Archive: academic entrepreneurship / Sometimes Right

Posts Tagged ‘academic entrepreneurship’

KaplanU: Corporate bravado or genuine threat?

David Kirby
July 8th, 2010
Economics

Kaplan University recently launched an advertizing campaign that announces in bold terms its aspirations to “use technology to rewrite the rules of higher education.” At an AEI event, KaplanU’s CEO Andrew Rosen argued that if you accept that incentives affect behavior, then you should expect that the quality of for-profit education should outperform non-profits over time. This is the “logical result” of a much clearer set of incentives – for customers, future employers, board members, and shareholders. If students don’t achieve learning outcomes and don’t get jobs, they’ll go somewhere else. For-profits must outperform or go out of business. Where does this logic lead? Rosen predicted that KaplanU will become the “world’s best educator by 2020.” Is this corporate bravado or a genuine threat to traditional education? There is certainly evidence to support Rosen’s case. For instance, it took Harvard 25 years to recommend curricular reform in 2005. And the ideas sat on the shelf until 2007. Since then, progress has been uneven at best. Harvard’s case is by no means unique. For those who appreciate that incentives matter, Rosen certainly seems to have a point. But I suspect that this past month’s hearings in the U.S. Congress on regulating for-profits is only a sneak preview of efforts to restrict this logic from playing out.

Non-tenure faculty jobs are not all alike

David Kirby
June 7th, 2010
Economics, Random

I had written before about how tenure-track faculty positions at colleges and universities are declining relative to contingent faculty positions such as lecturers or instructors. And while the American Federation of Teachers thinks this is uniformly bad news, things may not be so clear cut.

Last week, Ronald Ehrenberg, an economist at Cornell University, presented a paper at AEI’s conference “Reinventing The American University” that reveals some surprising trends. Ehrenberg compiles data that show you can actually make more money as a lecturer at a research university than as an assistant professor. And associate faculty at for-profit institutions actually feel less like second class citizens than adjuncts at traditional universities.

Academic Entreprenuership

David Kirby
May 20th, 2010
Economics

As many scholars have observed, the market for tenure-track jobs is declining, relative to contingent faculty positions such as lecturers or instructors. And this trend is not likely to change. Add to this the retirement of the baby boom professors, cost constraints for state higher education budgets, the eroded value of endowments, declining philanthropic support, and new business models by higher education companies –you have a recipe for tumultuous marketplace for faculty jobs over the next decade.

So in this environment, what can grad students and faculty in the early stages of their careers do to pursue a successful career in academia?

One idea emerging is “academic entrepreneurship”–the idea of taking your career into your own hands and discovering your own comparative advantage in this changing marketplace. In a great piece at Inside Higher Ed, “The Entrepreneurial Grad Student,” Christine Kelly offers three things you can do to be entrepreneurial: brand yourself, seek opportunities, and be willing to adapt.

Apologies for the cross-promotion. But for faculty and grad student readers who are interested discussing and exploring this topic, I am moderating a Academic Entrepreneurship group at Kosmos, the online community of classical-liberal scholars. (Kosmos is in beta, so please excuse some part of the website still under construction.)