How to rethink pedagogy to account for the rise of generative artificial intelligence (AI). What kinds of career paths are open to Ph.D. holders. Why adjuncting may be inadvisable. How to become a better academic writer. How deans can support faculty well-being. What it’s like to be a president in charge of closing a university.
There’s something for everyone in the 12 most-read career advice pieces Inside Higher Ed published in 2025, recapped in brief below:
First, in the year’s most-read career advice piece, “There Is No Such Thing as ‘Alternative’ Careers for Ph.D.s.” Briana Konnick argued for the need to move past false ac/alt-ac or academia/industry binaries. Konnick, a senior career development professional at the University of Chicago, drew from decades of trend data on post-Ph.D. career outcomes to argue that a tenure-track role is no longer the norm all other roles should be defined against. “The concept of an ‘alternative’ career no longer holds weight,” Konnick wrote, “and by continuing to use such language, we do ourselves and others an enormous disservice. In reality, there is no single ‘correct’ path after earning a Ph.D.—it equips you for a diverse range of career opportunities.” Konnick’s essay gives a taste of what’s on offer in the regular “Carpe Careers” column, authored by members of the Graduate Career Consortium, an association of professionals working in graduate and postdoctoral career development.
Coming in at the #2 slot, William J. Rothwell used the occasion of his retirement from Pennsylvania State University to sum up “What I Learned From Advising 120 Ph.D. Students” over a 32-year faculty career. Rothwell’s biggest takeaway was that too few graduate students are prioritizing career planning, and are pursuing degrees without direction. “Researching potential careers should not be postponed until after a student starts a degree program,” wrote Rothwell, a Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Workforce Education and Development. “It should be step one. Yet too many students still regard career planning as an afterthought, and too few faculty regard career counseling as a sacred obligation. As a result, students graduate with no real preparation for anything. They can pass doctoral defenses, but can they succeed in the world after graduation? If they cannot, it brings shame to the institution that graduated them.”
In July, Catherine Savini put forward specific ideas for how faculty can make it harder for students to (mis)use generative AI. In “We Can’t Ban AI, but We Can ‘Friction Fix’ It,’” Savini drew on a key concept of organizational behavior researchers Hayagreeva Rao and Robert I. Sutton, who define a “friction fixer” as someone “who makes the right things easier and the wrong things harder.” To that end, Savini, the Writing Across the Curriculum coordinator, Reading and Writing Center coordinator, and professor of English at Westfield State University, identified strategies for faculty who want to a) make their writing assignments more inviting and meaningful and b) through assignment design and other teaching choices, make it harder and less appealing for students to outsource their work to AI. “The good news is that this approach draws on practices already central to effective writing instruction,” Savini wrote.
In “5 Science-Backed Ways to Improve Academic Writing,” Yellowlees Douglas, the author of Writing for the Reader’s Brain: A Science-Based Guide (Cambridge University Press, 2024), focused on faculty and graduate students’ own writing practices, telling readers that “researchers in cognitive neuroscience and psycholinguistics identified the features that make sentences easy or difficult to read decades ago.” Douglas identified five science-based principles to make your academic writing clearer at the sentence level: 1) Use active voice; 2) make actors, concrete objects or organizations, rather than abstract nouns, the subjects of your sentences to turn them into “microstories”; 3) avoid overusing pronouns; 4) use action verbs; and 5) place subjects and verbs close together.
Number #5 on the list of top-read career advice pieces takes us back to the topic of AI in the classroom. In “A Multiday In-Class Essay for the ChatGPT Era,” John Robison offered a step-by-step guide for an in-class writing assignment using Lockdown Browser meant to replicate key elements of the traditional take-home essay. Robison, a philosophy lecturer at Indiana University Bloomington, argued that while out-of-class essay assignments in introductory humanities classes have grown easy to cheat and hard to justify in an AI era, the skills and habits of mind they teach nevertheless remain essential. “The research I have done over the past three years tells me I can no longer be confident that an intro-level course that nontrivially relies on out-of-class writing assignments can be a fully successful humanities course so understood,” Robison wrote. “Yet a humanities course that fully abandons sustained essay assignments deprives students of the experience that best positions them to fully exercise and develop the skills most central to our disciplines.”
In a similar vein, the #6 piece comes from another philosopher, Lily Abadal, who proposed “A Way to Save the Essay” through the use of in-class, scaffolded writing assignments. Abadal argued that “[t]he rise of AI only made obvious what was already true: The traditional college essay wasn’t working well. … For many students, it became a game of cobbling together something that looked like an essay—without careful reasoning or meaningful engagement with ideas.” As an alternative approach, Abadal suggested setting aside time for students to annotate articles, develop problem statements, craft and revise a thesis, outline arguments and begin drafting—all in class. “The tradeoff, of course, is that there is less time to cover content,” wrote Abadal, an assistant professor at the University of South Florida. “But if forced to choose between covering less content with depth and careful attention or more with a hurried drive to fit in as much as possible, I will pick less every time. It may well be the case that covering less and relishing the nuances of ideas is necessary for slow, critical thinking.”
