college and underemployment

The Strada Education Foundation released last week a major report, “Talent Disrupted,” on college graduates and underemployment. Trumpeted by the Wall Street Journal as demonstrating the importance of majors and internships, the large-dataset study claims to show that majoring in useful things like health sciences and quantitative-heavy subjects, along with having an internship, are the ways to avoid underemployment after college.

asa panel – the future of democracy

ASA 2023 has been a good meeting (thus far at least)! A well-attended session on the future of democracy featured Melissa Murray and Louise Seamster (ably moderated by Scatterplot’s own Dan Hirschmann). The conversation was great, and I learned quite a bit from both of the scholars. Recent court decisions by SCOTUS and the lower courts really do threaten democratic representation, and the talks explained just how these decisions are at once dangerous and ungrounded. Similar for other institutional questions, e.g., egregious gerrymandering.

That said, the panel raised a couple of issues I thought I’d raise here (after the break)….

guest post: why you should attend asa (yes, you)

The following was written by my colleague Ryan Calder to our JHU graduate students; I offered to post it as a guest post because I think the ideas are helpful to students elsewhere too, though some remain specific to JHU or Baltimore.

Dear JHU Sociology Grad Students,

ASA submissions are due soon:

American Sociological Association(ASA)

Submissions due: February 22, 2023 (extended abstract of 3–5 pages required; may submit full paper of 15–35 pages if you like)

Conference: August 17–21, 2023 in Philadelphia

Whether you are in your first year or nth year of grad school, I strongly encourage you to attend. Looking back, I wish I had attended every year of grad school.

REASONS TO ATTEND:

1. DEADLINES HELP. Real deadlines mean productivity. If your proposal is accepted, you’ll churn out a paper draft.
2. SAVE TIME. It’s often easier and more memorable to attend panels presenting scholars/topics that interest you than to locate the relevant reading yourself and find time to do it. You’ll get a quick sense of the latest scholarship on a topic and how experts discuss it.
3. LOWER STAKES THAN YOU THINK. There’s a very good chance you’ll be placed in a roundtable. This is a good outcome: a low-anxiety chance to share your research and, depending on the roundtable’s format, maybe to get feedback. If you’re placed on a panel, lovely. Either way, you should prepare and be professional, but you shouldn’t think of it as a massively high-stakes event. Most ASA panels don’t get too many people in the audience: three or four is pretty common.
4. MEET PEOPLE. ASA is the best time to set up meetings with scholars at other schools whose work interests you. Nobody thinks it’s weird to hear from an unknown person who wants to meet at ASA; that’s what ASA is for. In early July, write to at least three or four people who will attend ASA and ask to meet.
5. Don’t wait until you’re on the job market to do this. I wish I’d done it every year. The reason: Network effects and the strength of weak ties. If you meet Scholar A, who has many connections, that person will remember you as “that grad student at Johns Hopkins who studies X”—the racialization of lupus, for example. Then, anytime Scholar A hears someone mention something connected to your topic—lupus, the racialization of diseases and diagnosis, etc.—Scholar A will mention you in passing to Scholars B, C, and D. Who in turn may each mention you to another scholar or two, or who may look you up. Multiply this by every year of grad school and you have a network of people who associate particular topics with you. You’ve become a subject-matter expert.
6. LEARN ABOUT SECTIONS. Attend business meetings for the sections that interest you. Too few grad students do this. (For most of grad school, I didn’t know what section business meetings were.) Because few grad students attend, many sections are constantly hunting for more grad students to volunteer for section committees. Being on committees is a great way to meet people in your subfields of interest and learn about the latest research there. It will also give you a sense of ownership in the section, at relatively little cost of time and energy. Within a couple of years, you will be a familiar name and face in the section. As a post-doc or prof, you can continue to build your commitments to the section.
7. SINGLE… AND READY TO MINGLE. I know of more than one couple that first locked eyes at ASA. Just sayin’.
8. SUPPORT YOUR JHU COLLEAGUES. Attend their talks! Show up at business meetings when they win awards!

