Tag: Jobs

  • Books reviewed in 2024

    Books reviewed in 2024

    Mostly, I’m interested in what books you read in 2024.

    Let me know if there is any overlap between the books I reviewed and what you read.

    Here are the books I wrote about in 2024:

    ‘Never Enough’ and the Roots of Our College Student Mental Health Crisis: Can universities be a counterweight to a toxic achievement culture?

    Failure, Academic Careers and ‘Right Kind of Wrong’: Care to share your career failures with our Inside Higher Ed community?

    The cover of Right Kind of Wrong by Amy Edmondson

    The Ed-Tech ‘Blood in the Machine’: Can the 19th-century Luddite movement help us think about the corporate digitization of education?

    The cover of Blood in the Machine by Brian Merchant

    An Imagined ‘Economics in America’ Dinner Conversation on Inequality in Higher Education: What I’d ask Sir Angus Deaton.

    The cover of Economics in America by Angus Deaton

    Universities and the ‘Material World’: What is higher education made of?

    The cover of Material World by Ed Conway

    Scaled Online Learning as Higher Ed’s ‘Pandora’s Box’: And other imperfect academic equivalencies inspired by a fantastic book on the history of prestige TV.

    The cover of the book Pandora’s Box by Peter Biskind.

    Is ‘Filterworld’ Coming for Higher Ed? On algorithms and educators.

    The cover of Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture by Kyle Chayka

    Campuses, Climate Change and ‘How Infrastructure Works’:
    Understanding how the infrastructural systems that enable our campuses to run are dependent on stable climate.

    The cover of How Infrastructure Works: Inside the Systems That Shape Our World by Deb Chachra

    Reading ‘On the Move’ and Thinking Mostly About Climate Change:
    Another excellent book to place in conversation with Universities on Fire.

     Cover of “On the Move: The Overheating Earth and the Uprooting of America” by Abrahm Lustgarten

    ‘The Uninhabitable Earth’ and the Adaptable Campus: Climate change and higher education’s built environment.

    Cover of “The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming” by David Wallace-Wells

    Higher Ed and ‘Charleston: Race, Water, and the Coming Storm’: Climate change and the eight most interesting colleges and universities in the U.S.

    Charleston: Race, Water, and the Coming Storm by Susan Crawford book cover

    ‘The Displacements’ and the Need for a Climate Change Academic Novel: A call to combine climate and campus fiction.

    Cover of The Displacements, a novel by Bruce Holsinger

    ‘The English Experience’ Rounds Out the ‘Dear Committee’ Trilogy:
    Wondering how this novel, which is in part about teaching students to write, might have been different if written after the release of ChatGPT.

    Cover of The English Experience: A Novel by Julie Schumacher

    ‘Supercommunicators’ and the Challenges of Hybrid Professional Academic Work: Why hybrid university work is better but feels worse, and where learning to be better digital communicators may help.

    Cover of "Supercommunicators" by Charles Duhigg

    Why Universities Need to Decarbonize ‘Five Times Faster’: Higher education and the economics of climate change.

    Cover of Five Times Faster by Simon Sharpe

    The Election, ‘Our Final Warning’ and Us: Where Universities on Fire meets Six Degrees of Climate Emergency.

    Cover of Our Final Warning by Mark Lynas

    ‘How the World Ran Out of Everything’ and ‘Recentering Learning’: Economic and higher education lessons from the pandemic.

    The cover of How the World Ran Out of Everything by Peter Goodman

    University Culture and ‘The Geek Way’: What higher ed should absorb and reject from tech culture.

    Cover of The Geek Way by Andrew McAfee

    Introducing ‘Recentering Learning’: The sections, chapter titles and authors from our new co-edited book.

    The cover of Recentering Learning

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  • AI-authored abstracts “more authentic” than human-written ones

    AI-authored abstracts “more authentic” than human-written ones

    Journal abstracts written with the help of artificial intelligence are perceived as more authentic, clear and compelling than those created solely by academics, a study suggests.

    While many academics may scorn the idea of outsourcing article summaries to generative AI, a new investigation by researchers at Ontario’s University of Waterloo found peer reviewers rated abstracts written by humans—but paraphrased using generative AI—far more highly than those authored without algorithmic assistance.

    Abstracts written entirely by AI—in which a large language model was asked to provide a summary of a paper—were rated slightly less favorably on qualities such as honesty, clarity, reliability and accuracy, although not significantly so, explains the study, published in the journal Computers in Human Behavior: Artificial Humans.

