Job Outlook Improves Since 2008

Good news for the Class of 2011 (other than Conan O’Brien being your commencement speaker).  The job outlook is improving for graduating seniors since the 2008 financial crisis, according to U.S. News & World Report.  In fact, employers are hiring 19.3 percent of more college grads compared to last year, says a quarterly report by the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE).  The bad news?  You’re graduating.  

With the unemployment rate at 9.2 percent, what can attribute to employers' increasing demand for college graduates?  Acting codirector of career services at Dartmouth, Monica Wilson, says that employers want “younger folks” who understand how to use social media sites.  New job titles like “social media consultant” and “social media strategist” are common and “ever evolving,” says Wilson.  Companies are also increasingly hiring interns for social media positions.  In fact, the NACE study found that 58 percent of interns who graduated in 2010 became full-time employees. 

In a study done by Michael Stelzner, founder of SocialMediaExaminer.com, 93 percent of markets use social media to market their businesses, and 92 percent of markets are using Facebook.  It takes more than sending a Tweet or updating your Facebook status, however, to be knowledgeable about social media.  Creative, innovative thinking for new industries is necessary, and students must understand how to use Google Analytics and other web tools.  Wilson says, “You not only have to be fairly fluent in what's out there and willing to put the time in to really understand how the different vehicles work, but you [also] have to be able to evaluate and make recommendations that have a factual basis to them.  You can’t call yourself an expert [just] because you’re on Twitter or Facebook.”

--Melanie Wilcox

A Protest Worth Getting Behind?

“The closest way to a man’s heart is through his stomach,” goes the old saying. The same apparently holds true for Dartmouth students. There’s to be a protest today over the proposed changes to dining plans.

Do you like picking up a snack at Foco and paying only for what you eat?
Do you enjoy meeting up with friends in the dining hall without having to buy a meal?
Do you appreciate the simplicity of a meal plan that uses the same account at Thayer, the Hop, and Collis?

The new "SmartChoice" meal plans take away all of this and more. Among the six Ivies that offer multiple meal plans, Dartmouth will soon mandate that you spend the most money for the least amount of food.

The OLD minimum and full plans range from $3,675-$4,200 per year.
The NEW minimum and full plans range from $4,320-$4,974 per year.

The OLD plan deducts purchases a la carte and rolls over each term.
The NEW plan has a fixed number of weekly meals and does NOT roll over at all.

Want to do something about this? Come protest at 2:30 P.M. in front of the Hop and bring questions to the open faculty meeting afterward. Last year the employee union demonstrated here and they just got a raise!

Also, help with poster making in Robo during 12s.

Sources for 6 Ivies with multiple meal plans:
Dartmouth $4,320-$4,974 per year
https://www.dartmouth.edu/dining/dds/smartchoice.html
UPenn $4,287 per year
http://www.cafebonappetit.com/penn/diningplans/firstyear/
Cornell $4,270-$6,220 per year
http://housing.cornell.edu/campuslife/dining/options.cfm
Brown $3,244-$4,158 per year
http://www.brown.edu/Student_Services/Food_Services/mealplans/index.php
Princeton $3,010-$5,473 per year
http://www.princeton.edu/facilities/info/dining/files/next-year-prices.pdf
Columbia $1,890-$4,440 per year
http://www.dining.columbia.edu/docs/meal-plans-flex/plans.html

I’d like to point out how silly some of this. While I’m not a fan of getting less for more money in any circumstance, where were these people when the tuition hikes were announced? Can we have a protest about that? Ideally, these folks would be protesting DDS and its monopolistic and protectionist practices in general, not just the new meal plans. I also love the irony of the e-mail extolling the virtues of protesting because the staff got a raise. Maybe if the staff didn't get a raise, we wouldn't be dealing with an asinine dining plan. The general theme of these students seems to be that they want more--more staff, more benefits, more food--but without any rising costs. I can't help but wonder when people will wake up and realize there's no such thing as a free lunch.

A man can dream, I suppose.

--Sterling C. Beard

Update on May 9, 2011 by The Dartmouth Review

Well, I got to the protest. It was small, as was to be expected for a Monday afternoon, even with great weather. It was also a bit slow to start. Signs, for whatever reason, appear to have been created primarily on the spot.

Meager beginnings, but the brave members of DSFDC were undettered.About twenty minutes after the designated meeting time, things got in gear. Will Hix '12, though not the mastermind behind the protest, showed up to lend his support, as did several other students, bringing the headcount to roughly the low twenties.

Okay, signs are made. What's the next plan of action?

It was not long after the signs were complete that who should walk by but President Jim Yong Kim! The chant started up almost immediately "Where's our choice, give us a voice! Where's our choice, give us a voice!" President Kim, a man who didn't bend to the SEIU when they staged a candlelight vigil a little over a year ago, paid DSFDC no heed and continued straight into the building.

