Here's my high level summary, as a former instructor.
1. Berkeley offered tuition remission as a benefit to grad student instructors essentially as a stipend/subsidy of living.
2. The union representing instructors negotiated tuition remission for undergrad instructors doing the same job as grad instructors, primarily to protect grad students from being short-changed by departments trying to hire cheaper undergrad instructors over the grad instructors who had greater need for the income.
3. CS class sizes increased, and the CS department lacked the funds to hire both enough grad and undergrad instructors to properly staff, so they offered 8-hour positions to undergrads as an alternative.
4. Undergrads were more than happy to take these positions, spend a few hours a week teaching, earn some income, and get close to professors. As 20-hour-a-week instructor, I still felt like it was an incredibly cushy and privileged job.
I wouldn't argue that the union is to blame here. It seems that only the CS department (as opposed to other departments) has hit this budgetary issue of being unable to afford enough instructors to staff its classes--the solution to me is that the university should look at the massive growth in the department and allot commensurate funding for instructors. Instead, the department took a (fairly reasonable) alternative solution which apparently has run afoul of some labor agreement.
Also, as someone who knows some instructors who stand to benefit from this decision: almost no one is happy about it. No one gains except these instructors--the department, future students, and future would-be instructors are all getting screwed (unless the department gets much more funding as a result of this).
This is pretty accurate. The only part I don't really know anything about to confirm is the parts in #2 about the union doing that protecting grad students (I don't know the history). But it's a very accurate portrayal otherwise.
>Also, as someone who knows some instructors who stand to benefit from this decision: almost no one is happy about it. No one gains except these instructors--the department, future students, and future would-be instructors are all getting screwed (unless the department gets much more funding as a result of this).
This is just nonsense and is applicable to anything that takes money from the department. No, the department and future students wont be screwed because they have to pay back money.
To be more specific, they're being screwed because the department is now unable to add new (8hr) positions. Class size pressure will increase because the price of instructors has gone up, and fewer students will get to have cushy teaching jobs. The last point is what most of the former instructors feel: they felt privileged to work 8hr positions and now those opportunities are eliminated.
When I worked for Berkeley our bosses made it very clear: they can’t stop us from billing more than 39.5 hours in a week, but if we did, they’d have to let us go and stop offering the service we provide, because they just didn’t have the budget.
It’s not like we were providing essential services. We were doing things to make the other students’ lives better, and we were all fine with the restriction.
We were also learning a lot ourselves in the process, and valued the work experience far more than the few extra dollars.
I worked there over 20 years ago. The work I did there prepared me for a very lucrative career and I wouldn’t trade it for anything, especially not a few more dollars.
Also, the endowment isn’t unlimited use. Most of it is earmarked for specific uses. When someone donates $500M to build a building, the money can only be used to maintain the building. When they endow a professorship, that money can only be used for that professors salary and research.
$4.3B is pretty small for a university the size of Berkeley.
Question: were you financially supported by your family during that time? "a few more dollars" seems diminutive, but according to the union, there are multiple people who are owed $20,000 or more.
Enough said. Tuition today is a hair below $40,000 for an in-state student* compared to a hair below $5,000 in the mid 90's. They can afford every penny.
Might want to double check your sources. Tuition is $14,000 now compared to $5,000 when I was there. That’s roughly double when you account for inflation.
It’s not nothing, but it’s also not super relevant.
Also in that same period, the UC system has lost more than 1/2 its state funding, hence the increase.
The school doesn’t really have any more to work with now than it used to, but has a lot more students since they are required to accept the top 2% of all California students.
This is what your econ professor would call "comparing stocks and flows" and it's a pretty common theme in critiques of university endowments.
$4.3 billion could pay four-year in-state cost of attendance for 36,000 undergraduates. Enrollment is 31,000. Only one graduating class would make it through before the institution shut down.
The UC system endowment's return last year was 8.2% [0], or $344 million. Its budget was $3 billion. In other words, its wealth can only sustainably fund 10% of its operations, in a good year.
The problem with this is it assumes that OP's direct bosses have access to their fair chunk of $4.3b, which I doubt.
The money stops flowing some place, but no one can ever seem to point where. Individual departments are always severely strapped, so not likely there. Could be the university admins are just holding it in coffers and the individual departments only get small incremental increases relative to class sizes.
As a UC school, is it possible to get access to the books?