    For instance, the mean score for honesty for an entirely robot-written abstract was 3.32, based on a five-point Likert scale (where 5 is the highest rating), but just 3.38 for a human-written one.

    For an AI-paraphrased abstract, it was 3.82, according to the paper, which asked 17 experienced peer reviewers in the field of computer game design to assess a range of abstracts for readability and guess whether they were AI-written.

    On some measures, such as perceived clarity and compellingness, entirely AI-written abstracts did better than entirely human-written summaries, although were not seen as superior to AI-paraphrased work.

    One of the study’s co-authors, Lennart Nacke, from Waterloo’s Stratford School of Interaction Design and Business, told Times Higher Education that the study’s results showed “AI-paraphrased abstracts were well received” but added that the “researchers should view AI as an augmentation tool” rather than a “replacement for researcher expertise.”

    “Although peer reviewers were not able to reliably distinguish between AI and human writing, they were able to clearly assess the quality of underlying research described in the manuscript,” he said.

    “You could say that one key takeaway from our research is that researchers should use AI to enhance clarity and precision in their writing. They should not use it as an autonomous content producer. The human researcher should remain the intellectual driver of the work.”

    Emphasizing that “researchers should be the primary drivers of their manuscript writing,” Nacke continued, “AI [can] polish language and improve readability, but it cannot replace the deep understanding that comes with years of experience in a research field.”

    Stressing the importance of having distinctive academic writing—a desire expressed by several reviewers—he added that, “In our AI era, it’s perhaps more essential than ever to have some human touch or subjective expressions from human researchers in research writing.”

    “Because this is really what makes academia a creative, curious and collaborative community,” said Nacke, adding it would be a pity if scholars became “impersonal paper-producing machines.”

    “Leave that last part to the Daleks,” he said.

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  • The hypocrisy of community-engaged research (opinion)

    The hypocrisy of community-engaged research (opinion)

    Any critique about the neoliberal university ought to confront and acknowledge its colonial roots. Victoria Reyes, in her book Academic Outsider (Stanford University Press, 2022), highlights that higher education was never designed for the global majority, particularly people of color from low-income backgrounds. It was built by and for the elite—predominantly white, cisgender, male and affluent individuals—whose privilege shaped the norms that dominate higher education today. These norms actively harm oppressed communities. People of color in positions of power within higher education, such as tenured faculty or administrators, often perpetuate these systems of oppression when they conform to institutional norms instead of challenging them.

    The positivist research paradigm (a.k.a. positivism) sustains oppression in academia by prioritizing quantifiable data while dismissing subjective experiences and social contexts in pursuit of “objective” truths. This fragmented approach erases the complexity of lived experiences and ignores the interplay of privilege and oppression in shaping identities. Positivism fuels deficit-based research, white saviorism and helicopter science, invalidating diverse epistemologies and methodologies. Deficit-based research highlights negative conditions in oppressed communities, framing them as lacking while ignoring systemic causes of inequities, such as settler colonialism and structural racism. Legacies of positivism reinforce harmful stereotypes and stigmatization toward communities of color in higher education.

    In contrast, a transformative paradigm offers an alternative to positivism by centering the voices and experiences of oppressed communities. It prioritizes knowledge democracy and dismantling of power imbalances that have historically excluded marginalized communities from the research process. Over the past 25 years, community-engaged research (CEnR) and community-based participatory research (CBPR) have emerged as crucial approaches in health education, public health and the social sciences to address social inequities. Both approaches emphasize equitable, reciprocal community-academic partnerships, to foster genuine collaboration and systemic change.

    As a woman of color from the Global South and an immigrant scientist who studies health equity, I have witnessed firsthand both the transformative potential of CEnR in addressing social injustice and the discriminatory practices that neoliberal universities perpetuate in my own research with low-income and immigrant communities of color. While CEnR and CBPR are integral to addressing complex health and social inequities by empowering communities and fostering sustainable interventions, a question remains: Can these approaches thrive within the neoliberal university?

    White Saviorism and the Neoliberal University

    Unfortunately, the rise of CEnR within neoliberal universities, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic, was driven not by a genuine shift toward equity, but by a desire for funding and institutional prestige. As Megan Snider Bailey notes, “Market forces … shape university-community partnerships,” reinforcing a colonial mindset rooted in the white savior complex. This complex positions universities as gatekeepers of resources and legitimacy, exploiting oppressed communities under the appearance of “helping” them to secure funding from entities like the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation and the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute.

