Higher Education

Nasir Memon, New York University

Each morning seems to bring new reports of hacks, privacy breaches, threats to national defense or our critical infrastructure and even shutdowns of hospitals. As the attacks become more sophisticated and more frequently perpetrated by nation-states and criminal syndicates, the shortage of defenders only grows more serious: By 2020, the cybersecurity industry will need 1.5 million more workers than will be qualified for jobs.

In 2003, I founded Cyber Security Awareness Week (CSAW) with a group of students, with the simple goal of attracting more engineering students to our cybersecurity lab. We designed competitions allowing students to participate in real-world situations that tested both their knowledge and their ability to improvise and design new solutions for security problems. In the past decade-plus, our effort has enjoyed growing interest from educators, students, companies and governments, and shows a way to closing the coming cybersecurity workforce shortage.

Today, with as many as 20,000 students from around the globe participating, CSAW is the largest student-run cybersecurity event in the world. Recruiters from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and many large corporations observe and judge each competition. (Registration for this year’s competition is still open for a little while.)

But the pipeline for cybersecurity talent cannot begin in universities. High school students and teachers also participate in CSAW events to teach young people the computer science and mathematics skills that will allow them to succeed at the university level.

Teaching students to be adversarial

The main draw of CSAW is our Capture the Flag event, a contest in which the team members must pool their skills to learn new hacking methods in a series of real-world scenarios. Named after the outdoor game where two teams play to find and steal the enemy’s hidden flag, it includes multiple games that cover a broad range of information security skills, such as cryptography (code-making and breaking), steganography (hiding messages in innocent-looking images or videos) and mobile security.

Teams start by being assigned systems that have security flaws, and are given a certain amount of time to identify and fix them. Then each team is set against an opponent, and must protect its own system while attacking the other team’s. The hidden “flags” are data files stored on the opposing system. In the real world, these would contain critical information – such as credit card numbers or codes for controlling weapons. In the game, they contain information that proves a team “captured” that “flag,” with which the team is awarded a certain number of points, based on how difficult that particular challenge was.

There are many Capture the Flag competitions held throughout the country, which helps make our event the most popular of the week’s six competitions. It is also the most grueling: Teams must work for 36 hours straight, testing each participant’s ability to stay focused enough to create new solutions to emerging problems.

This type of challenge-based learning is vital in a field in which new threats emerge regularly. It also instills in students an adversarial mindset, which is an essential quality for successful security professionals. Learning the different ways to break a system firsthand is a vital first step to learning how to secure it.

Adapting on the fly

In one CSAW competition, the Embedded Security Challenge, students break into teams that must be able to work quickly at both attacking and defending each other from various threats. This is an attack/defense game like Capture the Flag, but focuses on vulnerabilities in hardware, rather than software. Last year, competitors were tasked with altering the digital results of a mock election – exposing potentially real threats to everyday elections.

This ability to quickly adapt as new threats are perceived is a top priority for security personnel. That’s a key element of all CSAW competitions – the idea that successful cybersecurity is not limited to mastering what’s known. Rather, students and professionals alike must constantly push their abilities to intercept future threats in an ever-evolving field. The cybersecurity industry – and all operations that rely on it, from small businesses to major military installations – depend on its practitioners’ ability to innovate. Every year, we change the types of challenges to reflect new threats, such as the recent rise of ransomware, for example.

Cybersecurity efforts must extend well beyond national borders; this year CSAW will dramatically increase its international activities. A collaboration with NYU Abu Dhabi and the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur will allow teams in the Middle East, India, North Africa and the United States to compete simultaneously. The competitors in these games in an educational setting, in the U.S. and around the world, will – not long from now – be the protectors of our most sensitive personal and national data. We need them to be prepared.

Nasir Memon, Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, New York University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Michael Betz, The Ohio State University

College graduates of the new millennium are different than previous generations. Not just because they prefer Snapchat to email and have mountains of school loans, but also because of their choices of where to live.

In the past, several factors such as the proportion of a city’s workers who are college educated, job prospects, income levels, and city amenities have influenced college graduates’ decisions on where to live.

So, are college graduates looking for the same things as they did in the earlier decades? Or has a changing world affected what attracts educated workers?

These choices matter to city officials, who work hard to attract the next generation of skilled workers through the lure of exciting new entertainment districts or by becoming a hub of a trendy new industry.

As a regional economics researcher, studying the migration of highly skilled workers, I found that there have been changes in how college graduates choose where they go to work, which has implications for the health of the national economy.

Grads in the 1990s

Previous research found that in the 1990s – after controlling for lots of other city characteristics like population, income and amenities – the proportion of the population with a college degree increased more in cities that already had lots of college grads.

For example, small college towns like Boulder and Ann Arbor had some of the country’s highest proportions of populations holding a bachelor’s degree – around 42 percent of the population at the start of the 1990s.