I think of it as less ironic, and more "There is a union constantly fighting to get Berkeley TAs paid more, and that union is more successful than no union at all, so Berkeley TAs are paid more."
It's a weird situation, since they are paid better than most TAs, but worse than a computer science instructor with that level of experience generally would be paid.
Thought I'd lend my 2 cents here. I'm a current Berkeley EECS undergrad.
These 8hr a week TA positions are very difficult to get and coveted by many students for (1) relationship to a professor which helps in such a large department and (2) the considerable amount of weekly pay.
Did the EECS department potentially ruin their short term future by not paying full tuition? Maybe.
They also do lean heavily on academic interns (unpaid students who work 1 or 2 hours a week), and I see this group increasing greatly in numbers after this decision is ruled.
Please ask me questions! I'm a past TA myself have a lot of friends who TA.
Terrible decision. The Berkeley EECS department is already cash strapped while serving an ever growing CS student body. This probably will lead to massive decreases in class sizes, as it is not worth it to appoint 8h TAs (incredibly common in CS classes across the board). As a result, the CS GPA cap to declare will probably go up to 3.5 or even 3.7, and CS education will be denied to many students.
Speaking from personal experience, as an 8 hour TA for 3 semesters, I think the current wage ($30 an hour) is more than fair. Usually 8 hour TAs just hold a 1 hour weekly discussion and OH session, along with some grading -- tuition remission sounds a bit excessive.
Did you meant to say EECS department is a cash cow. How many students at Berkley are at Berkley because they major in CS? Each of them pays 13-40k a year! Maybe the university should allocate resources where the students are? Like hiring more professors and TAs. I know, it's a crazy idea.
Yeah, paying $30 an hour to teach 20+ students who already paid their for education is absurd.
Calling this a "glitch" is disingenuous. It (is/was) an open secret for my entire undergrad. There were plenty of professors who would encourage students on 8-hour appointments to work 20~30 hours/wk with no overtime pay. Professors control access to valuable research positions and grad school applications so if you wanted to have a career in academia there wasn't anything you could do about it.
This comment is greatly exaggerated. I've never heard of 20-30h for 8h TAs, and even milder overworking (like 10 instead of 8) gets resolved when it's brought to people's attention. The professors I know actually do care about offloading work and not overworking people beyond their hours. I don't know how many such extreme experience you might've had personally, but the description doesn't seem to paint an accurate picture of what's been happening overall.
This is a great example of a union doing its job. Why should the TAs be the ones to get less when there is a budget problem. Why not hit the president's salary for the shortfall or any of the other many line items on the budget.
We constantly see people complaining about wealth inequality. Applauding unions for improving workers wages is one of the ways that it gets improved, one small step at a time.
Am I missing something? Berkley isn't arguing they accidentally underpaid people, but that they intentionally sought out more 8 hour positions. That sound in no way like a "glitch"
This problem is endemic in all academic research, even in the private schools and even for non-students. I worked for Stanford as a LSRP (read, research assistant in the biosciences) and there were some interesting hoops that were conditions on my employment.
1) My position was changed from salaried full time to hourly full time in order to avoid paying the needed minimum for salaried employees.
2) Told explicitly that I had to log all my hours but that I could NOT claim overtime, they simply didn't have the money for it.
3) Expected to work more than 40 hours a week because that's what you do in research
I was laid off at the end of a grant cycle because we ran out of funding and the professor thought I wasn't hard working or dedicated enough even though I was pulling 50+ hour weeks and working 6-7 days usually.
Now I work as an hourly consultant for a biotech startup and bill by the hour.
>In negotiating the 10-hour threshold for tuition remission during contract negotiations, the union says it understood that eight-hour appointments would be used only sparingly. And they were used that way for about a decade. Since 2015, however, non-remission-eligible appointments have surged from about 2 percent of assistantships to 12 percent.
It appears that it all comes down to whose understanding about the final contract was right. I understand these are legal documents. Was "sparingly" defined there, and did increasing the number of 8-hour appointments exceed that threshold?
Either way it's bad that the trend always seems to be towards decreasing instructional staff pay and benefits. It's a nice windfall for these TAs whether they were expecting it or not.
> it all comes down to whose understanding about the final contract
This isn't entirely correct. There are things that are explicitly part of the Collective Bargaining Agreement that both parties put in writing, and there are all sorts of other things that are "past practice".
