Today’s reflection is about the future of higher education. Specifically, I want to talk about three topics:
Student debt/finances: According to the Federal Reserve, since 2004 student debt in the United States has more than tripled and it reached about $1.52 trillion in the first quarter of 2018. Laura W. Perna University of Pennsylvania professor says: “We’ve come to a place where most students have to borrow in order to pay the cost of completing a bachelor’s degree”. In fact, it is estimated that about 44 million graduates hold student debt, and today’s graduates leave school holding promissory notes worth an average of $37,000. Therefore, there is evidence that many young adults after leaving college have to delay important steps in their life, such as buy a house, get married, have children and make a retirement plan. What do you think about it?
PhDs and postdocs: Currently, US produces more PhDs than openings for faculty or research position. In fact, there are too many PhD students for too few academic jobs. On the top of that, researchers feel the institutional pressure of producing over the actual and normal capacity on any laboratory for quality and relevant work. In this way, they bring postdocs to help them with their nth project. This is a crazy system: for each thousand papers published, how many do you think represent a transformative/impactful work? One or two? What can we do to stop this vicious cycle?
Open Access: In the recent years, more and more have been talked about open access. In September of 2018, the European Union announced the Plan S, an initiative for Open Access publishing. This plan is supported by cOAlition S, an international consortium of research funders. The plan requires that, from 2020, scientific publications that result from research funded by public grants must be published in compliant Open Access journals or platforms. This initiative has the potential of changing the face of science publishing in two years and therefore, it has provoked protest from publishers. Supporters from the movement say that “No science should be locked behind paywalls!”. What do you think about it? Should science be open for all? But, do you believe the general population is able of understanding the language used in formal papers? Will academics have to change language for open access? Do researchers have the funds to pay for the publication of their work? What is US doing to follow the trend started in Europe?
Let me know what you think about these topics!
References
- http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/student-loan-debt-crisis/
- https://qz.com/1367412/1-5-trillion-of-us-student-loan-debt-has-transformed-the-american-dream/
- https://www.coalition-s.org/
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