Author: Albert S. Fu

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Criticizing Return-on-Investment Approach to Degrees in PA

A version of this post appears in the APSCUF-KU May 2016 Newsletter.

Earlier this year, Pennsylvania’s System of Higher Education (PASSHE) issued a press release on a report entitled Degrees of Value. This report from Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce will become part of the State System’s “Program Alignment Toolkit.” Looking at undergraduate degrees and income, the report essentially takes a return-on-investment (ROI) approach to college degrees. In PASSHE’s press release, it noted that: “While college-educated employees in any field tend to earn more than those with only a high school education, the college majors that lead to the highest earnings are in STEM, health and business. For example, a major in architecture and engineering, the highest-paying area of STEM, led to average earnings of $82,500 in Pennsylvania.”

The ROI approach to undergraduate programs is highly problematic and often criticized. Not only are there problems with its logic, it is typically used as an attack on the arts and humanities. APSCUF, the union representing faculty in the PASSHE system, has issued its statement on the report. However, I would like to offer my thoughts on the report. I do not find the results of the report particularly surprising. What is disconcerting is that the document lacks nuance even when using a ROI rationale and the report’s own data.

Take for example the state average for students who majored in the humanities and liberal arts. Median earnings for a humanities and liberal arts major between the ages of 12-64 is $45,300 statewide. However, a humanities and liberal arts major in the Southeast region of the state makes $49,900, which is more than a biology and life science major living in the Northwest region of the state ($46,400) and pretty close to a biology major in the Southwest region ($51,000).

 

 Biology & Life Science Humanities & Liberal Arts
Central Region

$58,500

$44,100
Northeast Region

56,800

40,000
Northwest Region

46,400

36,100
Southeast Region

67,300

49,900

Southwest Region

 51,000

41,200

Statewide

 59,700

45,300
Source: Degrees of Value, Figure 14, pages 23-24

The Degrees of Value report only briefly discusses geographic differences. However, it only does so within majors. This is because using income as a benchmark is complicated by significant regional differences in jobs, cost of living, and economic resources. Yet, the report’s focus is solely on income.

PASSHE’s acceptance of the report reinforces faculty fears of a vocational-drive by campus administrators and state leaders. Yet, the data within the report does not support a vocational-drive based on ROI. Students majoring in the social sciences make more than those in fields such as agriculture and natural resources, education, law & public policy, journalism, industrial arts, and social work.

Major Median earnings by undergraduate major group ages 21-64
Social Sciences $52,800
Agriculture & natural resources 50,800
Education 47,800
Law & public policy 46,700
Communications & journalism 43,400
Industrial arts, consumer services & recreation 42,100
Psychology & social work 42,100
Source: Degrees of Value, Figure 12, page 20

In addition to the report’s focus on STEM-H, business majors are a focus. Yet, social science majors in the Southeast Region do better than many business majors across the state.

 

Business

Social Sciences (excluding psychology and social work)
Central Region

$55,900

$49,500
Northeast Region

50,500

42,100
Northwest Region

46,300

42,900
Southeast Region

67,300

60,500
Southwest Region

55,000

47,100
Statewide

58,900

52,800
Source: Degrees of Value, Figure 14, pages 23-24

It is also important to note that nationally, the gap between humanities & social science, and professional & pre-professional fields closes significantly over the course of a worker’s career.

Source: Chronicle of Higher Education, AAUP.

In conclusion, the equating of undergraduate degree with income is simplistic. It ignores economic geography, labor market dimensions, as well less quantifiable benefits such as career satisfaction, community service, and job security.

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Millennial Faculty (Yes, they exist)

clockEvery year, the Beloit Mindset List comes out and faculty freak out over it on social media. What bothers me about the reaction is that they forget that it is normal for different generations to experience different things. I am also bothered by some of the reaction that people have to studies regarding the millennials. In the case of higher education, I believe some of my colleagues forget that there are now millennial faculty members (which plays a part in #Ilooklikeaprofessor).

Rob Kelly wrote in 2007, “Millennial Faculty Are Coming. Are You Ready?“ Millennial faculty now exist. We are in our late 20s and mid 30s. From the standpoint of age, this is expected. In many fields, the age of new PhDs and assistant professors sits around 33 [1]. Although the average age of tenure being granted in 39, some “early Millennials” born just after “Generation X” may have already received tenure and those born shortly after will be will be going up soon [2].

