*Concerns of Young Mathematicians* Volume 2, Issue 39 Nov. 30, 1994 An electronically distributed digest for discussions of the issues of concern to mathematicians at the beginning of their careers. PLEASE FORWARD TO ANY POTENTIALLY INTERESTED INDIVIDUALS Please, direct submissions and questions to Steve Kennedy skennedy@mathcs.carleton.edu , editor for the month of December. Next issue: Wednesday, 7 December. Editor for November: Frank Sottile sottile@math.toronto.edu Editor for December: Steve Kennedy skennedy@mathcs.carleton.edu To subscribe: Send mail to Charles Yeomans at cyeomans@s.ms.uky.edu Back issues and other information are available via anonymous FTP to ftp.ms.uky.edu, in pub3/mailing.lists/ymn-list. The views represented here do not necessarily represent those of the administrative board or membership of the Young Mathematicians Network. In fact it is their policy to have no policy, save perhaps the dissemination of information relevant to the concerns of young mathematicians. Table of Contents Item # Title ------ ----- 1 Editor's notes 2 1993-4 Job statistics 3 YMN Statement of Purpose 4 Education as a Concern of Young Mathematicians Ed Aboufadel & the YMN administrative board 5 Professional Development After the Ph.D.: Another Perspective Lyle Cochran 6 Response to Candidate's Responses to the YMN Questionnaire Bryan Hearsey 7 Job Application Suggestion: Rejection Cards Timothy Y. Chow 8 Academic Domination of (new) Ph.D. Job Market Jim Maxwell 9 Time for Advancement: Gender differences in Mathematics Employment Beth Ruskai 10 Closing Credits _________________________________________________________________________ Item #1 Editor's notes: Fast breaking news, A reader has informed me that the employment crisis that many young mathematicians face has made it to the national press. If only they were as wrong about this as their articles a decade ago extolling people to train for academic jobs. Here is what I was sent: "the latest Newsweek has an article on oversupply of math PhD's." This week we will begin with a compilation of some 1993-4 job statistics. These are essentially taken from the NOTICES, we have managed to augment the data in Table 3C, to give a finer view of the statistics. In line with our continuing effort to reinvent ourselves, I am including a copy of the original which was published in the first issue in July 1993. Please think this through and either bring your comments to San Francisco, or send them to Steve Kennedy, December's editor. Ed Aboufadel has summarized a recent flurry of discussion that the editorial board had on the issue of mathematics education. Many things came to light in that discussion, among them the fact that all of us from those with ostensibly research positions to those whose work is focussed on teaching are deeply concerned with pedagogical issues. Lyle Cochran writes that Curt Bennett's inaugural article about professional development after the Ph.D. did not address his needs. This letter initiated a discussion which eventually spun off into the material from which Ed's article is culled. Bryan Hearsey has shared with us his response to some of the comments made by candidates in the recent AMS election to the YMN questionnaire. These responses appeared in the 19 October issue. Timothy Chow has sent in a suggestion for facilitating the applicant rejection process. The idea, like that of the application cover sheet that the JCEO is promoting is that if enough people cooperate, the process will necessarily change, and perhaps become more streamlined. Jim Maxwell of the AMS has written a note emphasizing the extent of the domination of the US labour market for new Ph.D. mathematicians by academic employment. Beth Ruskai contributed the last piece. It pertains to the question, explored in the most recent YMN newsletter, Are women getting all the jobs? Ruskai has written a longer piece on this subject called "Time for Advancement," which contains 5-6 years worth of data and will appear in the December 1994 issue of FOCUS, the newsletter of the MAA. I hope you enjoy reading this, my last issue as editor, for now. It has been very interesting, and I hope that some of you derived some benefit from the articles we carried. I also wanted to thank our contributors. I hope to see you in San Francisco. Frank Sottile ___________________________________________________________________________ Item #2 1993-4 Job statistics: Expanded version of Table 3C p1125 Nov/Dec 1994 NOTICES Type of U.S citizens Non-U.S. Citizens Total Employment Male Female Male Female # % # % # % # % # % US PhD, Acad. 70 20 24 20 79 17 20 20 193 19 US Non-PhD 100 29 55 45 58 12 19 19 232 22 US Research 9 3 3 2 16 3 4 4 32 3 US non-Acad. 61 18 15 12 49 10 9 9 134 13 For. Acad 10 3 7 6 106 23 25 25 148 14 For. non-Acad 0 0 0 13 3 4 4 17 2 Not seeking Employment 6 2 1 1 7 1 0 0 14 1 Still seeking 51 15 10 8 57 12 11 11 129 12 Unknown - US 35 10 7 