    The white savior complex describes privileged individuals, often white, who see themselves as “saviors” or “benevolent rescuers” of oppressed communities. This paternalistic mindset creates exploitative dynamics and replicates patterns of subjugation. For instance, universities often profit significantly from research with oppressed communities, taking up to 50 percent of grant funds as indirect costs for expenses such as facility maintenance and administration. These funds rarely return to the communities that need them most. Instead, universities divert these resources to maintain their own operations, exposing the hypocrisy of institutions that claim to support equity and justice. These exploitative practices raise a critical question: Who benefits the most from the oppression and illness of communities of color?

    The answer often points back to the universities themselves. They profit from the appearance of equity while perpetuating social injustice. The harm caused by white saviorism extends beyond finances. Transactional and extractive research methods are normalized in the neoliberal university. These methods reinforce patterns of subjugation and undermine long-term partnerships that could foster social justice and radical healing. As scholars have shown, a human-centered, liberatory approach must replace the transactional and extractive methods often associated with white supremacy and settler colonialism.

    Precarity in the Academy

    Universities that claim to promote social justice and CEnR often perpetuate exploitative practices and precarious working conditions. They frequently hire community leaders, promotoras de salud (community health workers), students and scholars of color on short-term contracts with little job security and no benefits. These precarious positions create dependency on higher institutions that exploit labor while controlling access to resources.

    As Anne Cafer and Meagen Rosenthal explain, moral outrage often drives short-term involvement in community projects. CEnR that fails to address inequitable power dynamics becomes another tool of oppression disguised as allyship. Superficial, performative community-academic partnerships deepen mistrust of academic institutions in oppressed communities and reinforce power dynamics and social injustice.

    Raquel Wright-Mair and Samuel Museus highlight how academia’s power hierarchies instill a fear of retaliation, silencing junior scholars of color from challenging systemic inequities. Scholars of color are often forced to align their work with institutional goals while sickening their bodies and damaging their mental health. The market-driven model of the neoliberal university prioritizes profits and productivity, limiting justice-oriented research. To address these issues in higher education, we must ask urgent questions:

    • What can we do to dismantle white-led initiatives that perpetuate dependence and subjugation?
    • How can institutions eliminate the white savior complex embedded in their structures?
    • How can we ensure fair calculation of indirect costs in CEnR that prevent the exploitation of community needs for grant funding and institutional prestige?

    Recommendations for Conducting Respectful and Liberatory CEnR

    The neoliberal university perpetuates the white savior complex, commodifies community needs and exploits people of color through short-term appointments designed to maintain systemic inequities. Therefore, it is pivotal to embrace the liberatory nature of CEnR that prioritizes social justice and structural change.

    • Transformative practices. Researchers must critically reflect on how their own positionality and privilege influence the liberation or oppression of marginalized communities. Universities must recognize and amplify the expertise of community members in shaping research agendas and outcomes. Furthermore, institutions must actively embrace linguistic justice and culturally relevant methods, respecting the languages, traditions and cultural contexts of the communities they engage. By prioritizing these practices, institutions can foster decolonial, respectful and inclusive collaborations that effectively challenge and dismantle oppressive systems in higher education.
    • Accountability is essential. Funding agencies must prioritize equitable representation and tangible benefits for communities over superficial metrics when evaluating CEnR. Neoliberal universities must stop exploiting community researchers and scholars of color through precarious, short-term appointments that reinforce tokenization and systemic inequities. Universities often hire people of color temporarily to build trust for community-academic partnerships while maintaining the overrepresentation of white faculty. To disrupt this cycle, funding agencies must require universities to intentionally hire and retain leaders, scholars and students from oppressed communities, ensuring they have job security. Empowering these voices permits CEnR to address community-specific needs, build local infrastructure and foster authentic partnerships rooted in equity, respect and shared power, dismantling the traditional hierarchies of academic research.
    • Rejecting unpaid labor is nonnegotiable. Unpaid labor perpetuates inequities, exploiting oppressed communities. Ethical CEnR demands equitable compensation, collaboration and empowerment, ensuring all participants are treated with dignity and are compensated fairly. These principles are critical to advancing liberation and driving systemic change.

    Advancing CEnR that truly serves oppressed communities requires dismantling the colonial, patriarchal and exploitative structures underpinning higher education. Embracing a transformative paradigm prioritizes genuine representation, community needs and liberation over market-driven motives, creating a model for lasting social change and liberation in an increasingly inequitable world.

