I have an update for those interested in the decision by the University of the West of England to shutter its Politics and IR programs.
Last night, I sent the following message to UWE Vice Chancellor Steven West:
19 February 2013
Dear Vice Chancellor West,
I learned today that the University of the West of England is seriously considering a decision to close its Politics and International Relations programs. I believe that would be a serious mistake and would urge you not to make it.
From what I understand, the decision will be part of a university effort to refocus coursework around skills and vocational training.
In the United States, some excellent recent scholarship demonstrates that liberal arts education is actually much more valuable than vocational and professional education. In the book Academically Adrift (University of Chicago, 2010), scholars Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa find that liberal arts students receive a far superior education compared to students enrolled in other degree program — and this is later reflected in the job market. The reason for the far better performance is academic rigor. Students pursuing traditional liberal arts majors showed “significantly higher gains in critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing skills over time.” Students pursuing practical and applied fields — business, education, social work, and communications — were more likely to be at the bottom of their rankings.
Data on the Politics and IR webpage at UWE seem to confirm this US data by revealing that the overwhelming majority (over 90%) of IR students at your university are either employed or enrolled in additional courses of study six months after they complete the program.
None of this data speak to the field-dependent reasons for saving Politics and IR. Many of the world’s most important problems will require concerted political action in order to prevent disaster. The current policy stagnation on climate change, for example, has much more to do with international politics than it does natural or physical science. Similarly, the world continues to confront the tremendous problems of war, weapons proliferation, poverty, and hunger. In all these areas, the world needs people trained in politics and international relations to help understand the global issues, frame potential solutions, and build winning coalitions. Nation-states, nongovernmental organizations, international institutions, and global businesses will have to come together around these problem areas. Today’s Politics and IR students funnel into jobs in all of those entities.
Again, I urge you not to close Politics and IR at UWE.
Sincerely,
Today’s reply was not encouraging. West said — and I’m paraphrasing because I hate to quote directly from a private email — that while he agreed Politics and IR provide an excellent education, programs are being asked to frame their arguments around practical application.
Readers, tell me, isn’t that precisely what I did in that message?
Here’s some more practical J-O-B information from Academically Adrift, via reporter Kevin Carey in the Chronicle of Higher Education, February 2012:
Despite a barren job market, only 3.1 percent of students who scored in the top 20 percent of the Collegiate Learning Assessment, which measures critical-thinking skills, were unemployed. Not infrequently, their colleges helped them land the jobs they had. Many struck out on their own and were engaged in civic affairs. Those who got married or cohabitated often did so with someone they met in college. For students like these, the college-driven job and mating markets are functioning as advertised.
Graduates who scored poorly on the CLA, by contrast, are leading very different lives. It’s true that business majors, who were singled out for low CLA scores in Academically Adrift, did better than most in finding jobs. But over all, students with poor CLA results are more likely to be living at home with their parents, burdened by credit-card debt, unmarried, and unemployed.
Readers, feel free to borrow any of my arguments in your own messages to Vice Chancellor Steven West at Steven.West@uwe.ac.uk.
More coverage on this issue form the university of Newcastle:
https://www.chasingdragons.org/2013/02/politics-and-international-relations-at-uwe-threatened-with-closure.html
Please take this as constructive feedback.
Nothing in your original message provides more than propaganda-level engagement regarding “practical application.”
The College Learning Assessment lacks either constructive or instrumental validity to measure what it is purported to measure. It measures /something/ — though it’s not clear what.
Likewise, stating that liberal arts graduates do not do as poorly as suggested is conflated by the fact that those degrees presumably attract students from better resourced families, which also mean better home environment, better learning environment, etc. Corrected for IQ, do liberal arts provide a better background for graduates from middling universities than technical programs?
Further, this seems a straight-forward example of a vertical cut — taking out a department to save others rather than make all departments have a hair cut. Assuming all departments not targeted would rather save themselves than except a cut, the q. then becomes what program with similar faculty size as Politics at UWE would be better sacrificed? Here’s a place to start: https://www1.uwe.ac.uk/aboutus/departmentsandservices/facultiesanddepartments.aspx
I did not respond initially to this topic because I assumed it was a rah-rah-poli-sci sort of thing, and you of course love your field of topic, and those no reason to troll that. But if you’re actually looking at convincing someone at UWE, instead of just preaching to the choir, it would help to focus on the needs of the decision makers.
