Off the Beaten Tenure Track

An increasingly common anxiety for freshly-minted undergraduates is finding a job in their field with a decent enough salary to pay off their student loans. For those with new advanced degrees, the stakes are even higher...  2008 figures from The Center for College Affordability and Productivity estimate that 16% of those qualified to be college professors, lawyers, and doctors are working jobs at the high school graduate level. Helping wayward professionals put their highly-trained brains to work, is Jon F. Wilkins,  founder of The Ronin Institute – an experiment in promoting independent scholarship and providing unaffiliated academics with confidence, funding, and community.  We read about his work in an article by Keith O’Brien in the Ideas section of The Boston Globe.