Careers
fromInside Higher Ed | Higher Education News, Events and Jobs
2 days agoAttrition and Career Ladders
AI displacement may lead to more conversations about job loss and career ladder challenges for newcomers.
Growing up, I struggled to figure out what made sense for me, what made me me. When I joined the drum line and felt that community, everything clicked. It made me a better person. It gave me something to fight for.
Research has shown there is a reading for pleasure crisis among children in the UK, where enjoyment of books has fallen to its lowest level in two decades. Not so here at Christ Church primary, a tiny Church of England school tucked behind the maze of HS2 construction works in Camden, north London, where children fizz with excitement about books.
I feel a tremendous amount of gratitude because it took an inordinate amount of work and uncertainty to get to this point, so now that we're finally here, we can breathe. The new school features large classrooms with plenty of natural light and additional shared spaces for clubs, sports and after-school programs.
I was like, 'What do you mean, I can actually work and take some classes?' I didn't even know there were apprenticeships out there, because I thought it was something of the past. That was my dream-to go into some field of engineering-so it was great to find something like AT&T, which has an apprenticeship program where you can jump into it, which later becomes software engineering.
Practical physics classes were competing with the allure of sports in the 1800s, and top tips for the best-smelling garden, in this week's peek at the Nature archives. 100 years ago doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-026-00297-2 This article features text from Nature's archive. By its historical nature, the archive includes some images, articles and language that by twenty-first-century standards are offensive and harmful. Find out more.
Maya Duckworth-Pilkington spent the first two weeks of January buried in her textbooks, studying. Until she submitted her final advanced functions exam, the Rosedale Heights School of the Arts senior didn't realize how much time and effort she was putting into her studies. The pressure is higher than ever to do well, she explained over text message. People aren't sleeping well, eating well or getting leisure time.
As a "Big Picture School, MetWest follows a nontraditional model, where students spend three days a week doing core learning and instruction, and spend Tuesdays and Thursdays participating in internships and career learning with a mentor. Their internships are in fields ranging from automotive to education, healthcare, and videography. "At Big Picture Schools, we believe not all the learning happens inside the schools but outside as well,"
Cuts that hurt are obvious: layoffs, program closures, college closures, furloughs, deferred maintenance, pay freezes, travel freezes, etc. It's a well-worn playbook at this point. Most of the moves in this category involve either attacking employee compensation, which causes obvious pain, or putting off necessary investments and living with gradual declines in quality.
Whether it's executive coaching or life coaching, people understand the concept and know that there is value to it in higher ed. However, what's been missing is this foundational research that really explains why coaching works in this context and how you can then leverage it to have the most impact on student success. What does a coach need to know, and at what skill level do they need to operate in order to have the impact on students that we want to see?
This idea was based on the parallel between the pluck and elan that are characteristic of both the early-college students I worked with and that of America's hardest-working founding father. Five years after I wrote the book, I had the opportunity to revisit the field for a revised edition, making it appropriate to ask, after Thomas Jefferson's song in the second act of Hamilton, "What'd I Miss": How has early college/dual enrollment changed over the past half decade?
The survey measured belonging by asking students to rate their agreement with the statement "I feel that I am a part of [school]" on a five-point scale, where 1 means strongly disagree and 5 means strongly agree. Students who rated their sense of belonging in their second year one step higher on the five-point scale than they did in their first year-such as moving from neutral to agree-were 3.4 percentage points more likely to graduate within four years.
I assume that it's intended to provide ammunition to go after disfavored faculty and/or to instill such a chill on campus that nobody would dare to say anything provocative in the first place. Whether those motivations are locally held or are meant to keep the university below the radar of certain culture warriors, I don't know. The effects are the same either way, and they're devastating to the mission of a university.