My original message included links to several prior blog posts I’ve made here at the Duck. Propaganda? Huh.
Whatever CLA measures, Arum & Roksa use early and then repeated tests to measure advances in critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing skills. They also studied a range of schools (“varying sizes, selectivity and missions”), not merely liberal arts colleges. IOW, they are comparing apples-to-applies — and determining if the individual students improve over time. And they are not over-sampling highly motivated or privileged students.
I fear in this case that the decision makers are making cuts based upon perceptions of vocation-relevant skills rather than actual performance or potential importance for society. Neither of us know precisely how those meetings went, but as someone who is now on the inside of academic administration, I can report that the info inputs are rarely as informative as you’d want. And people from different fields from one another rarely have any idea of what others do.
In his note to me, the VC (again, a podiatrist) referred to Politics & IR as a humanities field, rather than a social science.
Rodger,
I’ve worked alongside academic administrators in the past, and now my job (at a major R&D outfit) is helping to determine which programs of research are killed and which get funding, which researchers get to keep their jobs and which don’t. You can dismiss my comments with “Huh,” but they were constructive criticism — your original post would not be of help to an administrator actually facing these dilemmas. Feel free to contact me off line — DanN has my email address — if you don’t think comments are a great way to go about helping you here.
“Whatever CLA measures, Arum & Roksa use early and then repeated tests ”
Yes, I wasn’t saying no one uses it, I’m saying that if the administrator has anyone who understands psychometrics advising them on what tests to take seriously, CLA would face serious questions about instrumental and constructive validity. Maybe they don’t, maybe it’s a mute issue.
“Neither of us know precisely how those meetings went, but as someone who is now on the inside of academic administration, I can report that the info inputs are rarely as informative as you’d want. ”
Indeed. Thus perhaps you’re going for propagandic impact here. If so msg me offline, and I’ll know that I’m hurting my trying to help. :-)
“In his note to me, the VC (again, a podiatrist) referred to Politics & IR as a humanities field, rather than a social science.”
Does it function as a humanities rather than a social science at UWE? I have a close friend who took it as a humanities — indeed (a speculation) the use of “Politics” instead of “Political Science” might be a conscious decision.
“I’m saying that if the administrator has anyone who understands psychometrics advising them on what tests to take seriously, CLA would face serious questions about instrumental and constructive validity. Maybe they don’t.”
I would *kill* to see an administrative discussion in which this kind of stuff actually mattered. Heck, I’d pay good money to see this stuff used even as ex post justification for decisions. :-)
+like :)
I’m sorry if this comment is a bit off on a tangent, but one thing that bothers me about discussions like this is that they tend to portray liberal arts and ‘vocational’ education as dueling antagonists in a zero-sum game. Now in a given situation, that may indeed be the case. But it really shouldn’t and needn’t be true as a general matter.
Ideally, the U.S. — which I refer to here b.c it’s the society I’m most familiar with — should offer a good liberal arts education to anyone who wants it (and is minimally qualified for it), while recognizing that not everyone may want it and providing those who don’t want a liberal arts education with a real alternative — i.e. not a worthless degree in some ill-defined subject (however labeled) but technical training that, in its own way, is just as rigorous as a good liberal arts program. As long as students are not forced too early into one option or the other and are given chances to change their minds, this would seem preferable to a set-up in which, as the Chronicle piece linked by R. Payne suggests, a relatively small number of students get good, rigorous post-secondary education in the U.S. while the majority get, in effect, the worst of all worlds: no rigorous liberal arts and no rigorous technical training. (Certainly Obama seems to believe that rigorous technical training programs are possible and feasible, if the passages on education in the State of the Union are taken seriously.) I am not suggesting some kind of tracking system, simply suggesting that there should be decent alternatives available for those who want them. As opposed to the present arrangement, in which there is a generic (in theory) thing labeled “college,” a general label that masks a system in which a minority is educated and a majority is, apparently, not, or not very well.