

The peculiar status of PhD-employees - wslh
http://crookedtimber.org/2014/08/31/the-peculiar-status-of-phd-employees/

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silentvoice
At least in my field, doing a PhD in the U.S. was essentially the same as what
the author described for their country. Freedom of topic choice comes with
independent funding, otherwise your advisor will be telling you what is
consistent with their funding, and among those projects what they believe is a
good fit for you. Unless your advisor is made of research grants, that won't
leave much choice for you. In the meantime you are effectively an employee (I
like to think of it as an apprentice), you are learning your trade while
providing a service for which you are usually compensated.

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XorNot
This whole article seems like its being informed by some very specific views
or experience with the academic system.

The idea that students should be free to choose their own topics is...odd. You
choose your topics based on choosing your lab and the projects on offer - at
least in science.

The observations from the author in the comments section that they know people
who want to do a PhD (in Arts/Humanities) but can't because they can't find an
offered project seems more like the system working properly - professors, who
can be presumed to be aware of their field and by extension national interests
via grants, offer projects to hopefully efficiently allocate the research
dollars of the nation.

Which leads back to my first paragraph: in science I really don't know what
you'd get out of students making up their own projects in a vacuum. Which
makes me think the author has a very narrow perspective on PhD research.

~~~
michael_nielsen
I chose my own research questions for my PhD. So did many people I know. And,
when supervising my own PhD students, I preferred them to work on their own
problems, all other things being equal [1].

The reason is that choosing what problems to work on is a fundamental research
skill. Someone who doesn't learn that skill hasn't really learnt to do
research.

This isn't to say that a student shouldn't spend time talking with their
advisor about choice of problem. Of course they should -- they should talk to
as many people as possible! But the responsibility for the choice of problem
should be theirs. If that's not the case, then they're missing much of what it
is to do research.

To quote a letter of Feynman to a former student of his (
[http://genius.cat-v.org/richard-
feynman/writtings/letters/pr...](http://genius.cat-v.org/richard-
feynman/writtings/letters/problems) )

"I had another Ph.D. Student (Albert Hibbs) [who worked on] how it is that the
winds build up waves blowing over water in the sea. I accepted him as a
student because he came to me with the problem he wanted to solve. With you I
made a mistake, I gave you the problem instead of letting you find your own;
and left you with a wrong idea of what is interesting or pleasant or important
to work on..."

[1] This is actually pretty complicated. Many students don't have ideas
they're confident pursuing. Some don't grow into it, even after gaining some
experience solving research problems. That presents challenges. And sometimes
students badly misjudge what is important or interesting to work on. Should a
supervisor interfere when that's happening? It depends. Making mistakes in
choosing which problem to work on is an important part of learning to do
research. So some floundering around is fine. But allowing it to go on for
years and years is just cruel.

~~~
hatandsocks
You're probably among the top 5% (if not top 1%) of people in physics, and you
attended top institutions. That's fantastic (I really mean that), but it gives
you a skewed view of academia.

 _Most_ physics PhD candidates do not have free choice of research questions
(or, at best, they are spending their "10% time" on their own questions, which
is what I did).

~~~
michael_nielsen
Thanks for the kind words.

On institutions: I did my PhD at the University of New Mexico. A fine
institution, but also not Harvard / MIT / etc. I went there because Carl Caves
had created a great environment to work on quantum information. Carl
encouraged me to work on whatever problems I wanted, but was also happy to
provide advice upon request. My fellow PhD students enjoyed similar freedom,
and I believe it benefited them enormously as well.

Edit: To clarify my earlier comment: I am certainly _not_ saying that it is
universally the case that people are able to choose their PhD project. That's
not true, especially in fields involving expensive experimental equipment. I'm
saying that someone not able to choose their project is being badly trained.
It should count as a very heavy mark against doing a PhD when the advisor
believes they should control the direction of the project.

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gfour
Starting a PhD means someone has already mastered the basics of a profession,
and is at an age that could work productively in the industry. At this point,
doing a PhD is a choice between academia and industry for the next 4-5 years.
If an industry really exists (e.g. STEM fields), PhD programs must be
competitive with it; they must offer something like a job. Of course, there
are fields where PhD programs have less funding and the status of PhD
employees is less frequent: a PhD in literature may have less funding
available compared to a PhD in bioinformatics and will attract people that
have different expectations.

About the freedom of choosing a thesis topic, I think this depends on both the
style of supervision (controlling boss vs. laissez-faire situation) and the
funding project (some have vague goals and can accept a wide range of topics,
while others are very focused on mini areas).

And I think danieldk is right about the money: you are welcome to accept less
of it, this doesn't mean that the money saved by the state is really going
where you want it to go...