6 39 8 3 3 84 8 Unknown - For 1 1 1 43 9 7 7 52 5 Totals 343 123 467 102 1035 Abbreviations: `Acad.' means academic department, `For.' Means foreign (non- US) address The following is an excerpt from the article: "The 1994 unemployment level was the highest ever observed since employment information for new doctorates was first reported in 1971" _______________________________________________________________ Item #3 YMN statement The Young Mathematicians' Network (YMN) is (i) a mathematicians' group keeping the mathematical community honest about the job market and its future; (ii) a group providing information about job searches from both the inside and the outside; (iii) a support group for those on the job market; (iv) a group providing information on publishing, grant proposals, obtaining industry jobs, and other things which many of us did not get in graduate school and (v) a group to inform the mathematical community of the interests and concerns of the younger mathematicians. _____________________________________________________________________ Item #4 Education as a Concern of Young Mathematicians A little secret of our profession, something we don't hear much about in graduate school, is that most of our professional time is spent with teaching or activities related to teaching. There are a number issues related to teaching that, as new members of our profession, we should think about from time to time. Here's some food for thought: Issue #1 -- Doing Your Job. How much energy should you put into teaching? There are many thoughts on this. One commonly repeated idea is that you should not exert yourself much when it comes to teaching because hiring and tenure decisions come down to your research and your publications. A rebuttal to this is that SOME hiring and tenure decisions revolve exclusively around research, but that most of us will be spending most of our professional time teaching and will be evaluated in that way. If teaching is what we are being paid for, we had better invest the time, energy, and creativity to do it right. All in all, maybe it depends on who is paying your salary. Issue #2 -- Responsibility for Curriculum. The Mathematics Department is responsible for mathematics curriculum, this includes how the courses are structured, which topics are taught, which texts are used, how big classes will be, and who will teach which classes. What do you think about how this responsibility is being carried out where you work? What would you have to do if you want to change something? What effect does the administration have on these decisions? Here's an example: at a school that could be classified as a "research center", until a few years ago, every section of every mathematics class was held to a normal classroom size. The only big school characteristic was to have uniform exams in the calculus classes; this was to make the students believe that all sections were learning the same thing. In response to financial pressure from above, the department was basically forced to abandon this in exchange for large lecture-hall type classes, just like the other big universities. This shows the commitment of a certain group of administrators to higher education. Issue #3 -- Are Some Doctorates Better Than Others? Many mathematics department have a mission to train future high school mathematics teachers. Should this be done by Ph.D.'s in Mathematics, or Ph.D.'s in Mathematics Education? There is a difference. Also, some Ph.D.'s in Mathematics look down on Ph.D.'s in Mathematics Education. Others don't. One person told me that he doesn't have a lot of respect for some of the research done in Mathematics Education, but then admitted that he didn't know much of the research. He finds it hard to sify through the research to find what is good. Does that Math Ed. crowd treat education as some exact science? Is teaching a highly individualized art form? Issue #4 -- Oh, Yeah? Reform THIS! Calculus reform is a decade old. Starting with a few conferences, a few experiments, and a few grants, calculus reform has turned into a major initiative. There are at least a half dozen projects which are being tested broadly right now, including the Harvard project and the Duke project. Some professors scorn all of this reform work, others embrace it whole-heartedly. What's an intelligent young mathematician to do? Read and listen and experiment. Have you read any of the NCTM Standards for the Teaching of Mathematics? Do you realize how influential they have been? What do you know about using the computer in your teaching? Some thoughts I have heard: any reform which fails to take into consideration the fact that learning is the key (as opposed to teaching) is doomed to failure. What works at Harvard will inevitably fail at most four year colleges. The interactive style of learning is a big improvement over the lecture format. What's next, reformed differential geometry? Whatever