? The list includes a number of expected metrics, like a college’s average net price, its students’ completion rates, and the percentage of its students receiving Pell Grants. It also includes labor-market outcomes and loan-repayment rates—measures that proved controversial during the protracted fight over the “gainful employment” rule.

But there’s a lot that the “framework,” as department officials are calling it, does not do. It doesn’t assign weights to each metric. Nor does it offer a plan for how similar institutions will be grouped.

It doesn’t say what format the ratings will take, and it doesn’t clarify whether the department will publish a single, composite rating, or a series of ratings.

Those gaps have left colleges “a little mystified,” said Sarah Flanagan, vice president for government relations and policy at the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities, which has opposed the ratings…

Publication of the much-anticipated draft comes almost three years after President Obama used his State of the Union address to put colleges “on notice,” stating that his administration would not continue to subsidize rising tuition. He announced his plan to rate colleges the following year, during a three-campus “college cost” bus tour through New York and Pennsylvania.

Since then, the administration has proceeded cautiously, holding a series of public meetings and forums to solicit feedback from experts and advocates on how to construct the ratings. Mr. Mitchell estimated that the department has talked to 9,000 individuals about the plan.

The president’s goals are threefold: to help colleges improve, to help students make better decisions about which institutions to attend, and to allow policy makers and the public to hold institutions accountable for their outcomes. Ultimately, the administration wants Congress to tie some portion of federal student aid to the ratings.

But Republicans, who will control both chambers of Congress come January, aren’t likely to go along. They argue that the federal government has no business rating colleges and have threatened to cut off funding for the effort.”

Given the USDOE intrusion into K-12 education during the Obama adminsitration, American higher education is not putting out the welcome mat out for this plan.

Tony