~~~
neltnerb
I disagree that it truly needs to be "competitive", because the people in the
PhD program are receiving value other than monetary compensation for their
work (i.e. a PhD!).

I do think that PhD students need to be paid a living wage, because of
practical considerations, but you definitely don't need to pay anywhere near a
normal wage. Your job as a PhD student is to get your degree and graduate, not
to make anyone else money directly with your labor.

~~~
hatandsocks
Well... As someone with a brand new physics Ph.D., I think you're wrong that
the pay doesn't need to be competitive. Ph.D. programs are really coasting
along on the ignorance of the Ph.D. candidates, and I'm not sure how much
longer that will last.

Here's what I mean by that: The opportunity cost of a Ph.D. in physics, in
terms of foregone salary, earnings on tax-advantaged savings accounts, stress,
etc., is north of half a million dollars (and 5 to 8 of the best years of your
life). Talking to people I know from my own department, and those I've met at
conferences, and such, the lifetime value added to one's salary from having a
Ph.D. is _probably_ greater than the opportunity cost. But it's not
_obviously_ greater--a Ph.D. is a pretty good signal for "smart and gets
things done."

In other words, it tells you "this person was probably going to do well
anyway." You can't compare the mean or median salary of Ph.D.'s with those of,
say, people with a Bachelor's in some STEM field. If you were to compare
median STEM Ph.D. salaries with same-field top-quartile (or maybe top-decile)
Bachelor's salaries, you'd find there is not much difference.

Am I just a bitter washed-out Ph.D.? Hell no! I did all sorts of fun things
(like intermural sports and traveling) that I wouldn't have been able to do
otherwise. I cherish those memories. But, if someone asked me "Should I go to
grad school to improve my chances of earning a decent living?" my answer would
be "Hell no!"

~~~
JamesBarney
"I think you're wrong that the pay doesn't need to be competitive. " I would
say the pay is competitive judging from the difficulty of gaining admission
into these programs. Why do you think it isn't competitive?

"(and 5 to 8 of the best years of your life)" I'm not sure about a physics
Ph.D. but most of my friends who are finishing up their Ph.Ds enjoyed their
mid 20's more than the ones of us who decided to did the daily work grind.

~~~
neltnerb
Indeed, my friends who do postdocs at places like MIT never get more than $50k
a year. That is definitely not competitive. You're getting compensation in a
higher chance of your lottery ticket to getting a faculty job getting chosen,
and people wouldn't accept such low salaries if there weren't some perceived
trade-off value.

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tanderson92
Another thing I find interesting about "PhD-employees" in the US is that we
are considered students when it helps the government and employees when it
helps the university. My main complaint has to do with the nature of taxing
research/teaching/fellowship income as "income", and then turning around and
not allowing those students to invest the money in IRA accounts (according to
the tax code, any money eligible for IRA contributions must be on a single box
on a W-2 form, which many students do not get)

This is deeply troubling to students like myself who would like to invest and
save a significant part of our salary for the future, as we would if we were
truly employees in industry.

~~~
munin
I know of schools that don't give W2s, pretty sure that is just illegal and
also pretty sure those schools get dinged by the IRS regularly for this.

some student friends of mine get paid in very sketchy ways, like in personal
checks from the department administrator, and don't even know if the
university has done withholding. these are ivy league schools too! every few
years there is a big IRS thing but nothing changes.