you think about these issues, ultimately it is a question of separating myths from realities. Is it a reality that there are "research schools" and "teaching schools" and nothing in between? Is it a reality that "calclus reform" means making calclus easier? Is it a reality that there are a lot of open positions right now for someone with a degree in Mathematics Education? Is it a reality that your research is "your work" and your teaching is that thing you have to do? These questions are rhetorical; my answers being No, No, Yes, No, but I may be wrong. As mathematicians, though, we should be interested in these issues. Written by Edward Aboufadel, with ideas and statements by several members of the YMN Administrative Board. aboufade@scus1.ctstateu.edu ________________________________________________________________________ Item #5 Professional Development After the Ph.D.: Another Perspective I am writing this note in response to Curtis Bennett's article on `Professional Development after the Ph.D.'. Bennett's target audience seemed to be young mathematicians at the university level where research and publication is an important part of the tenure process. I decided to write in a few comments from the perspective of a young professor at a small college. Research and publication is not the center of attention in my evaluation process. While I am encouraged to continue research in pure mathematics, I am also encouraged to pursue scholarly activities directly related to my teaching. I will briefly describe a couple of my current interests and activities below. Some of my current interests include calculus reform and integrating technology into the classroom. Last summer I attended a workshop, sponsored by the Harvard Calculus Consortium, on calculus reform. The workshop helped me to become familiar with the reform movement. Next semester, I will be using the Harvard Consortium Calculus textbook for the first time. This will be a radical approach to teaching calculus and I must admit that I am a little scared about using this new approach. Although I consider myself somewhat of a skeptic of the reform movement, I feel that I need to try it out and see how I like it. I'll try to inform the YMN on my experiences. By the way, the Harvard textbook is the most popular reform calculus textbook currently being used - over 300 colleges and universities have adopted this textbook. I encourage young mathematicians to attend summer workshops on calculus reform. The conference I attended was paid for by the NSF - all I had to do was sign up for the conference. As mentioned earlier, I am also interested in using technology in the classroom. Next semester, I will be using Mathematica in a differential equations course and I am starting to write some curriculum for a linear algebra course that I will be teaching next year. We also use TI-82 graphing calculators in our lower level courses. I would like to hear from other members of the YMN about their experiences in calculus reform and technology. I would also like to know what other small colleges consider important in the tenure process. Lyle Cochran Fresno Pacific College _______________________________________________________________ Item #6 Response to Candidate's Responses to the YMN Questionnaire [The original questionnaire appeared in the 19 October issue] Although I am not a 'young' mathematician, I read your newsletter with interest. Below is my reaction to some of the statements made by some of the candidates for AMS offices. I offer these thoughts as seeds for discussion. The AMS candidate responses, printed in a recent issue, highlight attitudes prevalent in the mathematics community. Below are paraphrases of five excerpts. They are followed by my reaction and some opinions. 1. Ph.D.'s are being over produced and their number should be cut down by about 50%. Accomplish this by jacking up the requirements for a Ph.D. Demand theses to be more substantial, require at least five published papers in refereed journals. My translation: They are mostly going to be teachers, so make them publish more papers! This statement was followed by some positive suggestions about improving Ph.D. candidates. But, those suggestions lose credibility when more research is given as the qualifying criterion, not breadth, teaching, and communication. We need able mathematicians, but most must be primarily interested in helping all students learn mathematics. Most students are learning mathematics as a tool for other fields. Increasing research standards will produce mathematicians no more suitably prepared for, and more frustrated by, the vast majority of academic positions. 2. Make sure that all mathematics is taught by mathematicians. Get rid of engineers and physicists teaching calculus, probability. My Translation: Those are our jobs, give them back! Why are other people teaching mathematics? Have we asked what they need and want done? Do we present mathematics our way, ignoring the concerns of our clients? Do we teach statistics as if it were mathematics? To recapture our territory we must serve those who need our expertise. 