In this blog post, I want to talk about what college was like and how it influences our (or at least my) learning, teaching and research.

Higher Ed Goes Digital (late 1990s-2000s)

I hate the term “digital natives” – commonly associated with millennials. However, I think it’s important to talk about growing up with digital knowledge. Perhaps the most important experience that we had in college was having broadband internet access.  Compuserve existed in the 1980s and AOL went online in 1991, but they were typically accessed via dial-up modems. Similarly, there were intranets on university campuses. However, the availability of broadband access to the World Wide Web in college fundamentally connected technology and learning for many of us. More specifically, we had dorm rooms with ready internet access (either wired or later with wifi).

This had a very significant impacts on our lives. The release of Napster in 1999 changed the way we relate to digital content. While, those of us early millennials owned physical media, the MP3 explosion altered our relationship with such physical artifacts. This had implications for knowledge. Books, articles and course readings need not be locked away in a library or within a physical book. In fact, according to Publisher Weekly, in 2011 those born between 1979 and 1989 bought more books than Baby Boomers (with 43% of those expenditures going to digital purchases).

Microsoft Encarta came out in 1993. This and other encyclopedia programs meant large unwieldy formats such as Encyclopedia Britannica (as well as other types of indexes) were simply inefficient ways to look up information. This was followed by Wikipedia going online in 2001. Card catalogs are a distant childhood memory (if at all). As an academic generation, there are those that rarely or never read bound editions of academic journals. Not coincidentally through the 2000s, university libraries began to invest less in study carrel spaces and more in “information commons.” Book acquisitions dropped, as budgets were reassigned for online journal databases.

In addition to digital versions of books, the way we learned was always supplemented by the internet. The Blackboard Learning System debuted in the fall of 1998, and by 2004 the company had thousands of “clients” using it to post syllabi, readings, and offer assignment submission. We used email as well as AIM, ICQ, and Facebook to interact with our TA’s and our classmates. RateMyProfessor went online in 2001 affecting what classes we chose to take.

If our undergraduate experience was about digitally consuming knowledge, graduate school meant producing research digitally. I certainly do not know anyone who used notecards to create bibliographies in graduate school. Most of us have never used a typewriter. Those who conduct historical research can now use digital archives in conjunction with “analog” sources in archives. This meant the “physical” act of research and dissertation writing was fundamentally different. EndNote Plus was released in the 1990s and grew in sophistication and popularity in the 2000s. Similarly reference management software such as RefWorks was released in 2001, and Zotero in 2006. Personally, I cannot imagine not using Zotero for my dissertation, much less having to re-format references for publication without it. For Millennial graduate students and faculty, other things like digital humanities, blogs, conference live tweets, conducting ethnography online, job rumor wikis, etc. increasingly play a role in our academic/professional lives.

Millennial Faculty (2010s)

The preceding paragraphs have largely focused on the cultural and practical differences that millennial faculty experienced. However, I want to also mention that we experienced a very different economic situation. As the PEW Research Center has found, our entire generation faces very different economic and educational challenges than Generation X, the Baby Boomers and the Silent Generation. We have higher levels of student loan debt. We finished (or are finishing) our doctoral degrees in a world where we had to teach as well as publish much more to even be considered for a job (which might not even be tenure track). Peter Higgs (of Higgs Boson fame) has noted the brutality of today’s publish or perish world.

The narrative I have presented is not a digital versus analog debate. It is not about the virtues of the millennial experience, or that we had(have) it harder. Rather, it is a more serious take than on what the Beloit College Mindset List does every year – only with faculty not students. It’s also a reminder that things change, and it’s normal.

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Why I teach

 

Splatter ReadingThis blog post was inspired by a colleague’s suggestion last year that fellow faculty write a short piece for the campus paper on why we teach. I have been thinking about this essay prompt for a while, and I think it is especially fitting to write this now that I have tenure.