Another popular essay on pedagogy, Michel Estefan’s “‘Win-Win’ Pedagogy Is Impossible in a Diverse Classroom,” takes as its starting place the author’s decision to ban laptops in the classroom, which garnered criticism from advocates for students with disabilities, who argued a ban was ableist or that professors should look for alternatives to keep all students engaged while continuing to permit laptops. While writing that he takes such criticisms seriously, Estefan argued that the same laptop ban that hurts some students will help others. “Inclusive pedagogy celebrates diversity as an educational good,” observed Estefan, an associate professor of teaching and director of undergraduate studies in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, San Diego. “But diversity means heterogeneity in needs, preferences, skills, identities and constraints. That heterogeneity makes it literally impossible for a single pedagogical choice to benefit all students equally.”
Changing gears, Nancy H. Blattner’s essay, “How Closing a University Changes You,” looks back at her final year as president of Fontbonne University before the Roman Catholic institution closed in August after years of financial struggles. Blattner described the difficulties and deep feelings of loss that came with closing “a university that has always been a community, a family,” as well as some of the “grace-filled moments” that lightened the way, as when students dropped by her office to check on her, or when the university was able to gather donations, including dozens of window air conditioning units, to benefit St. Louis residents impacted by a tornado. As Blattner wrote, a presidential colleague once told her that closing a university is “genetically altering,” that she would never be the same after going through it. “Only time will tell,” Blattner concluded, “but I fear that he was right.”
The #9 piece is an unusual one, drawing on an 18th-century text for inspiration. In “Advice to a Friend on Becoming an Adjunct,” written in the style of Benjamin Franklin’s “Advice to a Friend on Choosing a Mistress,” Melissa Olson-Petrie proffered advice to all those who “insist on accepting” an adjunct faculty role despite its many disadvantages. “My Dear Present or Future Adjunct,” Olson-Petrie’s piece begins, “I know of no words to satisfy the professional aspirations you mention; and if I did, I might well keep them to myself. The tenure track is the proper remedy. It is a vaunted state within academia, and therefore the state in which you are most likely to find social capital, financial remuneration and, dare I say, job satisfaction (even as job security erodes in universities across the nation). The barriers between you and a career as a college professor are not always logical, but they are long-standing. The obstacles are nigh on overwhelming. As each year passes, you are less (not more) likely to succeed.”
The need to better support faculty is the subject of the #10 most-read career advice piece, Richard Badenhausen’s “How Can Deans Support Faculty Well-Being?” Badenhausen, a dean at Westminster University, suggested some low- or no-cost strategies deans can use to support faculty, such as taking steps to protect their time, acknowledging mental health challenges, bringing them into decision-making processes, knowing their work, advocating for new opportunities for them and recognizing their achievements. “Letting faculty know you’ve got their backs and that you are always on the lookout for opportunities they might find exciting can help ground them mentally,” Badenhausen wrote. “Connecting them with a conference opportunity, suggesting them for a speaking gig or putting their name forward for a professional development workshop gives faculty confidence that they have someone in a position of power looking out for them, even in the face of all the uncertainties currently plaguing higher ed.”
Returning to the “alternative” careers genre, #11 on the list is Miles Reding’s “How I Make Money Using My History Degree.” Reding, who left academe partway through a Ph.D. program, wrote that he was pleasantly surprised to find that he could make income through freelance history writing, asking clients for $40 an hour to write articles or video scripts on niche history topics. Monetizing one’s own content—history websites, videos or podcasts—through ads or subscriptions is another route. “It may be hard to believe, but it is possible to get paid to do humanities work outside of academia,” Reding wrote. “The trick is knowing where to look and how to seize the opportunities when they arise. While humanities jobs may be admittedly niche, in the rare instances that your expertise is needed, you can be one of the few people qualified to meet that demand.”
Finally, rounding up the list of most-read career advice pieces of 2025, Ernesto Reyes, an English instructor at Fresno City College, urged readers to “Ask Your Students Why They Use AI.” His own prompting yielded unexpected insights: “When I speak with students who have been caught using AI, they usually do two things: They apologize, and they almost always say, ‘I’m just not a good writer,’” Reyes recounted. “In my experience, it has often been the students who didn’t receive the instruction they needed before college and who gained the least experience with the writing process who turn to AI. They are left feeling unprepared and insecure about their abilities, and this points to a larger problem in which mistakes are still stigmatized and completion (not competence) is often the norm.”
Thanks to readers for turning to Inside Higher Ed for career advice and inspiration in 2025. We’ll see you next year.
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