PhD Jobs Update: Post-Docs Fill The Void

The fine folks at the AIP's Statistical Research Center have the latest employment numbers for physics PhD's a year after graduation. First the good news: unemployment is still amazingly low.  Only 2% of physics PhD's were unemployed a year after graduation compared to about 9% for the general population in the US over the same time period and over 10% for those ages 25-35.  The bottom line is that physics PhD's continue to be extremely employable.  Isn't it nice to feel wanted?

Now for the bad news:  between 2008 and 2010 the fraction of new PhD's taking potentially permanent positions fell by about 8%.  The deficit was made up largely by increases in the availability of post-docs, at least partially due to the stimulus package passed in 2009.

 So while there are still plenty of jobs, more and more of those jobs are temporary positions designed to funnel people into faculty jobs that have been extremely scarce.

Hopefully, the potentially-permanent jobs will return as the economy improves.  Of course that is assuming government deadlock, the national debt, global warming, European fiscal crises, or attacks by Godzilla don't derail our tepid recovery.  While physics PhD's aren't immune to the world's economic woes, it does appear that we're faring better than most.

What PhD's Want To Be When They Grow Up

Almost everyone who goes to grad school in physics does so thinking that they will one become a tenured professor at a large university.  And anyone who has been around a physics graduate program for a while knows that for most of us that is simply not going to happen.  A recent book by Paula Stephan entitled "How Economics Shapes Science" shows that 23% of physics PhD's hold tenure-track appointments 6 years after their PhD, which means that less than one-quarter of those that survive grad school will get to be a professor in the way they imagined when they started.

That's a dismal way to look at grad school, but I've made a strong assumption in the preceding paragraph that some of you probably already noticed.  I assumed that every grad student wants to have a tenure-track position at a large research university.  It turns out that what grad students want is far more diverse than that, and that it changes over the course of the average student's grad school experience.  A recent study by a pair of management experts looked at exactly those questions and the results are fascinating.  I recommend reading the entire paper as it's very well-written and accessible, but here at the two points that I found most interesting.

First, they showed that even when asked to disregard the likelihood of actually getting a job in one of six areas, only 37% of beginning grad students in physics rated a tenure-track faculty position at a research university as "highly desirable" and that the percentage of students with that opinion didn't change over the course of grad school.  Note that the percentages can add up to more than 100% because respondents could indicate multiple areas as "highly desirable".

This indicates that new physics PhD's are not facing 1-in-4 odds of getting a tenure-track position, but rather that the odds are more like 1-in-2, assuming that there was little overlap between those that liked the "faculty-research" and "faculty-teaching" options.

 The second highlight is the way that students' opinions of the six career paths change over the course of grad school.  They tracked what percentage of students rated each career path at the end of their graduate careers versus their ratings when they entered grad school.

This shows that the faculty options were the two that took the biggest hits, meaning that a significant fraction of grad students realized that they didn't really want to be professors after getting effectively apprenticed to one for 5-7 years.  Presumably replacing that career goal are fields like R&D at start-up firms and government labs, which saw the biggest increases in attractiveness.

I find it very encouraging that most grad students realize that there are good things to do with a PhD in physics other than become your adviser, and that grad school actually does help open minds to other options.

Sauermann, H., & Roach, M. (2012). Science PhD Career Preferences: Levels, Changes, and Advisor Encouragement PLoS ONE, 7 (5) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0036307

Teaching Makes Grad Students Smarter

One of the best pieces of career advice I received as an undergrad was that if i wanted to go to grad school I should work as a TA for the freshman and sophomore level physics classes.  As a TA for those classes I learned how to do all of the basics of mechanics, thermodynamics, electromagnetism, and even a bit of quantum mechanics in my sleep.  I can still solve elastic collision problems on autopilot.  And it turns out that one of the big tricks to doing well on the physics GRE (aside from just being really smart) is to be able to do freshman and sophomore level physics very rapidly.  I credit most of my "decent but not terribly impressive" physics GRE score to those shifts in the tutoring labs on the 3rd floor of the Eyring Science Center.