The reason why I teach is not that I am a teacher. It is because I am a social scientist. Part of the sciences (natural and social) is the pursuit and sharing of knowledge. This means that I teach, because I love learning. I teach, because I love sharing what I’ve learned. Teaching my research areas forces me to think and re-think ideas and concepts. It also makes me a better writer. When I prepare for a new semester, I update my PowerPoints with new data. This is not just to be a good teacher, but it is also to be on-top of things going on in my field. I teach because it is truly fun and satisfying to me to find new material for my classes. I go into each semester hoping that the new information I’ve found may be interesting and compelling to my students.

At the same time, in the classroom, I am less interested in teaching facts, than sharing knowledge that can help students critically look at the world around us. To me, knowledge is not just a series of facts and data points. Social science is a process; it is active not static. In sociology, a typical introductory lesson includes C. Wright Mills and the “Sociological Imagination.” Mills writing in 1959 notes that there is, “generous comment in all schools of social science about the blindness of empirical data without theory and the emptiness of theory without data. But we do better to examine the practice and its results….” (66). In other words, social science is not just the practice of research or even its findings, but it is a field that is at its best when we ask questions about research. It is my hope that I’ve been able to inspire my students to ask similar questions.

So why do I teach? I teach not because I am a teacher, but because I am a social scientist.

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Visualizing the 100 Largest Cities in the U.S. (1840-2010)

In a previous post, I discussed how I like making visualizations for my classes using Google products. It’s a good exercise for me, and hopefully it leads to something useful in fall. My weekend project was this map of the 100 Largest Cities in the U.S. (1840-2010) using Google Charts’ GeoChart. It was largely based on this code. However, I had to make a number of changes to have it do what I wanted it to do. I also had to organize the data in way that was useful. The dots on the map mark cities that are amongst the top 100 urban centers in the United States in a census. The slider is a date filter that allows one to either move decade-by-decade to see the rise of cities in the Sunbelt, or see the persistence of a city in the top 100 depending on how you move the sliders.


The neat thing about the GeoChart API is that it rendered within the browser using SVG. While the GeoChart API will recognize place-names, it loads much faster if you use latitude/longitude coordinates instead of place-names. There are 269 cities in the map above, with data drawn from 18 census years.

This was meant to be a fun weekend project playing with the GeoChart API. I’ll probably play around with this a bit more, so that I can make use it in my urban sociology course in the fall.

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Neoliberalism, logistics and the treadmill of production in metropolitan waste management: A case of Turkish firms

Splatter Trash Can

Splatter Trash CanThis paper examines the domestic growth and overseas expansion of Turkish firms as part of the treadmill of production. The treadmill of production is an environmental and political-economy approach to society’s insatiable hunger for material goods. In this approach, economic growth leads to withdrawals of natural resources, and the addition of waste to the environment that stresses both nature and society. Drawing on the treadmill of production approach, I argue that logistical service providers are a coping and modernisation mechanism for accelerated urban growth and economic expansion. This process is visible in the expansion of privatised waste management, and even more so in rapidly urbanising regions where growth and modernisation are of great importance to policy-makers. Owing to the importance of growth and expansion, logistics firms in newly industrialised countries, like their counterparts in the Global North, increasingly export logistical services overseas. This, in turn, accelerates the treadmill of production internationally. As such, this paper will also look at the expansion of Turkish firms into Pakistan.

(2015). “Neoliberalism, logistics and the treadmill of production in metropolitan waste management: A case of Turkish firms.” Urban Studies, DOI: 0042098015586537.

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Fear of a black Spider-Man: racebending and the colour-line in superhero (re)casting

This paper tackles the way in which fans legitimise ‘whiteness’ in the pantheon of American fictional heroes. Using the 2010 internet meme calling for an African-American actor be cast as the next Spider-Man, and the replacement of Peter Parker with a character of Hispanic and African-American descent, I examine online arguments made by fans that Peter Parker and Spider-Man have been and therefore should remain white. Specifically, I am interested in the way in which fans legitimise the ‘casting’ choices of characters through the use of canon – the officially recognised history of a fictional universe – and dominant characterisations of Spider-Man as a hero.