These towns ranked first and eleventh in the population of college graduates. Over the next decade, they added 10.2 and 6.2 percentage points to their respective totals.

There are many reasons why highly educated workers might be attracted to towns with a high population of college graduates.

One, there is evidence that productivity from better educated workers can “spill over” to other workers, enabling them to earn higher wages. Two, better educated places tend to offer more cultural amenities and entertainment options, which college graduates value highly.

If this trend goes on long enough, it could lead to segregation according to education level across cities, as cities with better educated workers will continue to attract more educated workers. In fact, one prior study suggests this is exactly what happened in the three decades between 1970 to 2000.

We were interested in seeing whether these trends still held, or if different factors were now luring graduates. So what is this generation of graduates looking for?

Large cities attract grads

A lot has changed for colleges graduates of the new millennium.

After all, in the last decade there have been two recessions (including the Great Recession in 2008), a continued decline in overall interstate migration, and significant industry restructuring from the loss of so many manufacturing jobs. Other studies have highlighted the trend of college-age adults living with their parents longer, providing some evidence that the struggling economy was swaying behaviors.

We wanted to see if the same economic forces had also changed where college graduates were moving.

We used data from the U.S. Census on the share of population who are college graduates in 358 Metropolitan Statistical Areas in the United States for two separate decades: 1990-2000 and 2000-2010. We controlled for many other city characteristics like size, median income and natural amenities.

We found it was not necessarily the better educated cities that attracted graduates as in the 1990s, rather it was the large cities (holding city education levels constant) that attracted graduates post-2000.

Bigger cities usually have more diversified economies and therefore pose less risk of unemployment. It could be that graduates preferred places where they would increase their odds of landing any job during a time when the overall economy was struggling.

In previous decades graduates might have risked failure by chasing down that dream job in a city that was less diversified but more risky. Take Des Moines, Iowa, for example. It is a city of about 200,000 people that is highly specialized in the insurance industry. The percent of the population who were college grads increased six percent in the 1990s, but had slowed to less than four percent post-2000.

We believe, that because economy was so strong in the 1990s, graduates were willing to take those risks. So they went to cities with industries that employed highly educated people and were growing fast, but which also were more risky. If things didn’t work out, they believed they could always find a decent job somewhere else.

In the first decade post-2000, much of that perceived job security had eroded.

What can policymakers do

Our research is important because it further refines models of regional college graduate growth and updates our understanding of how the mix of factors influencing city college graduate growth has changed in the new millennium.

The link between education and economic growth is well-established and intuitive. Better educated workers are more productive in their jobs and more likely to start new businesses that create even more jobs. College graduates are more productive workers, have higher civic engagement, and help create new businesses.

Because of these things, our results have important policy implications for decision-makers aiming to lure talented workers to their cities. While city officials can do little to make their cities quickly grow in population, they can enact policies such as investing in education and supporting local entrepreneurs that create more stable labor markets.

Michael Betz, Assistant Professor of Human Development and Family Science, The Ohio State University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Samantha Bernstein, University of Southern California and Adrianna Kezar, University of Southern California

The State College of Florida recently scrapped tenure for incoming faculty. New professors at this public university will be hired on the basis of annual contracts that the school can decline to renew at any time.

The decision has been highly controversial. But this is not the first time tenure has come under attack. In 2015, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker called for a reevaluation of state laws on tenure and shared governance. As of March 2016, a new policy at the University of Wisconsin has made faculty vulnerable to lay offs.

The tenure system provides lifetime guarantees of employment for faculty members. The purpose is to protect academic freedom – a fundamental value in higher education that allows scholars to explore controversial topics in their research and teaching without fear of being fired.

It also ensures that faculty can voice their opinions with university administration and ensure that academic values are protected, particularly from the increasingly corporate ideals invading higher education institutions.

Our research on the changing profile of university faculty shows that while the university enterprise has transformed dramatically in the last hundred years, the tenure employment model remains largely unchanged. So, has the tenure model become outdated? And if so, is it time to eliminate it altogether?

Growth of adjunct faculty

The demographic of higher education faculty has changed a lot in recent years. To start with, there are very few tenured faculty members left within higher education.

Tenure-track refers to that class of professors who are hired specifically to pursue tenure, based largely on their potential for producing research. Only 30 percent of faculty are now on the tenure-track, while 70 percent of faculty are “contingent”. Contingent faculty are often referred to as “adjuncts” or “non-tenure track faculty.” They are usually hired with the understanding that tenure is not in their future at that particular university, and they teach either part-time or full-time on a semester-to-semester or yearly basis.

Most contingent faculty have short-term contracts which may or may not be renewed at the end of the contract term. As of 2010, 52 percent of contingent faculty had semester-to-semester part-time appointments and 18 percent had full-time yearly appointments.

Researchers suggest that the increase in contingent appointments is a result of the tenure model’s failure to adapt with the significant and rapid changes that have occurred in colleges and universities over the last 50 years.