But you don't have to take my tales of benefits of teaching as the only evidence for the link between teaching and success.  A paper in Nature (see the review by the Chronicle of Higher Ed) purports to have objectively created a measurement of the quality of a grad student in the physical sciences as a researcher and then tracked that quality for groups of grad students that worked as TA's versus others that simply worked as researchers.  To measure research quality they had 95 grad students write research proposals twice - once early in their grad careers and again several years later. The proposals where then graded by a review panel similar to those used by the NIH and NSF. Interestingly, they found that the two abilities most improved by teaching were generating testable hypothesis and valid research designs.

The authors limit their speculation as to why those two qualities are improved by teaching experience, but my guess is that teaching emphasizes understanding how fundamental concepts (e.g., conservation laws in physics) are used over and over again in progressively more advanced ways.

Physics PhDs: How Many? How Long? How Worthwhile?

I regularly sing the praises of the Statistical Research Center at the American Institute of Physics, so forgive me if you've heard this song before.  The latest data release from the SRC has a couple interesting tidbits profiling the newly minted PhDs in physics and astronomy.

First of all, the number of PhDs awarded continued its decade-long rise since the low of the late 90's dot-com boom.  The last time the US produced this many PhDs in physics was the mid-1960's when the space race, the nuclear arms race, and dozen of other defense-related Cold War initiatives drove hoards of students into PhD programs. 

The second interesting tidbit is the distribution of time-to-PhD for recent graduates.  I have seen averages previously, but it's great to see the histogram.  It's clear that the "5-year PhD" model is really a myth more than anything at this point.

Finally, the last tidbit is a fun little question that the AIP asked.

Interestingly only 22% of American students would change anything about their PhD experience while half of non-US citizens would.  Perhaps American are either too proud or too complacent to admit they would have done something different if they had it all to do again.

How do I Love Summer? Let Me Count the Ways....

How do I love summer? Let me count the ways.
I love summer to the depth and breadth and height
My uninterrupted time can reach, when feeling out of sight of undergrads
For the ends of Research and ideal Parking.
I love summer to the level of everyday's
Most quiet need, by sun and Colorado thunderstorm.
I love summer freely, as grad students travel to Conferences;
I love summer purely, as grad students strive for Publications.
I love summer with a passion put to use
In my old coursework, and with my passing of Comps.
I love summer with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost Time, --- I love summer with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my hopes for graduation! --- and, if God choose,
I shall but love summer better after my PhD.
-Elizabeth Browning (with some minor modifications)

Here's to summers in grad school - when we actually make progress towards our degrees!

Should You Go To Grad School?: A Quiz

I am the first person* in my very large extended family on my father's side to earn a graduate degree in something academic (as opposed to something useful like medicine, engineering, or business), but interestingly I have a number of cousins who are finishing their Bachelor's degrees in more academic fields and are seriously looking into graduate school, so at a recent family gathering I was asked a number of times about the merits of graduate school.  Of course I am not an expert on grad school in general, but I like to think that I've kept my ears open these past 4 years and I have served on several campus-wide committees that have allowed me to interact with a number of grads from other fields.  When asked I usually try to give my opinion along with some ideas about where to get more information.  Basically, I think I can boil what little wisdom exists in my rants to a 3 part quiz, which I thought I would share here (along with a humorous-because-it's-too-close-to-the-truth cartoon to the right).

*Interestingly my great-grandfather earned a Master's degree and was ABD on his doctorate in rural sociology in the 1930's.  But other than that I'm the first.

Part 1:  Have You Done Your Homework?

1. Name the professional society whose meetings you would attend to present your research. (2 points)
2. What is the average starting salary for people with and without your target degree to within $10k? (2 points)
3. What is the mid-career salary for people with and without your degree to within$10k? (1 point)
4. Have you talked to someone who has your desired graduate degree?  (face to face = 3 points, email = 2 points, heard someone speak about it to a group = 1 point)
5. Can you name the standardize test you need to take to get in? (1 point)
6. Do you know how long it takes to get your desired degree? (1 point)
7. Do you know how students in your desired program are supported financially?  (1 point)

Subtract your total from 7 and divide by 3 rounding to the nearest whole number.  This is your number of strikes from Part 1. Negative strikes count.

Part 2:  Will You Survive?