(2015). “Fear of a black Spider-Man: racebending and the colour-line in superhero (re) casting.” Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics. DOI: 10.1080/21504857.2014.994647

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My Favorite Class as an Undergraduate

Splatter BackpackI’ve been meaning to post a blog for a while on my favorite courses. As an educator, I regularly reflect on the courses I had as an undergraduate (something I think is important for teachers to do regularly). I also want to specifically thank UC Irvine’s Humanities Core program for my success as a student and scholar. Despite taking the class over a decade ago, Humanities Core always comes up when I think about my undergraduate coursework. So I can easily say the course was effective and impactful. During my new freshman orientation, I was placed in the course, because it fulfilled requirements for humanities majors (history at UCI is in the School of the Humanities) and it satisfied the lower division writing requirement for general education. However, it was much more than something that fulfilled a requirement. I’d say that Humanities Core laid the foundation for my later success as an undergraduate and graduate student, my work as a researcher, and my job as an educator. So in this blog post, I’d share with you all why Humanities Core was the best course I ever took. *** No offense to any of my former teachers and professors reading this blog.

Humanities Core is a year long interdisciplinary course that is taught by a team professors across the humanities (such as art history, history, philosophy, and literature). The year typically revolves around a theme, and I believe that the theme for my year was the “journey.” Although it had a theme, the material was incredibly diverse and varied. That year, I read the work of David Hume, Plato, the Chinese epic Journey into the West, and the work of Freud. I watched Hitchock’s Rebecca, Hiroshima mon amour and the opera Madama Butterfly. I learned about the Aztecs, William Bradford’s religious beliefs, Cabeza de Vaca’s experiences in the New World and was introduced (briefly) to Chicana/o studies. In addition to content, the course had a substantial writing component which meant that the course was worth 8 credits (or two courses) per term. So this was much more than just a year long survey of the humanities, it was a sustained effort in reading, critical thinking and writing in my first year of college.

I believe that the structure of Humanities Core was incredibly in developing my critical thinking skills and writing. It was one of the few courses that truly balanced content and writing instruction. I still remember the lecture given by a philosopher Terence Parsons on ‘a priori’ and ‘a posteriori’ knowledge following a reading of Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. The follow up in the writing seminar on argumentation helped turn the lecture material into something that would help my writing. Looking back, I see that the intent of the reading assignments, lecture and writing assignment was to make us think about how we make arguments. When we read historical works like that of William Bradford and Cabeza de Vaca, we were not just learning content. We learned how these historical figures legitimized and justified what they wrote. We also learned that these texts were primary sources to be used in making our writing effective.

The teaching assistants/writing instructors for the course were typically advanced graduate students from throughout the humanities. I don’t remember if it was luck or if I was placed in writing seminars with historians, but I was. In either case, I believe this positively affected my writing as a young social scientist. I owe a great deal of my writing training to Robert Blackman who I had both in Humanities Core (and later as a history instructor). I learned that when you quote or cite texts it is to support your argument and not to use quotes as a crutch. It was about using/analyzing a text (such as the diary of William Bradford) as a means of providing evidence. Essentially, I learned how to find/use evidence to discuss some form of historical, social or cultural phenomena. Oh yea, and I learned how to use the Chicago style of citation not MLA (thankfully!).

I could go on and on about how great of a course it was, but I won’t. While this was ‘Humanities’ Core, I believe that this course laid the foundation for my social science training (I declared sociology as a second major as a junior). In conclusion, when I reflect on my time in Humanities Core, I don’t just remember what I learned. I remember that I love learning. It reminds me of why I went into research and why I enjoy teaching the subjects I care about.

To my fellow educators reading this via social media, what was your favorite class?

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Why I wrote about Spider-Man

Although my primary area of specialization is urban studies, I recently published an article entitled “Fear of a Black Spider-Man: Racebending and the Color-Line in Super Hero (Re)Casting” that is now online ahead of print. In this blog post, I figured I’d talk a bit about why I wrote that piece and link it to why I think personal interests, research, and teaching are closely connected.

My article seems timely given the recent news that there will be a new Spider-Man movie starring a new actor produced under the watch of Marvel. It may also seem timely given the recent suggestion that Idris Elba play James Bond or the recent news of Mehcad Brooks playing Jimmy Olsen in the upcoming Supergirl television show. However, this is not a new issue and the issues of race, racebending, and casting is a recurring debate amongst fans of superheroes and other genres. This debate is something that I have been following as both a fan and a social scientist for the past few years. However, this is my first research article on the topic.