Even if it's not codified in the agreement, a company must bargain with a union when it wants to make a change in working conditions.
Thanks, I hadn't heard of the term past practices before. I guess I haven't experienced being unionized, and just take it for granted that an employer can make my life worse if it wanted to. Sort of boggles my mind that a union can negotiate things with the employer in vague terms, and the understanding is that things will always be "just as good" unless explicitly spelled out.
i was an undergraduate 8-hour TA at UC Berkeley for six semesters between 2015 and 2018. i was also part of the union. i'm surprised few of the comments are mentioning the main issue: union contract stipulates that 10-hour or more TAs receive tuition fee remission, but even 9.9-hour TAs receive zero remission. (there was at least one 9.9 hour TA, though not in the EECS department.) in 2015 when the 8-hour TA position was implemented there were initially not very many of them, and there were more 20-hour TAs, mostly graduate students. but between then and now Berkeley's CS program grew exponentially. so more and more 8-hour TAs were needed. what started as a clever hack was beginning harm other departments' workers by setting a precedent (ex, the 9.9 hour TA in chemistry). so the union fought and won.
Berkeley's undergraduate CS education is a unique self-sustaining juggernaut. there are not only TAs officially hired and paid by the department, but also numerous volunteers tutoring, lab assisting and otherwise helping each other out. it would be a tragedy if the bureaucracy destroys this beautiful self-sustaining machine through this decision. but i trust Berkeley will find a way as always to teach the most with the least resources.
"It’s akin to employees accusing an employer of keeping them just below the threshold of full-time work in order to avoid having to give them full-time benefits."
... which is akin to accusing a motorist of remaining just below the speed limit in order to avoid paying fines for speeding.
One thing I find very odd about this: it’s in both parties’ interest to gave as much tuition remission as possible and as little pay as possible: tuition remission is not taxable. The deal should have been that tuition remission depends on hours and the hourly pay goes way up after there’s no tuition left. Maybe this violates the Fair Labor Standards Act?
When I was a TA, the effective hourly pay was in excess of $70. It was an amazing job!
$70 per hour is incredible, almost too good. It makes me think it's like department store prices though: charge deliberately inflated prices knowing most students will never actually pay the sticker price.
it's entirely possible that the Berkeley CS professors, who are obviously geniuses but also kind of dolts, knew nothing about these bureaucratic intricacies and took the most obvious way out.
I don’t really understand why Berkeley has to retroactively give $7500 to students who were never expecting it in the first place. When the minimum wage is raised, should employers have to compensate employees for previous hours worked below the new minimum wage?
I'm not buying it. The labour agreement allowed for students working 8 hours/week. This wasn't even an oversight -- it was specifically considered during contract negotiations and the (lack of) benefits such students would receive was agreed upon.
Past practice has force as well – the written agreement is only one part of what binds the parties, and Berkeley made a change to working conditions without bargaining over how that would affect workers. That's unlawful.
tl;dr: the merits of the labor dispute notwithstanding, TAs were well-compensated relative to other schools and the core problem was a mandated pay structure with a cutoff at 10hr week for tuition fee reimbursement.
1. Berkeley offered tuition remission as a benefit to grad student instructors essentially as a stipend/subsidy of living.
2. The union representing instructors negotiated tuition remission for undergrad instructors doing the same job as grad instructors, primarily to protect grad students from being short-changed by departments trying to hire cheaper undergrad instructors over the grad instructors who had greater need for the income.
3. CS class sizes increased, and the CS department lacked the funds to hire both enough grad and undergrad instructors to properly staff, so they offered 8-hour positions to undergrads as an alternative.
4. Undergrads were more than happy to take these positions, spend a few hours a week teaching, earn some income, and get close to professors. As 20-hour-a-week instructor, I still felt like it was an incredibly cushy and privileged job.
I wouldn't argue that the union is to blame here. It seems that only the CS department (as opposed to other departments) has hit this budgetary issue of being unable to afford enough instructors to staff its classes--the solution to me is that the university should look at the massive growth in the department and allot commensurate funding for instructors. Instead, the department took a (fairly reasonable) alternative solution which apparently has run afoul of some labor agreement.
Also, as someone who knows some instructors who stand to benefit from this decision: almost no one is happy about it. No one gains except these instructors--the department, future students, and future would-be instructors are all getting screwed (unless the department gets much more funding as a result of this).