1. What is your undergraduate university ranked by US News?  (Top 10 = 5 points, Top 50 = 3 points, Top 100 = 1 point)
2. Did you graduate with honors? (summa cum laude = 3 points, magna cum laude = 2 points, cum laude = 1 point)
3. What was your total undergraduate GPA? ( 3.75 or higher = 3 points, 3.50 to 3.75 = 2 points, 3.25 to 3.50 = 1 point)
4. Honestly compare yourself with the best student in your major. That person is... (Clearly you = 4 points, Maybe you = 3 points, A little better than you = 2 points, In the same league as you = 1 point)

Subtract your total from 10 and divide by 4 rounding to the nearest whole number.  This is your number of strikes from Part 2.  Again negative strikes count.

Part 3:  Is It Worth It?

1. Calculate the difference in average lifetime salary between the average person with your Bachelor's degree and the average person with your desired graduate degree (including tuition and lost salary while in grad school).  Are you comfortable with that number? (2 points)
2. Honestly asses what schools you can get into and then ask your spouse or significant other if they would like to live in those places for the average time it takes to get your desired degree. If single, ask a friend of the opposite sex this question.  (smiling yes = 4 points, yes = 3 points, sigh followed by yes = 2 points, "if that's where we need to go" = 1 point)
3. Honestly asses what schools you can get into and then ask yourself if you would like to live in those places for the average time it takes to get your desired degree. (smiling yes = 4 points, yes = 3 points, sigh followed by yes = 2 points, "if that's where we need to go" = 1 point)
4. Would you be happy living for the average time it takes to get your desired degree with whatever kind of financial support you are likely to get.  Remember this may include some serious student loans.  (3 points)
5. What percentage of people currently holding your dream job hold your desired degree?  (75% or more = 5 points, 50% to 75% = 3 points, 25% to 50% = 1 point)

Subtract your total from 13 and divide by 5 rounding to the nearest whole number.  This is your number of strikes from Part 3.  Negative strikes still count.

Obviously 3 strikes (or more) and you're out.  Go get a job and be happy.

If you have 0 or less then what are you waiting for?  Get to grad school ASAP.

If you have 1 I would recommend grad school, but you should probably dip your toes in the job market as well.

If you have 2 strikes I would recommend against grad school immediately.  Go get a job and see how things feel again in a year or so.  I can say from personal experience that my program, for one, doesn't see a year or two away from school as a negative on an application and in many cases it can be a positive.  You might as well be earning a decent salary while you figure things out.

Comments?  Suggestions?  Name-calling?  Please let me know what you think.

The Latest on New Physics Grad Students

We recently had a discussion about the issues surrounding the process of getting a PhD in the US and thanks to the AIP's Statistical Research Center, here's an illustration of a strong argument in favor of fixing the system.  First, let's look at the trends in enrollment of 1st year grad students at PhD-granting departments:

Note that while there was a small drop-off in enrollment in 2009, the numbers have been fairly consistently around 2,800 for most of the past decade after a big dip in the late 90's thanks to the dot-com boom, which siphoned away a lot of potential grad students.

Now look at the number of PhD's granted over a much longer time period, although let's focus on the last ~15 years:

Here again there is evidence of the late 90's dot-com boom, delayed by about the average length of a PhD program, but note that the average is somewhere in the ballpark of 1,300, or roughly half of those entering grad school.

Now let's look at the number of tenure-track faculty hires over the last decade:

Interestingly these numbers are extremely constant. But again the average is somewhere in the ~360 phase, or only a third of the number of physics PhD's produced.  This is roughly in line with the anecdotal evidence from my department that showed about 30% of PhD's from 2000 to 2005 had tenure-track faculty positions.

That means that of those student's starting a PhD program at your university this year only roughly half will get their PhD and only about 13% will get a PhD faculty position.  Of course all programs are not created equal, but the averages don't lie.

So in the grand scheme of things, we are (a) doing a poor job getting people through the existing PhD programs and (b) preparing people for jobs that a large fraction of those that do make it through will never have.

Comparison Of US News To NRC Graduate Physics Rankings.