universities are shady as hell.

~~~
tanderson92
Fellowship income (for example from the STEM fellowships) is not reported as
earned income for sure. It's less clear for other positions. Consider this
from IRS publication 970:

“Scholarship and fellowship payments are compensation for IRA purposes only if
shown in box 1 of Form W-2.”

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winterismute
I am not from the NL but I have moved here to attend a MSc program (Computer
Science department), I am not pursuing a PhD myself but I know a lot of people
that do. I think that the system has its pros and cons, as always, although I
don't agree with the part about not choosing the topic because (as also other
people pointed out) policies can often vary from supervisor to supervisor, and
in any case a student basically chooses, more or less, the boundaries of
his/her topic when he/she decides to which position apply, positions that
always have fairly clear project descriptions and include contact details of
professors that are generally open about clarifications. Also, even if it is
formally difficult to change supervisor, in fact if a student decides to work
more with another professor for any reason, the original supervisor does not
usually raise any practical problem.

However, a big problem that I have experienced and seen is that PhDs
negatively impact the quality of teaching. Master programs in the NL aim at
being very high level (often succeeding), offering also courses on specific
advanced subjects. Usually, PhDs have no control over what they will teach,
they are simply allocated as "resources" by the faculty, even just to cover a
minor part of a course or to supervise/correct practical assignments. This
leads to ridiculous situations with courses that, for example, teach advanced
rendering techniques but for supervising the practical part allocate a PhD
candidate that has clearly never ever rendered a triangle on a screen in
his/her life, and who had no time to properly prepare beforehand. I think this
is a visible "weak point" of the whole system, and it should be addressed,
somehow, also because I have noticed it being treated as some kind of "taboo
argument" in the past.

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danieldk
_There are exceptions, but to the best of my knowledge most PhD-employees in
the Netherlands have not chosen their own topic._

This is nonsense. Although my PhD was in a project with a predefined topic,
many of my colleagues were doing a PhD in a topic of their choice. The faculty
would have N open PhD positions every year, and people could submit proposals.

Also, the primary argument set forth in this post is financial. If you avoid
paying income tax (through scholarships), you can spend your money on other
things. No shit. If you change the amount of the scholarship to $500 per
month, you can also spend more money, but you'll only get garbage. You have to
find some level of compensation where you still get good candidates. In some
fields, candidates will go to industry at the proposed compensation level (I
would).

Another problem that is not taken into account is how government budgeting
works. They won't see a switch to a bursary system as a way to save money to
hire more faculty staff. They will see it as a way to save money, period.
Especially in economically difficult times where we have to increase our
military spending because of conflicts in Ukraine and the middle east.

~~~
evoloution
"in the UK and the US, PhD-students can in many (most?) cases choose their own
topic"

In the US, in the labs I am aware of, most of the student stipend for the
experimental work is paid by the lab from its funds. As a consequence most of
the time it is on the grant's topic. Choosing the lab is a way of choosing the
range of the topics.

"Our proposal would give PhD-students decent wage contracts for the research
assistance or teaching which they would do"

PhD students do not merely provide research assistance. They design protocols,
carry them out and ask new questions, at least the good ones. The only thing
that most PhD students lack is the ability to safely shift focus since most of
their ideas have already been done but they don't know that since they are not
aware of the literature.

What I don't like about the articles on academics lately is that on the one
side they are focusing on how to keep highly educated people with low salaries
and on the other hand how to bring more people in academia. Increase the
salaries and more smart people will come, it is as simple as that... instead
they are trying to get more people in academia so more people get trapped by
inertia in bad paying jobs...

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jrochkind1
I think the author has a very inaccurate impression of how PhD's work in the
US, the way he thinks is better because it works so well in the U.S. -- is not
the way it works in the U.S.. He also has an overly optimistic view of how
well it works in the U.S. or how happy people are with it (in both areas where
it's somewhat like he thinks and not).

~~~
rumham
Agreed, at least in my field it's almost exactly like he describes in the
Netherlands - you get funding via professor's grants, and that means you work
on a project related to their work. Additionally, my university pays social
security, healthcare, dental, etc.

I think that for humanities things tend to work differently (I'm in a STEM) in
the States though.

~~~
jrochkind1
My impression is that humanities PhD students in the U.S. tend to be fully
funded as well, although with smaller stipends than STEM PhD students.

I'm not sure where the OP gets the idea that PhD students in the U.S. usually
have to pay their own way entirely and do not receive employment benefits
(healthcare etc).

Humanities PhD students in the U.S. probably do have somewhat greater leeway
in choosing/defining their projects, although they still need to pick one that
their advisor approves and is comfortable with.