WHY YOUR REASONS NOT TO ATTEND ARE B.S.:

1. “ASA ISN’T MY KIND OF SOCIOLOGY.” You’d be surprised. Pretty much every faculty member in US sociology departments goes to ASA at least sometimes. Moreover, one of the most popular activities at ASA is to find kindred spirits and kvetch with them about the rest of ASA.
2. IT’S EXPENSIVE AND TIME-CONSUMING. Uh… it’s in Philly this year. And our department provides some conference funding. Share a hotel room or an AirBnb. You can even make it a day trip from Baltimore and not stay overnight. You don’t have to attend every day of the conference.
3. I’M SCARED TO PRESENT MY WORK. Again, the stakes are lower than you think. If you’re trembling with trepidation, remember that no one really cares what you have to say—unless you get placed on a rock-star panel, in which case you’ve hit the lottery, so be happy. Most importantly, it’s only by presenting that you’ll learn to present.
4. “I’LL GO NEXT YEAR” / “I’LL GO WHEN I’M ON THE JOB MARKET.” See Reason to Attend #3(a) above.
5. MY RESEARCH ISN’T READY YET. See Reasons to Attend #1 and #4 above.
6. “I’D RATHER DRINK LIGHTER FLUID THAN ‘NETWORK.’” Yeah, I understand. This is what kept me away from ASA for too many years in grad school. But it’s only “networking” if you think of it as the shallow and instrumental task of unctuously making faux friends. The image of “networking” I had in my head as an early-stage grad student was of walking up to someone illustrious at a reception and giving a sales pitch for my own relevance on this planet, only to be elbowed aside by some eager beaver and forgotten. What, I wondered, was the point of debasing myself like that? But the truth of making connections at conferences is sitting down, often by appointment, to explore your genuine interest in the work of others, talk about your current projects, ruminate about future ones, and work through ideas together. Isn’t that’s the whole point of academia? You’re not in it for the money, after all. You’ll discover that most sociologists are generous, curious listeners and caring humans: more so, on average, than academics in nearly any other discipline I can think of.

defending democracy: institutions and principles

In the leadup to the anniversary of last year’s January 6 insurrection, a couple of Tweets combine into some interesting questions about the relationship between support for democracy in theory; support for extant institutions of “democratic” governance; and frank policy failures. How should scholars support democracy and to what extent?

on leaving unc

Last week was my last week at UNC.

I never thought I would leave; I’ve loved my 20 years on the UNC faculty. I was hugely fortunate to be hired at UNC directly out of graduate school, and I’ve stayed since. I’ve had fantastic students (undergraduate and graduate), amazing colleagues, and great opportunities to learn and grow. Despite the seemingly never-ending string of crises UNC keeps facing, particularly since some big changes around 2010 (more on that below), it’s a wonderful, truly mission-driven, important place, and I’m proud to have been part of it.

which lessons learned?

As I’m sure everyone knows, after an ambitious plan to open the campus for in-person instruction one week earlier than normal, we at UNC-Chapel Hill had to reverse course only a little more than week in, moving nearly all classes online and sending most students home. This post is my attempt to draw lessons from this very demoralizing experience.

on decolonizing sociological theory – a reply to perrin

This is a guest post by Jose Itzigsohn, written in response to my prior post .

Erin McDonnell organized a wonderful panel on Rethinking Sociological Theory and Andrew Perrin published in Scatterplot a thoughtful response to the panel that included a critique of my arguments. I asked Prof. Perrin whether Scatterplot would publish my response and he readily agreed. I thank him and welcome the opportunity to elaborate on the call to decolonize sociological theory.

decolonizing classical theory: some appreciatively skeptical thoughts

Yesterday’s panel on teaching classical social theory was fantastic. Erin McDonnell did a great job organizing and facilitating, and the four panelists — Greta Krippner, Jose Itzigsohn, Zine Magubane, and Jocelyn Viterna — offered really thoughtful, measured, and inspiring ideas. The session was remarkably well-attended, particularly for summer: I think around 100 people showed up. Awesome!