Ever wanted to visually compare the US News rankings of graduate schools to that of the National Research Council (NRC)?  Well, HappyQuark prepared such a visual for graduate physics programs just for you! (Thanks to Julianne at Cosmic Variance for pointing this out)

(Click to See.)

What I find interesting is the two rankings agree fairly well within the "error bars" of the NRC rankings.  I take this to mean both rankings do a reasonably consistent job and the NRC in some sense gives sensible error bars on everything.  (These are the NRC "Survey Quality" rankings for those who what to know how to reproduce this list.)

Update:  A comparison with the "Research Quality" NRC ranking is here:

Again, the two rankings seem to track well within the "errors" of the NRC rankings.

I should do the extra effort of mixing and matching different weightings for the NRC data and compare against US News, but I think the "Survey Quality" and "Research Quality" rankings are probably good enough to see the full picture.

Enjoy!

Living Life in a Demanding Profession

In my time at CU it has come up several times that graduate students often work very long hours.  An informal survey in my department showed that the average grad student puts in between 50 and 65 hours per week between classes, teaching, research, and other administrative responsibilities.  The numbers get worse for those of us that want a tenure-track position.  I have yet to hear anyone say that, on average, they worked less than 60 hours per week while they were trying to get tenure.  That's at least 1.5 full-time jobs for those that think a 40 hour work week actually means anything today.

I bring this up because one of the biggest challenges for those pursing a very time-intensive career path is who to balance career with the rest of life.  I am a firm believer that a life well-lived involves a lot more than a career, but how does one protect those other areas of life from being overrun by work-related stress?

If anybody knows about work-related stress, it's a football coach at a NCAA Division I-A university.  Legendary Kansas State coach Bill Snyder eats only one meal per day during football season to put more time into his job.  In his words,

"I never was a breakfast eater, and I learned that by working over the lunch hour, you could get a lot more done. That was so good, I did it during dinner."

 He eats his only meal of the day when he gets home at night - which is usually after midnight.  If that man has a work-life balance, I can't see where it would fit into his schedule.

This is what makes a new book by BYU coach Bronco Mendenhall so amazing.  Mendenhall has been the head coach at BYU for almost 6 seasons and has won over 70% of his games, including 4 consecutive top-25 finishes. Clearly he's good at his job, but the title of his book is "Football Comes 5th".  What comes in first through fourth?  Faith, family, knowledge, and friends... and then football. 

The book is specifically written for young people, however I'd love to give it a read anyway.  I'd love to know how he excels in a field with a total of 120 jobs where the competition thinks taking time out for dinner is a luxury, because that sounds a little too familiar to my field for comfort.

Most US Physics PhD's Don't Go On To a Post-Doc

When those of us crazy enough to pass-up more lucrative, less demanding career paths entered graduate school most of thought we'd get our PhD's, do a post-doc or two, and then become a tenure-track professor somewhere.  At some point most of us realized that most of us were not going to end up as professors at large research universities, but for me at least a post-doc seemed like a necessary step in the whatever career path I envisioned.  It turns out that piece of the Physics Career Path™ isn't as ironclad as I once thought.  From the excellent folks at the Statistical Research Center at the American Institute of Physics, below is the break-down of what those who earned PhD's in 2007 and 2008 were doing one year later.

Note that for Americans only 49% go on to a Post-Doc, meaning that there is something to do with a doctorate other than take a low-paying temporary research position in the hopes of getting a long-term research position with moderate pay.

Here's the trends over the past 30 years for all physics PhD's. 

And here is the breakdown by sub-field. 

Note that over 60% of astrophysicists end up in post-docs, so maybe the Physics Career Path™ is my destiny after all.

The Recession Has Finally Caught Up To UCI's Physics Department.

                                Image via Wikipedia

I have never had to pay any extra student fees at UC Irvine because the physics department has always covered them out of their own pocket.  I guess the recession has finally caught up to the department as, starting next year, the physics department will no longer be covering our fees out of their pocket.