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jmount
Ph.D. programs vary a lot by country, school, and department. They mostly
appear uniform from the outside. Big variabilities include: funding, status,
teaching load, qualifying exams (these are after you are in), amount of
choice, publications, expected level of choice/originality in thesis topic,
writing, and open/closed defense.

~~~
lutusp
Very, very true. To see it most clearly, compare a physics Ph.D. to a
psychology Ph.D..

EDIT: to readers, the reason posts like this are downvoted is not because
they're false, but because they're true. The anonymous downvoters are trying
to conceal the truth.

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willpearse
I can't comment on much of this article, but it doesn't apply to the UK (as is
implied), where essentially every student has full funding for their 3-4
years. Sometimes people hang around for an extra six months, but it's nothing
like the US system.

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wheaties
I would say that funding and grants (or lack thereof) is one of the biggest
determinants in the sciences in the US. You can choose your own PhD as long as
what you choose is something your advisor has the money to support and agrees
that it is an interesting direction to go. That's very different from choose
whatever you want and more in line with what he thinks European PhD's are
like.

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rpedela
Depends on the particular PhD program, but if you are in science or
engineering in the US then you should be able to be a teaching assistant,
research assistant, or both and have free tuition and a stipend. If the author
is solely talking about humanities PhDs or other types of graduate school
(law, medical) in the US, then maybe the author has a point.

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rotskoff
I'm a PhD student in the US, and the author's view of PhD students, at least
among R1 institutions, is not accurate for most disciplines. In most of these
programs, a student is guaranteed a salary for 5 years, given health
insurance, tuition benefits, and in many cases quite a lot of freedom.

The guarantee of funding doesn't mean that you won't have to work for your
income. In my field, it is common for theorists to teach for much of their
graduate career in order to support themselves.

------
waps
Sadly the article is inaccurate on a few counts :

1) social security taxes

The government has carved out a special status for these Phd "employees",
which means that social security taxes are not paid for these employees, and
of course the resulting burden is carried entirely by the employee.
Ironically, and because this results in a higher effective wage for these
young people, who are too young to care about pension and generally don't need
health insurance, they actually like this part.

a) you can't get unemployment if you get fired, or after you "graduate" (which
amounts to firing with a nicer pink slip for 9/10 Phd employees)

b) you don't build up pension rights

c) health insurance is the employee's problem (though many universities
"solve" this through private means, but it means significantly less coverage)

c) No paid holidays (again, universities sometimes make up for this, but not
the same as private sector. This is pretty much the only European job I know
that doesn't come with 4 weeks paid holidays. This is legal, because it's not
a "job", legally speaking)

d) very few other employee rights (e.g. no rights to unions, even though I
doubt any union would stand a chance their anyway). No rights if you get
fired. If a university downscales (thankfully, doesn't happen often), these
people are treated worse than contractors.

2) They are most definitely not "civil servants"

The legal differences and problems this poses are too numerous to go into.
Let's just say, once again, the Phd student is the loser here.

3) about the one thing these people do have going for them is that government
sponsorships are tied to the person, and include a (small) amount to the
university and the pay for the Phd student him/herself. So if the university
fires a Phd student, they lose the funding.

In other words, unless you commit a crime or something as a Phd student, if
you're on a government scholarship, getting fired is not a concern.

Being a Phd student on either a university or private scholarship ... you
don't want that. Or, at least, make DAMN sure you like your promotor.

~~~
walshemj
I am surprised that some one hasn't taken the Dutch government to court over
a,b,c,d

Is there not a student union in the Netherlands?

~~~
ht_th
These points are not true for the Netherlands, at least: a PhD student is a
real employee with the same rights as any other employee. So, after you lose a
job you'll get support, if you get sick, you get support, if you get a child,
you get support and (maternity) leave, you're part of a pension plan as well,
and so on. (Source: I've been a PhD student for 4.5 years in the Netherlands
till this summer and got all those rights, benefits, whatever, just like any
other employee)

And yes, there are organisations for PhD students, which are employee
organisations not student organisations, by the way.

There are some universities that are trying to change the status from a real
employee towards a funded student, but that's not happening very fast, as of
now.

