Reminder: People who think of themselves as getting prestige from their college education may view something that challenges the prestige of college as an attack on their hard-won status.
Reminder 2: College is broken. It needs challenging.
Reminder 2: College is broken. It needs challenging.
At that meeting I watched a woman with a doctorate in English scream at the future (and former) Mayor of California because he was telling her they'd have to cut her six figure salary. Even though she admitted her students test scores were abysmal and everyone in the room knows she couldn't go anywhere else and get paid the same rate she still felt she was entitled to the money on her degree alone.
Bottom line (IMHO): If society is to move forward people who deify the degree need to be relieved of that delusion even if it's painful to them.
I'm not arguing about her pay, that's up to the market. However, the condescending tone of your post shows that you have zero inkling of what's involved in the PhD process (no worries, most people don't even when they think they do). I've lived through my wifes years in PhD school (accounting). It was as intense a 5 years as I could imagine anyone enduring.
So I'm absolutely condescending of people who think because they went through a process of any kind they are automatically entitled to respect and high pay. I respect people who prove their worth to society.
My answer:
A difficult accomplishment should be its own reward irrespective of the outside world.
A useful difficult accomplishment will be rewarded by the outside world.
In her case she overlaps very heavily with behavioral economics (think freakonomics, predictably irrational, etc...). It can be pretty amusing watching these academics fight over what is in the realm of behavioral accounting and what is within economics. No one really knows;)
There is a capital markets side of accounting research which is much more focused on the analysis of accounting in the wild.
It is hard to sort of put your finger on what accounting research is. It does exist tho:)
If they have to argue about this, then they've probably drawn the dividing lines between their categories wrong, and they're trying to shoehorn new ideas into an ill-fitting taxonomy rather than making the taxonomy accurate.
(Related: where the hell does computer science fit? Is it a science, or a branch of applied math, or a craft, or an engineering discipline? Or perhaps an exotic species of potato? Sometimes I think we need the ghost of Alfred Korzybski to rise from the grave and harangue people.)
If it's hard-hitting enough for you to post as a rebuttal, it's hard-hitting enough for you to explain your reasoning for. I had a useful, fulfilling, transformative college experience that challenged my preconceptions and taught me how to reason and appreciate complexity; I will readily admit to the financial privilege I enjoyed going in, but I couldn't have done it without financial aid and I knew plenty of other people who went in with much weaker financial backgrounds than me who did just fine (i.e. without debilitating debt afterwards).
So please, explain to me how "college is broken". I don't mind challenging it, and I would certainly agree on an anecdotal basis at least that some colleges and external systems surrounding them are broken (e.g. SAT), but asserting "college is broken" without further explanation isn't a meaningful challenge--it's a provocation, and one I will gladly take.
* Big lecture classes, where a professor delivers canned lectures to enormous crowds of people as though we still lived before the invention of online video and the printing press. As far as I can tell, this is strictly inferior to having a really good teacher record lectures, then put them online. Preferably with an option to play them at 1.4--2x speed. This would also free up time and resources to focus on the parts of the educational experience where college can be better than online lecture videos plus a textbook.
* Often, a whole class of people has to proceed through a set list of topics in lock-step. Some people will find this too slow, and others too fast, for any given topic. What if you want some time to really think through a particular topic? There's no time; you've got to go on to the next thing. And then at the end of the semester, there's a flurry of activity as people finish up final projects and study for exams, and then BAM! It's over!
* The workload tends to be heavily skewed to the end of the semester, so people seldom have enough time to devote to finishing projects properly. This has caused no end of frustration.
* People are crazy-focused on grades, often at the expense of their education. Grades are a clumsy proxy for learning. It's like trying to measure someone's happiness by how much they smile: there's a correlation, sure, but telling someone to smile more is not the best way to make them happier.
I could list more, but that should be enough for starters. Would you dispute the claim that such a system is at least a little broken? Or, if you prefer, blatantly sub-optimal?
I went to a liberal arts school, and a good one. I was never in a large lecture class (my CS101 class had 12 students in it), professors were mandated to have regular office hours and email availability to meet with students outside of classes for extra discussions and help, workloads were reasonably balanced over time, and no one really cared about grades or GPAs as long as they weren't so low that you got put on probation. (It goes without saying that we also didn't have anything resembling class rank, which is an awful concept in all possible ways.) In other words, none of those were issues in my college experience.
Thus, to me, that sounds more like an argument that "X College is broken" than "college is broken". Do some colleges offer sub-optimal educational experiences? I wouldn't doubt it. Do all of them? Clearly not, for those reasons at least.
As an example, when I was in college, I received a grant from the Kauffman Foundation( 1 ) to pursue an idea myself and some friends had for a new type of 3-d visualization device. In the end we determined our idea was infeasible as a commercial technology (technical limitations based on our design), but through an arrangement between the Foundation and my college, we were able to work on the prototype and still receive credit so that all of us graduated on time (we were required to use the prototype and lessons learned as a senior project, paper and presentation, along with intermediate documentation to prove we were progressing and continuing our education).
Had we been forced to drop out, we would have failed and not even had a degree to show for it. Had we chosen to drop out, it would have been our decision based on our belief in the idea, instead of as a requirement for pursuing it.
( 1 ) http://www.kauffman.org/about-foundation/foundation-overview...
[edit] formatting.