However, only TAs and graders are affected as research assistants still have this covered somehow.  So personally I am still safe! :)

Here is the email:

Dear Graduate Students,

Every quarter, graduate students are assessed $256.50 in local fees (see below). Students who are hired as GSR's (Graduate Student Researcher) have this fee covered through GSR remission paid from the research grant, which covers 100% of fees and tuition. Unfortunately this does not apply to TA's and readers/graders. TA's and readers/graders receive only a partial fee remission, which does not include the local fees. In the past, the department has covered the cost of these local fees from our graduate student fellowship budget. A deficit in the graduate student fellowship fund has arisen because of the current university budget reductions, and as a consequence the department can no longer pay for the cost of the local fees. This is a regrettable but necessary decision.

Effective Winter 2011, graduate students hired as a TA or reader/grader will be responsible for covering their own local fees each quarter. Fees for Winter 2011 are due December 15. Information, as well as a detailed explanation of the fees and tuition, is provided below.

Papers: How to Organize Electronic Journal Articles

I hate journal articles.  I don't hate publishing research.  Journal articles are the standard means of publicly communicating research findings to the rest of the scientific community and I don't hate that either.  What I hate is the fact that I need to keep track of literally hundreds of 10-20 page documents - it's a logistical nightmare.  My undergraduate adviser accomplished this with a pair of 5 drawer filing cabinets.  My current adviser has dozens of boxes of reprints sitting on shelves in our computing lab.  I generally prefer electronic versions for storage purposes, but that becomes a mess when getting papers from ADS, the arXiv, and individual journal websites - all of which use their own convention for filenames.  I hate the piles of papers, either physical or electronic, that result from journal articles.

However I have recently found something that helps with the mess:  a piece of software appropriately entitled Papers.  First a couple of disclaimers - it is not freely available (it costs $25.20 for students, $42 for everyone else), it only works for Mac OS X, and it's really designed for people in biological sciences, so it doesn't integrate as well with the arXiv as I would like.  Also since the software is developed by a small company (6 people, some of whom are also full-time scientists), upgrades and bug-fixes are often unpredictable.

Now that I've got the negative stuff out of the way, let's talk about why I'm writing this post.  The bottom line is that Papers saves me time trying to find papers I want and allows me to effectively carry my entire library of journal articles with me wherever I take my laptop.  On top of that, Papers can extract bibliographic information from PDF files and then export it in BibTex format, allowing me to easily create reference lists for papers.  On top of all that, it provides a nice front-end portal to almost all of the major databases like NASA ADS, the arXiv, Google Scholar, and more to provide useful features.  Let's say, for example, I want to know if one of the leading dynamo theorists and perhaps the most prodigious writers of journal articles in astrophysics (13 peer-reviewed journal articles so far this year) Axel Brandenburg has published anything new.  Papers automatically interfaces with ADS (or another database of your choosing) and downloads the titles and bibliographic references to all of recent entries for all of the authors in my database.  Here's a screen shot to illustrate my example and to generally show how spiffy Papers looks (click to embiggen):

Say what you will about Macs but their GUI's sure are pretty.

The software is also easy to use as a PDF reader with note-taking feature. I regularly use it to read new articles on my bus rides to and from campus. They even have a new version for the iPad that allows you to read and annotate PDF's on Apple's latest wonder. If anyone would like to send me an iPad I'd be happy to write a review on that feature as well.

So if you hate piles of paper on your desk or trying to organized PDF's on your hard drive and happen to use a Mac, check it out. It's not a perfect solution, but it is the best thing I've found to alleviate my hatred of journal articles yet.

NRC Rankings Are Here... And Extremely Complicated

After several years of waiting with baited breath, the National Research Council's rankings of doctoral programs in the US is here.  In an effort to be true scientists, the rankings come with up to 61 categories which can be weighted in any way your heart desires.  Do you want to see rankings based on average workspace per grad student and availability of academic ethics training? Then look no further.

Another interesting, helpful, and extremely complicated feature is that instead of producing a single set of rankings, they have created probability distribution functions for each schools ranking and then listed the 90% confidence interval.  That means that in Astronomy and Astrophysics programs Harvard, Caltech, UC-Berkeley, and MIT are all ranked "1 - 9", with Arizona and Princeton ranked "1 - 10" and Johns Hopkins ranked "1 - 11".  While more correct given the errors in ranking procedures, it's certainly less fun to say that I'm 90% sure that my department is somewhere between the 5th and the 14th best program in the country using one set of weights for 61 categories measuring aspects of graduate education.