3. Sad to say, no enterprise today can survive without effective public relations. Traditionally, mathematicians have been the worst among the sciences in public relations. We cannot survive without a change in this attitude. My translation: When all else fails, blame communications! There has never been a time when there was available more good literature on what mathematicians do. The public does not question the need for mathematics. Students do not lack for sources of information on careers. We will never convince the world that the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem is important. We need to convince people of the value of mathematical preparation, and our role in providing it. We are not going to convince the public of the value of our private mathematical pleasures. For most of us, our vocation has to be teaching mathematics, our avocation doing mathematics. 4. Of course, the emphasis and highest priority of Ph.D. programs should be focused on training scholars. Still, the system should value what highly trained mathematical scientists bring to professions outside of academia. My Translation: Produce a better scholar and they will beat a path to our door. Most of the jobs in mathematics are not for scholars. As mathematics departments focus on their narrow view of scholarship they drive away much of their work. It could be that the rest of the world is wrong, but even if they are it does not help us. 5. Even of those finding academic employment, the level of the institutions at which they are taking jobs has been falling. But basically the current problem is not that students are not getting the training they want, it's that they're not getting the jobs they want. My translation: Its the market that's wrong, not our student preparation. If we are going to produce Ph.D. mathematicians for the market, then we need to recognize what the market wants. We should desire the placement of well qualified graduates in all mathematics positions. We should not imply that taking a job at a lower level institution is unfortunate. We have a system which only appreciates making it to the major leagues, then we fret when most can't. For many students, the training they want is what they think they need. They trust us to provide it. For most we are not doing a very good job. Bryan Hearsey Chairman Department of Mathematical Sciences Lebanon Valley College HEARSEY@acad.lvc.edu ______________________________________________________________ Item #7 Job Application Suggestion: Rejection Cards After hearing stories of people never hearing from colleges from which they were rejected, and after receiving an acknowledgment letter that explicitly said that they would not contact me again unless they were interested in hiring me, I got the idea of enclosing two self-addressed stamped postcards in each of my applications. The first one says: Thank you for your application. We have filed it and will contact you if you make our short list. Otherwise, ___ we will send you the rejection card that you provided. ___ we regret that we cannot contact you again since we have so many applicants. We wish you the best in your job search. The second one is simply a "We regret that we have filled the position [etc.]" card. I don't know how well this idea will work, but I'm passing it on to those of you who are still preparing applications because it seems to me that my idea will only work if sufficiently many people do it. Note however that the U.S. Postal Service is raising its rates early in 1995. Timothy Y. Chow tycchow@math.mit.edu ______________________________________________________________ Item #8 Academic Domination of Ph.D. Job Market I am writing to elaborate on a rather significant datum that was embedded in one of the questions to the AMS candidates (Vol. 2, Issue 33, October 19, 1994). I believe that the datum reported may be misinterpreted so as to understate the extent to which the U.S. labor market for new Ph.D. mathematical scientists (newdocs for short) is dominated by academic employment. Question 2 states: "... fewer than 60% of new Ph.D.'s obtain academic employment." I suspect that this quote is based on the second report of the 1993 Annual AMS-IMS-MAA Survey reported in the recent July/August issue of NOTICES. The report states (page 599): "Of the 1,076 [new doctoral recipients], 52% assumed academic employment in the U.S., and 68% took academic employment in the U.S. or other countries. Both of these percentages are down from 1991-1992 and 1990-1991." The figure 1,076 includes 187 individuals who reported taking foreign employment as well as 114 who were not employed. I believe it is more informative to look only at the newdocs who reported U.S. employment