I want to raise a few thoughts about what I hope will be ongoing discussions and reforms in this vein.

galloway and the perpetually-to-come disruption

What is transmitted in higher learning?… Limiting ourselves to a narrowly functionalist point of view, an organized stock of established knowledge is the essential thing that is transmitted. The application of new technologies to this stock may have a considerable impact on the medium of communication. It does not seem absolutely necessary that the medium be a lecture delivered in person by a teacher in front of silent students, with questions reserved for sections or “practical work” sessions run by an assistant. To the extent that learning is translatable into computer language and the traditional teacher is replaceable by memory banks, didactics can be entrusted to machines linking traditional memory banks (libraries, etc.) and computer data banks to intelligent terminals placed at the students’ disposal. Pedagogy would not necessarily suffer. The students would still have to be taught something: not contents, but how to use the terminals.

don’t sacrifice college to the pandemic

I wrote a letter to the NY Times in response to Richard Arum and Mitchell Stevens’ “What is a College Education in the Time of Coronavirus?“. Unsurprisingly, the letter was not published, so I offer it here as a conversation-starter on lessons we should and shouldn’t learn from higher education’s current situation.

what i’ve learned: three years on asa council

From 2016-2019 I had two positions that have taught me a lot about academic leadership and organizations. I led the process of redeveloping UNC’s General Education curriculum, “IDEAs in Action,” which was approved in April 2019; and I sat on the American Sociological Association’s (ASA) elected Council. These two blog posts are intended to explain some of the things I’ve learned from both of these experiences.

This post will deal with what I’ve learned from three years serving on the ASA council. The previous post dealt with my role leading UNC’s general education curriculum redesign.

what I’ve learned: chairing unc’s general education curriculum redesign

From 2016-2019 I had two positions that have taught me a lot about academic leadership and organizations. I led the process of redeveloping UNC’s General Education curriculum, “IDEAs in Action,” which was approved in April 2019; and I sat on the American Sociological Association’s (ASA) elected Council. These two blog posts are intended to explain some of the things I’ve learned from both of these experiences .

This first post will deal with what I’ve learned from three years chairing the curriculum redesign process.

the democratic electorate

The current conventional wisdom, expressed for example in this NYT Upshot piece, as well as by Bret Stephens on MSNBC yesterday (June 5) is that the vocal “left” of the Democratic party has lost touch with the authentic base of the party, and therefore risks re-electing Trump by veering too far left.

I believe this analysis suffers from a theoretical mistake that enables its pundit providers to ignore certain empirical evidence while trumpeting other such evidence. Here’s why.

selective college admissions games

Alongside the well-publicized scandal of super-rich parents covertly buying their kids entry into super-elite colleges (as distinguished from super-rich parents overtly buying entry through donations, and just-pretty-rich parents doing so through opportunity hoarding), I am interested in two more general patterns in selective-college admissions these days:

• The incredibly low admissions percentages at elite colleges (public and private), publicized and often understood as indicators of college quality; and
• Many colleges closing for lack of financial resources, and many others below capacity (in these cases generally, though not entirely, less-selective institutions)

Finally, meanwhile, the “oversupply” of Ph.D.s, particularly in the humanities and some social sciences, is well-documented and anxiety-producing.

why the liberal arts? the value of general education

This post comes out of my work chairing UNC’s General Education Curriculum Revision effort. I’m posting it here on Scatterplot instead of on the Curriculum site because it represents my own view, not a formal statement from the committee. 

Unusual among our public-flagship peers, Carolina requires all undergraduate students to enroll first in the College of Arts & Sciences, even if they ultimately major in one of the professional schools. This reflects a core commitment to the liberal arts as the foundation for all undergraduate education at Carolina. Implicit in this organization is the claim that broad, serious education in the liberal arts is the best way to prepare students for future study as well as for leadership, citizenship, and professional life.