Motivation To Go To Grad School.

I was not motivated to go to graduate school for the money (despite this earlier post) or because of the state of the job market.  I wanted to go because I love physics and knew that in order to "be a physicist" studying the types of physics I was interested in I would need to get a PhD.

However, this plot made by PhD Comics gathered from from the Bureau of Labor and Statistics suggests that the state of the job market may be a major factor determining whether people decide to enter grad school or not.  As is noted, fluctuations in grad school enrollment in science and engineering and fluctuations in unemployment are strongly correlated.  When unemployment goes up, more people start going to grad school.

Thoughts?

Sad Truth About How Much Our PhDs Will Accomplish.

In the US, by the time most people get PhDs they will have been in some type of formal school for around 22-23 years and will spend many of their later years working way harder than their pay would seem to justify.  (How many people do you know with Bacholors/Masters degrees will spend years working ~50 hours a week and bring home in the ~$15-30,000 range for income?)

And yet this is what we will have to show for it.  From Gizmodo. (The site has more images so you should go check it out.)

1. "Imagine a circle that contains all of human knowledge":

2.  And now consider how much this circle will grow after including all the contributions you will make by the time you are rewarded a PhD:

And the really sad reality is the size of the dimple relative to the circle is probably far too generous. :)

NRC PhD Program Rankings Are Coming... For Reals This Time

The premier ranking of PhD programs in the US comes from the National Research Council's "Assessment of Research Doctorate Programs", in which leading academics compile the results of extensive surveys, publication data, grant information, and a bit of voodoo (just for fun).  This wealth of data is then made into some sort of ranking system, upon which every graduate program in the country will pounce and then come to the conclusion that they are ranked highly in some way.  More usefully, it will give prospective graduate students some sort of semi-objective ranking system upon which to make decisions about where to apply for graduate school.  The NRC has announced that this will be released on September 28th.

But wait, you say, wasn't this supposed to come out several years ago?  Why yes, I respond.  It is nominally set to happen every 10 years, with the last report being released in 1995.  But, you continue, wasn't there a post on this very blog a year ago claiming the release was imminent? I have no idea what you're talking about and I will not be taking any further questions. I will however say that I'm already planning a post for September 28th celebrating just how far CU has moved upward in the rankings. That is all.

What Happens to Grad Students

In honor of a fresh new batch of grad students here at CU (one of whom is my new office-mate) and some great data released by the American Institute of Physics Statistical Research Center, here's a quick look at what happens to graduate students on average in physics and astronomy programs across the country over the past decade.

Overall the number of incoming graduate students in physics and astronomy programs has risen by an average of 1.5% per year, which is only slightly faster than the overall population growth rate in the US of 1.2%.  The growth rates for PhD's awarded in physics and astronomy were 3.9% and 3.2% respectively, while the growth rates for terminal master's degrees was 2.7% in physics and a whooping 4.8% in astronomy (although that corresponds to an increase of 1.2 terminal master's degrees in astronomy per year).  In graphical form, here are the trends:

As you probably noticed, the most interesting feature in both plots isn't the trend, rather it's something consistent from year to year.  For both physics and astronomy programs, the total number of degrees awarded is only about three-quarters of the number of incoming students.  More precisely, if we assume that the grad student population is divergence-free and account for the overall trend in enrollment, the outcomes for physics and astronomy grad students are shown below.

For both types of programs, a little less than 30% of incoming graduate students will not earn a graduate degree.  Since the AIP only tracks American programs, there may be people who transfer to a foreign program, but for the most part there is a clear and sizable attrition in our graduate programs.  Interestingly while distribution between PhD's and Master's degrees varies considerably between physics and astronomy programs, the number leaving without a degree is nearly constant.

So what happens to the bright-eyed 1st year students?  At least for some of them nothing in the way of academic degrees.

****************************************

Update:  The AIP data gives a break-down by school of the incoming grad students and graduate degrees awarded, but only for 2009.  Here is a list of the program that had at least twice as many plus 1 (to account for noise) incoming students at degrees awarded in 2009.  Of course with only 1 year of data there is a lot of noise here, but it might give an idea of the types of programs that contribute to the nearly 30% attrition rate.  Program with more than 15 incoming grad students are in bold.