and then examine the proportions who took employment in the three basic employment sectors reported in the Annual Survey: academic, government, and business and industry. (Note: the category "Research Institutes" is most appropriately included with the academic sector.) I happen to have handy figures of this sort for the period from 1978 through 1993. Academic employment was just over 70% in 1978, grew slowly to 80% between 1981 and 1988, and remained at 80% until 1993 when it dropped to 77%. Business and industry was just over 20% in 1978, declined slowly to a low of about 15% in 1990 and has returned to almost 20% in 1993. Employment in government was above 5% in 1978 and has remained at or below 5% since then. Keep in mind that these relatively stable percentages mask a significant fluctuation in the actual numbers of newdocs employed in each of these sectors over this interval. The figures above serve to emphasize the extent to which the employment prospects for each year's newdocs are influenced by the pressures in the academic labor market. I am hopeful that a future report of the AMS-IMS-MAA Annual Survey report will be able to elaborate more on information of this sort. Regards, Dr. Jim Maxwell Associate Executive Director, Professional Programs and Services American Mathematical Society JWM@MATH.AMS.ORG ______________________________________________________________ Item #9 Time for Advancement: Gender differences in Mathematics Employment At the BMS math chairs meeting on Sat. [October 29], John Fulton reported on the most recent AMS-IMS-MAA survey to appear in the Nov. Notices. Unfortunately, there was an overemphasis on an apparent gender differential in % of 93 Ph.D.'s who are unemployed, with the repeated claim that the burden fell most heavily on US citizen men. In fact, the more detailed data revealed a far more complex picture, suggesting that other factors may be responsible for the difference. In particular: * women are much more likely to get Ph.D.'s in statistics, where the unemployment rate is significantly lower. * women are Not getting positions at PhD math departments in excess of their proportion in the pool * US citizen women are much, much more likely to get first positions at MS and Bachelor's math departments. than either US citizen men or non-citizens. Some facts for 1993 PhD's: 18% (75/420) of PhD's FROM group I math depts. went to women 14% (11/78) of those getting positions AT group I were women 33% (52/157) of PhD's FROM group IV (statistics) depts. went to women 42% (10/24) of those getting positions AT group IV were women 7.4% (17/228) of PhD's in probability/statistics were reported as unemployed 22% of all math PhD'S went to women 26% of all math PhD'S to US citizens went to women 21% of those getting positions AT groups I-III (math PhD) were women 19% of those getting positions AT group I or a research institute were women 37.5% of those getting positions AT master's depts were women 34% (10/24) of those getting positions AT 4-year colleges were women 16% of those reported as unemployed were women Looking at the data slightly differently 15% of US citizen Men were reported unemployed 8% of US citizen Women were reported unemployed 12% of non-citizen Men were reported unemployed 11% of non-citizen Women were reported unemployed 20% of US citizen Men got positions in PhD math depts. 20% of US citizen Women got positions in PhD math depts. 29% of US citizen Men got positions in non-PhD math depts. 45% of US citizen Women got positions in non-PhD math depts. Clearly there are many causes for concern, including high unemployment and underemployment for ALL groups of new PhD's. Those who are interested, should read the full report in the Nov. Notices rather than jumping to simplistic conclusions on the basis of partial data. Additional information on employment patterns in the 90's is summarized in my article "Time for Advancement" to appear in the Dec. MAA Focus. (e-mail and hard-copy preprints are available on request.) Beth Ruskai, JCW chair Chair, Joint Committee on Women in the Mathematical Sciences _______________________________________________________________ Item #10 Closing Credits The Young Mathematicians' Network is administered by: Charles Yeomans cyeomans@s.ms.uky.edu Mark Winstead mwwinst@gcr.com Frank Sottile sottile@math.toronto.edu Vic Perera vperera@silver.ucs.indiana.edu Franklin Mendivil mendivil@math.gatech.edu Kevin Madigan madigan@math.nwu.edu Steve Kennedy skennedy@mathcs.carleton.edu Matt Hudelson hudelson@math.washington.edu Bob Dobrow dobrow@cam.nist.gov Lyle Cochran address change pending Neil Calkin calkin@math.gatech.edu Wendy Brunzie brunzie@turing.ucdavis.edu Curtis Bennett cbennet@andy.bgsu.edu Frank Arlinghaus frank@math.ysu.edu Edward Aboufadel aboufade@scus1.ctstateu.edu _______________________________________________________________ End of Journal -- Next week: The Discussion Continues