The origin of my work on race and superheroes goes back to my dissertation. In a chapter, I use Zorro to discuss the not-so-fine line artists, authors, and writers walk when they appropriated non-WASP culture for popular dissemination. I specifically discuss how Johnston McCulley was very careful to make Zorro of Spanish and not Mexican descent. This choice to make Zorro specifically European was not simply to tell a good story. It was a choice that was influenced by racial attitudes of the time. However, my dissertation wasn’t about Zorro or superheroes. It was about the use of “Spanish” culture in California’s built environment and visual culture.

The reason why I became interested in the Donald Glover controversy is that I enjoy comic books, superhero movies, and video games. However, as a critical social scientist, I cannot help but be persistently aware of the under-representation of different groups in popular culture. As a sociologist, I’m always using my “sociological imagination” to see the connection between aspects of everyday life to larger social realities. Essentially, I wanted to put my training and curiosity to use, while digging deeper into something I enjoy.

Another reason why I chose this project is that I wanted to do something different. I wanted to explore a different topic and employ different methods to test myself. To put it simply, I made myself write this article for the same reasons why I make my students write papers. Doing the research and writing the paper allows me to develop and test my skills and knowledge in another area of interest.

Finally, I was teaching courses on race and ethnicity every semester when I was working on this project. So reviewing the literature, conducting the research, and writing helped me in the classroom. Bringing this research into the classroom – partially since it was about Spider-Man – was enjoyable for both myself and my students. It was a fun way to show my students the connection between personal interests and research.

It’s unlikely that I’ll continue to do research on superheroes, but I think it’s an exciting time to be a fan. The news that Spider-Man can be included in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the coming Captain Marvel and Black Panther movies, as well as the recent shake up of the Avengers in the comic books are intriguing on so many levels.

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Teaching Social Science Writing

Like most semesters, I assign a lot of writing despite my heavy teaching load. However, this semester I have spent a bit more time discussing what makes social science writing different from what they might have encountered in other classes (e.g. why MLA is inappropriate for our class). This blog post will discuss some of my concerns and thoughts regarding teaching social science writing.

A few premises I want to get out of the way. I think effective writing across the disciplines is important. There are a lot of issues with student writing. For example, political scientist Michael Allen has a good post on passive voice. Like Steven Pinker, I’m against academic gobbledygook. I understand that basic skills in writing and research are difficult to learn and just as difficult to teach. For instance, at Kutztown, the other sociology faculty and I created a guide to writing academic (sociology) papers on our webpage. However, a persistent problem is the lack of discipline specific training in writing.

My goal is to make students not just critical thinkers, but much more rigorous thinkers. Not only do I want my students to be better communicators, I want them to be accurate writers. So here are just some of the issues I encounter every year that is specifically tied to social science writing.

  • Use of Sources
    • We live in a world where good writing is often more important than good research. As Michael Chabris explains on Salon, popular nonfiction work such as Malcolm Gladwell’s fails to meet the rigor social science. A criticism of Gladwell is his cherry picking of studies. Our students do something similar. They find a quote in a text to ‘augment’ their writing (rather than build an argument based on existing research results and methods, or theory). When I’ve asked students to construct literature reviews, very few actually survey the research. Most structure their literature reviews author-by-author plugging in quotes that include the terms and concepts they want to write about. Here the quote is a crutch. They’re augmenting their writing rather than building a foundation for an argument that is grounded in the research. That’s not to say what my students are writing aren’t relevant, interesting or significant. However, the way they are using sources tends to emphasize the significance of what they are saying, rather than provide evidence that what they are saying is reliable and valid.
  • Generalizability and Importance
    • Sociologist Robert Merton in his classic work Social Theory & Social Structure, discusses (or grossly generalizes) different approaches to research. For example, Merton suggested that, Europeans take the position: “We don’t know that what we say is true, but it is at least significant.” While the Americans take the position: “We don’t know that what we say is particularly significant, but it is at least true” (pp. 494-495). As a qualitative and critical researcher with postmodern inclinations, I tend to agree with criticisms of positivist social science. However, I believe that significance (or social relevance) and truth (validity/reliability) are both important. The balance of those two sides in research is what makes us social scientists.
  • Unit/Level of Analysis
    • When my students write about inequality, they do a fairly good job emphasizing it as a social problem. However, a common problem is that many will mention things such as racial segregation in the United States and slums in the developing world in the same paper. There’s no unit of analysis. There’s also no sense of level or scale. This is linked to the aforementioned problem of precision, validity and reliability. However, it is also connected to the disconnect between course content (information) and the notion of research. Student papers spend a lot of time reporting facts, rather than transforming that information into data that can be analyzed. In other words, writing doesn’t just open up discussions of social problems, but is part of operationalizing research.