 And not a single care was given that day.

TDR contributor Dave Lumbert '12 was on hand to help record some of the event for posterity. He got President Kim giving a polite wave, then returning to whatever business was at hand.

DSFDC decided their best course of action was to then try to get the attention of faculty as they went to the meeting in Alumni Hall. To that end, they positioned themselves around the most obvious entrance at the Top of the Hop.

Most faculty just turned their heads and noted the signs. None stopped.

It was a pretty quiet protest, in all honesty, with a low turnout. One wonders if they might have better luck mounting a new media campaign, much like Save the River Docks this past summer. That group managed to get the docks reopened for the '13s and their sophomore summer. It took a while, but they at least had an effect with a Facebook group that had 750+ members. It seems that efforts are already being made to that effect: 1000 Students Against the New Dartmouth DDS Meal Plan already has more than 1,000 members.

In the meantime, however, students were left to stand and hope that faculty glanced at their signs:

 

This is easily my favorite photo, but I don't know if it's the sign or the expression on her face that makes it so.I sat through most of the meeting, too. Nothing too terribly interesting to report, except that the administration has been slow getting information to faculty on budget matters--more specifically, one faculty member requested that they be informed with itemizations and that simply hasn't happened. In fact, said faculty member, whose name escapes me, had only been sent a few PowerPoints by College VP Steven Kadish after a three month wait.

Also of note was the faculty vote in support of ending the fall quarter before Thanksgiving. Far more than two-thirds of those in attendance favored the proposal. This doesn't necessarily mean that we'll have a shorter fall next year, but it does mean that it's more likely to happen.

--Sterling C. Beard

"Shutter Fraternities for Young Women's Good" or "Make Generalizations Based on Hand-Picked Incidents"

A recent story in the Journal's Life and Culture section caught my eye with its audacious headline. And The article, titled "Shutter Fraternities for Young Women's Good" lives up to its name. In it, the author argues that, due to both tragic individual anecdotes and carefully chosen statistics, the time has come to abolish all-male college fraternities, as they are simply malignant entities, especially to the health of college women.

The author's strategy for convincing the reader is as follows:

1. Tell a heartbreaking story about a gang rape that occurred during the 1980s at UVA.

2. Denigrate fraternities as "dedicated to quelling young men's anxiety about submitting themselves to four years of sissy-pants book learning by providing them with a variety of he-man activities: drinking, drugging, ESPN watching and the sexual mistreatment of women."

3. Cite relevant negative statistics.

4.Tell a positive personal personal story about never having stepped in a fraternity

And after all this her conclusion is that fraternities should be abolished entirely. Frankly, the only relevant arguments within her piece stem from the statistics. The other heart-rending anecdotes, which work only to appeal to the readers' baser instincts, are irrelevant to the arguments. They are tragic and deserve to be treated with gravity. Yet anecdotes do not a pattern make.

As for the statistics, they certainly do not reflect well on men like myself who are members of fraternities. Indeed, if the statistics are to be believed, fraternity men are more likely to sexually assault women. That is unacceptable.

But it is hardly grounds to call for the abolition of fraternities entirely. Should fraternity men be better educated about sexual assault and the dangers of drinking? Definitely. But to say they should be abolished is a leap by which I cannot abide. It is as if any group prone to destructive behavior should be done away with. Perhaps men in the Army are also more likely to commit sexual assault than those not (this is purely hypothetical); does this mean the Army should be destroyed? Clearly not.

If the ongoing discussion about sexual assault at Dartmouth has proven anything, it is that all involved parties could benefit from better education on the issue. But abolish the Greek system? Now that is just too far.

--Benjamin M. Riley

The Superman Cometh

The Superman of the South Bronx, Mr. Geoffrey CanadaIn one small chapter of the interminable quest to reform education, the HOP last night put on another showing of Davis Guggenheim's documentary Waiting for "Superman," having previously shown the film last January. Since I'm currently in Istanbul (more on that another day!), I naturally could not attend, but I did attend the January showing. The film was intended to precede a visit to campus by Harlem Children's Zone founder Geoffrey Canada, a major figure in the film, but blizzards forced the postponement of his visit until this term. Presumably, the second showing of the film was to remind everybody that education was not magically fixed in the last three months.

Thankfully, "Superman" wastes no time in answering its most burning question: Why on Earth was it titled Waiting for “Superman”? At the very beginning, Geoffrey Canada speaks of how he grew up in the slums of the South Bronx and was always waiting for Superman to arrive and save the day. When told by his mother that Superman is not real, Canada was crushed, because from his viewpoint nobody but Superman could solve the Bronx's monumental problems. To his credit, Canada eventually took it upon himself to play the role of Superman, becoming first a teacher and later the president of the Harlem Children’s Zone, an innovative educational nonprofit which is a major focus of the film. 

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