In order by state (alphabetically) and then alphabetical order, the physics programs are:  U. of Alabama-Birmingham, UC-Davis, San Jose State, Yale, U. of Central Florida, Florida A&M, Idaho State, IUPUI, U. of Louisville, Louisiana State-Baton Rouge, U. of New Orleans, U. of Maine, Clark, UMass-Amherst, UMass-Dartmouth, Michigan Tech, Mississippi State, U. of Nebraska-Lincoln, UNLV, Syracuse, North Carolina Central, Wake Forest, Ohio U., Portland State, Carnegie Mellon, U. of Puerto Rico-Mayaguez, U. of Puerto Rico-Rio Piedras, South Dakota School of Mines, U. of North Texas, Southern Methodist, Texas Tech, U. of Texas-Arlington, U. of Texas-San Antonio, Brigham Young, George Mason, Hampton, Old Dominion, U. of Virginia, U. of Wisconsin-Madison, U, of Wyoming

In the same order but with bold for program admitting more than 7, the astronomy programs are:  Yale, Florida Institute of Technology, U. of Virginia, U. of Washington

No immediate trends pop out of that list at me.  Anybody else see anything?

Handguns, The Supreme Court, and CU

As many of you are probably already aware, today the US Supreme Court ruled that laws banning the ownership of handguns and possessing a handgun in a private home are constitutional rights under the 2nd and 14th amendments. This continues a trend by the current court towards limiting government restrictions on handgun ownership and affirming the right to bear arms. This is a large national issue, the kind we usually avoid here, but if you will indulge me for just a minute I would like to show you how these large national issues can impact a university near you.

Along these same lines, two years ago the state of Utah passed a law making it illegal for state universities to ban those holding concealed weapons permits from carrying their weapons on campus. In Colorado most major universities including the University of Colorado (CU), Colorado State University, and the Colorado School of Mines have had campus regulations forbidding anyone, including concealed weapons permit holders, from bringing firearms on to campus. However in the wake the the Supreme Court's 2008 decision striking down Washington, D.C.'s handgun ban, a student at CU with a concealed weapons permit filed a lawsuit claiming the the university's ban violated his 2nd amendment rights. The suit was initially dismissed by the trial judge but in April of this year a state appellate court ruled that the trial judge had erred in his ruling and his rationale for doing so, remanding the case for trial. Last week the CU Board of Regents narrowly voted in favor of fighting the to keep the ban.

This has caused some controversy on CU's campus and various faculty and students groups have passed resolutions for or against the ban. One such group was the United Government of Graduate Students, to which I am my department's representative. Most of the time the hottest topic UGGS deals with is the fall picnic for grad students, so I felt a little over my head.

In my mind there are two questions here, both of which I believe have to be answered to properly address this question:

1. Should the university have the right to ban concealed weapons on its campus?
2. Should the university ban concealed weapons on its campus?

So what do you think? Does your university have a concealed weapons ban? Does it have the right to ban concealed weapons? Should it?

Grad Student Fees Survey Results

I'm sure you've been waiting with baited breath for the results of the grad student fees survey I pestered you with for the past 10 days or so. Well here's the data so enjoy!
Some observations and questions:

1. We clearly have a limited sample size - 13 responses is by no means a representative sample of any larger distribution, except maybe our blog readership, so we can't make too may general statements.
2. Our distribution appears to be quite bimodal. Since I pay something like $900 per semester in student fees, it's nice to know I'm not alone. Still, I can't help but be a little bitter towards those of you that pay less than a fifth of that.
3. Clearly not all student fees are created equal. To those of you that pay very little, is that because your school simply doesn't charge grad students fees or does your TA/RA appointment cover some or all of those fees?
4. If your school does charge heavy student fees, does your department let prospective students know about these fees during the admissions/recruiting process?

Comments are open - let's hear what you think.

Reminder: Take the Student Fees Survery

Just a quick reminder to take the student fees survey if you haven't already. I will post the results later this week.