While I verbally address many of these problems in class, I feel that I could (or should) do much more over the course of the semester. As this semester wraps up, it’s time to head back to the drawing board to come up with new ways to encourage better social science writing in my courses.

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Teaching and Visualizing School Segregation: Google Docs

As I’ve discussed in an earlier post, education and race is a topic that I discuss in my classes. I’m also a big fan of providing visualized data for my students when I cover the material. So, I was very happy to see Reed Jordan at the The Urban Institute’s great post (with maps) on segregation in America’s public school system. Maps and other visual material support my lectures and PowerPoints in making the case that we are still very much a segregated country. Specifically, that this segregation is despite the country’s increased diversity. However, this post is not going to focus on segregation. Rather, I want to share the way I present information to my students via tables and charts in PowerPoint as well as Google Docs/Drive. Google Docs is not just a web-based replacement for Office. Part of Google Drive, it allows you to make Fusion tables to map and chart data. Its spreadsheet (and presentation program) can be embedded into webpages and other HTML files for easy online sharing (such as in your CMS). You can, of course, also share the spreadsheet if you wish.

Why do I want to share this material? If you’re a social scientist, you likely want to present data to your students. However, the charts included in publisher provided PowerPoints are ugly and often out-of-date.  I’m hoping that sharing my spreadsheets will help you to embedded figures, tables and charts into presentations and other course materials.

Source: http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d13/tables/dt13_203.50.asp

As mentioned above, the segregation we see in American public schools is despite the country’s increased racial and ethnic diversity. For most kids in the United States, they are more likely to attend schools where other students look like them than otherwise. For instance, Orfield and Frankenberg’s report has notes that we are in an unprecedented era of diversity, but there has been a long retreat from integration. The question for me as an instructor is: how do I convincingly present evidence that contradicts students’ notions of societal progress – the idea that the present (and future) is better than that of the past.

I like to show my students several years of data (within their lifetimes) to suggest that the problem of segregation is long-standing and enduring. This is also when I remind my students that their parents were likely born in the 1960s (amidst the Civil Rights Movement). This means that the history of Jim Crow is not ancient history. In Figures 2 & 3, we see that there has not been a lot of change in the new millennium. 60 years after Brown v. Board, most White kids go to schools that are predominantly white, just as most African-American kids go to schools that are predominantly black, and Hispanic/Latino students go to schools with other Hispanic/Latino kids.

Embedded charts and figures from Google Docs are nice because they are somewhat interactive with mouse overs revealing numbers and other information. The option to export charts and figures as images is available as well. However, I like embedding the HTML. I also prefer inserting or creating charts and figures via Excel. This allows for easier updating and having the visualized data fit the theme of your website or PowerPoint (which I haven’t done here).

Source: http://nces.ed.gov/ccd/pubschuniv.asp

While differences remain, there is some good news. The number of high school dropouts has decreased, with the steepest decline being amongst Hispanic students. The mouse over effect is particularly useful in the line chart above and below.

Source: http://www.census.gov/hhes/school/data/cps/historical/index.html

The steep decline in dropouts parallels a record high of students aged 18- to 24-year-olds being enrolled in college. In fact, a greater percentage of Hispanic high school graduates were enrolled in college than Whites in 2012. However, differences remain. Including links to the data sources is important. When I teach my Sociology of Visual Culture class, I require students to get data from the U.S. Census bureau to use in their charts, figures, and tables.

Source: http://www.census.gov/hhes/school/data/cps/historical/index.html

 If this was a lecture, this is likely the point where I’d make a joke about information overload. I’ll wrap up by saying that I hope that my Google spreadsheet is useful (I hope to update it when I have more time). Also don’t forget, Reed Jordan’s post & maps on this issue. The maps are also embeddable.