The most significant of these changes is the rise of teaching-focused institutions, the largest growth being in the community college, technical college and urban institutions that have a primary mission to educate students with little or no research mission. Between 1952 and 1972 the number of community colleges in the United States nearly doubled, from 594 to 1141, to accommodate a large increase in student enrollments, leaving four-year institutions to focus on research and development.

Campuses changed, not tenure system

Most commentators have described the growth of contingent faculty as a response to financial pressures in the 1990s.

But our research shows that this growth actually began in the 1970s when market fluctuations caused unexpected growths in college enrollment. Between 1945 and 1975, college enrollment increased in the United States by 500 percent. However, rising costs and a recession in the late 1970’s forced administrators to seek out part-time faculty to work for lower wages in order to accommodate these students. The practice increased dramatically thereafter.

In addition to enrollment changes, government funding for higher education decreased in the late 1980s and ‘90s. The demand for new courses and programs was uncertain, and so campuses needed more flexibility in faculty hiring.

Further, over the last 20 years new technologies have created new learning environments and opportunities to teach online.

Tenure-track faculty incentivized to conduct research were typically not interested in investing time to learn about new teaching technologies. Consequently, a strong demand for online teaching pushed institutions into hiring contingent faculty to fill these roles.

As a result, what we have today is a disparity between the existing incentive structures that reward research-oriented, tenure-track faculty and the increased demand for good teaching.

Why the contingent faculty model hurts

Critics of tenure argue that the tenure model, with its research-based incentives, does little to improve student outcomes. But the same can be said of the new teaching model that relies so heavily on contingent faculty – it is not necessarily designed to support student learning.

Research on contingent faculty employment models illustrates that they are poorly designed and lack many of the support systems needed to foster positive faculty performance.

For example, unlike tenure-track faculty, contingent faculty have little or no involvement in curriculum planning or university governance, little or no access to professional development, mentoring, orientations, evaluation, campus resources or administrative support; and they are often unaware of institutional goals and outcomes.

Furthermore, students have limited access to or interaction with these faculty members, which research suggests is one of the most significant factors impacting student outcomes such as learning, retention and graduation.

Studies have shown that student-faculty interaction provides students with access to resources, mentoring and encouragement, and allows them to better engage with subject material.

Recent research on contingent faculty has also identified some consistent and disturbing trends related to student outcomes that illustrate problems related to new faculty workforce models. These include poor performance and lower graduation rates for students who take more courses with contingent faculty, and lower transfer rates from two-year to four-year institutions.

Using transcripts, faculty employment and institutional data from California’s 107 community colleges, researchers Audrey Jaeger and Kevin Eagan found that for every 10 percent increase in students’ exposure to part-time faculty instruction, they became 2 percent less likely to transfer from two-year to four-year institutions, and 1 percent less likely to graduate.

Additionally, studies of contingent faculties’ instructional practices suggest that they tend to use fewer active learning, student-centered teaching approaches. They are also less engaged with new and culturally-sensitive teaching approaches (strategies encouraging acknowledgment of student differences in a way that promotes equity and respect).

Consequently today, when the pool of Ph.D. students is growing, the number of tenure-track positions available for graduates is shrinking. As a result, a disconnect has evolved between the types and number of Ph.D.s on the job market in search of tenure, and the needs of, and jobs available within, colleges and universities.

Some estimates show that recent graduates have less than a 50 percent chance of obtaining a tenure-track position. Furthermore, it is graduates from the top-ranked quarter of graduate schools who make up more than three quarters of tenure-track faculty in the United States and Canada, specifically in the fields of computer science, business and history.

A new tenure system?

We appear to be at a crossroads. The higher education enterprise has changed, but the traditional tenure model has stayed the same. The truth is that universities need faculty who are dedicated to teaching, but the most persuasive argument in support of tenure – its role in protecting academic freedom– has come to be too narrowly associated with research.

Academic freedom was always meant to extend to the classroom – to allow faculty to teach freely, in line with the search for truth, no matter how controversial the subject matter. Eliminating tenure completely will do little to protect academic values or improve student performance.

Instead, the most promising proposal that has emerged many times over the last 30 years is to rethink the traditional tenure system in a way that would incentivize excellent teaching, and create teaching-intensive tenure-track positions.

Under an incentive system, when considering whether to grant tenure, committees can take into account excellence in teaching, by way of student evaluations, peer review, or teaching awards. For faculty on a teaching-intensive track, tenure decisions would be made based primarily on their teaching, with little or no weight given to research.

Though not every contingent faculty member would be eligible for such positions, these alternative models can change the incentive structures inherent in the academic profession. They may be able to remove the negative stigmas surrounding teaching in the academy and may eliminate the class-based distinctions between research and teaching faculty that have resulted from the traditional tenure model.

Samantha Bernstein, PhD Student, University of Southern California and Adrianna Kezar, Professor of Higher Edcuation, University of Southern California

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.