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  • For Adult Learners, College Means More Than Just Jobs and Wages

    For Adult Learners, College Means More Than Just Jobs and Wages

    Title: Multiple Meanings of College: How Adult Learners Make Sense of Postsecondary Education & Why It Matters

    Authors: Melanie Shimano and Becky Klein-Collins

    Source: Council for Adult and Experiential Learning, Stanford Pathways Network, and Strada Education Foundation

    When adults decide to go back to college, some people assume their motivations are purely economic—to get a better job, make more money, or move up the corporate ladder. However, a new study by Council for Adult and Experiential Learning, Stanford Pathways Network, and Strada Education Foundation challenges this narrow view. Researchers interviewed 120 adult learners and found that they have many different reasons for wanting a college degree.

    While most people said they wanted to advance their careers and make more money, they also had personal reasons that were just as important. For example, they want to:

    • Set a positive example for their children
    • Push back against racism and discrimination through educational attainment
    • Gain skills to better serve their communities
    • Fulfill a lifelong ambition and gain a sense of achievement
    • Grow as individuals by developing new capabilities and identities

    The people interviewed said support from their schools, employers, coworkers, friends, and family was key to their success. Programs designed for adults, caring advisers, and supportive loved ones made it easier to juggle school, work, and life. When asked if college was “worth it,” many said yes because of what they learned, how it helped their careers, and the personal goals they achieved. But some who took on a lot of debt or felt they weren’t learning enough had doubts.

    To serve adult students well, institutions should consider all the reasons they go back to school. Here are some key recommendations from the report:

    • Craft recruitment messages that resonate with a range of motivations beyond just economic benefits
    • Explicitly recognize and celebrate personal, familial, and civic goals in advising
    • Provide college credit for completion of alternative credentials to leverage the symbolic power of a college degree
    • Assess student success comprehensively, incorporating metrics like community involvement in addition to earnings

    While there is growing enthusiasm for alternative educational pathways, adult learners remind us that a college degree still holds significant value for Americans in many ways. As institutions work to create more paths to success, it is crucial to understand and build upon the multifaceted meaning of college for adult learners.

    Click here to read the full report.

    —Alex Zhao


    If you have any questions or comments about this blog post, please contact us.

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  • Which MBA Specialization will offer Highest Paying Jobs After MBA in India for 2025-2027 ?

    Which MBA Specialization will offer Highest Paying Jobs After MBA in India for 2025-2027 ?

    1.MBA in Finance : Finance has consistently been one of the best-paying MBA specializations in India. Graduates with this specialization can pursue roles such as investment banker, financial analyst, or portfolio manager. The core subjects include financial planning, corporate finance, risk management, and investment analysis.

    Why it pays well: The financial services sector is always in high demand, and firms are willing to offer premium salaries to candidates who can manage financial risks and maximize profits.

    Average Salary: Rs 10-15 lakhs per annum for fresh graduates, which can escalate significantly with experience.

    2. MBA in Marketing : Marketing is another specialization known for its high-paying jobs. Professionals in this domain work on brand building, customer engagement, and sales strategies. Key subjects include consumer behavior, brand management, digital marketing, and advertising.

    Why it pays well: Companies are always looking for innovative ways to capture market share, and they invest heavily in marketing experts to promote their brands.

    Average Salary: Rs 8-12 lakhs per annum, with potential for higher earnings in senior roles such as Chief Marketing Officer (CMO).

    3.MBA in Business Analytics: As companies become more data-driven, the demand for business analytics experts is skyrocketing. This specialization focuses on data analysis, machine learning, and predictive modeling, helping businesses make informed decisions.

    Why it pays well: Data is the new currency, and firms need analytics experts to turn large datasets into actionable insights.

    Average Salary: Rs 10-14 lakhs per annum, with senior roles in analytics and data science fetching even higher pay.

    4.MBA in Information Technology (IT) : With the rise of digital transformation, IT management is one of the most in-demand MBA branches in India. Subjects covered include information systems, project management, and IT strategy.

    Why it pays well: Technology drives innovation, and IT managers play a critical role in leading this transformation, which is highly valued across industries.

    Average Salary: Rs 9-13 lakhs per annum for IT management graduates.

    5.MBA in Human Resource Management (HRM) : While not traditionally considered among the highest-paying specializations, HRM is growing in demand due to the focus on talent acquisition, employee relations, and organizational development.

    Why it pays well: Companies recognize the value of efficient human capital management, especially in competitive industries, and offer attractive salaries to top HR professionals.

    Average Salary: Rs 7-11 lakhs per annum for HR professionals

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