Let’s put this in perspective. Under this agreement, UC can hire a college-educated, generally high achieving, generally highly motivated researcher, in California, for $34k/yr. This worker will be motivated to work hard (to graduate) and is likely to also teach classes and work rather long hours. This is an incredibly good deal.
Obviously the total cost is more than $34k/yr, because graduate students, like any other employees, have overhead. But university money has a way of going around in circles, and (although I haven’t checked the particular details here), a good fraction of this money may be chargeable to grants, this costing the university as a whole nothing except to the extent that these charges displace other charges that the university might otherwise benefit from.
In fact, in some cases, universities charge more than 100%: the university can charge a “fee” (graduate tuition) and bill that fee to a grant. And in other cases (but maybe not under this agreement), the university can collect the fee from the student.
For comparison, NSF GRFP currently pays $37k/yr. Stanford appears to pay about $27k/yr (which, if I understood the table right, is a bit embarrassing). The DoD’s NDSEG pays $40.8k/yr. Hertz pays $34k/yr.
So, as far as I’m concerned, this agreement is a bargain for UC.
> UC can hire a college-educated, generally high achieving, generally highly motivated researcher, in California, for $34k/yr
That's not exactly how it works.
The faculty receives a funding, from a public source such as NSF/NIH, or private source, maybe Google/Facebook, or donation. Roughly 50% of that goes to the the university in lieu of overhead, admin, facilities etc. expense (this should sound an alarm bell to anybody reading). Roughly 25% covers tuition expense- again to the university. The remainder is that $34k you are reading about.
So yes, the NIH/NSF will grant more than $100k of the taxpayer money for one student, but the university takes 75% or more of that and peanuts are left for the grad student workers. If someone is in a good place, they might have $1500-2000 take home every month. If a they are in a bad place, it could be lower than $1000 a month. Basically you'd make make less than half of what a fast food worker makes. But without you, grading, research and all other critical higher education activity will stall.
I think you’re agreeing with me. The university pays the student some absurdly small amount of money. Even ignoring the actual value added by that student, the university collects enough money for doing so that it comes out ahead.
Note that this may not be the case for teaching assistants. One can get a teaching assistantship without being attached to any particular grant. This money actually comes from the university (but the university may still charge fees to the student).
As a bit of trivia, the NSF GRFP is not a normal grant — it’s a highly prestigious grant directly to a graduate student. And it, at least historically, didn’t put up with this nonsense. GRFP gave the student a stipend and the university a smallish, fixed fee. This fee was well below the normal graduate fees. However, hosting NSF students is considered a privilege, most research groups want them (they’re free from the PI’s perspective), and as a result, the universities simply eat the “loss” and waive the balance of the fees.
I was a student in a CSU (California state university) and a professor nominated me for a award from industry which was valued at $1000. To pass me the check, the university took 20% of the award!
High end universities regularly mark up most expenses charged to research grants by about 75%. This is the result of negotiations between the university and the government.
Nongovernmental grantors will sometimes negotiate much lower overhead. I suspect the negotiation goes “here’s $1M to a prestigious professor, and you may not touch it. We’ll give you $100k to make you feel better. Take it or leave it. By the way, if you leave it, we will happily offer the same research group $1M if they pack their bags and move to a different university.”
Wise professors with grants with differing overhead schedules will, of course, allocate charges to minimize the university’s cut.
If the donation is structured as an unrestricted gift, many universities take <5% as overhead. The nature of such gifts is that they cannot have, well, restrictions. So you can’t ask for deliverables or any other guarantees that might go along with a normal contract.
Why does this system even exist? Grad students shouldn't even really be students, but rather junior level employees who can switch employer at will if they get better offers.
I did my graduate work in Europe, and I think it is crazy how a bunch of unqualified/ semi-qualified students without their doctorates are teaching in US universities. We had exactly 0 doctoral candidates teaching classes, whereas it is widespread to have masters candidates teaching in US universities - many of which are not cheap at all. They should be students and researchers first and foremost, until they can complete their learning.
You're confusing "teaching assistants" with teaching a class.
A typical setup would be to have a professor give 3 lectures a week, along with open office hours, and design the curriculum. Then to have an assistant or two who are graduate students (people who have a bachelor's degree or master's degree in the subject) who help grade homework, set up lab work, and answer student questions in a 1-hour recitation/discussion meeting.
That's not the case in many places (including prestigious universities - and due to their research orientation, perhaps it happens more, the more prestigious it is).
It is virtually impossible to get into a teaching position post-doctorate in the US if you have not been teaching as a doctoral candidate. I have taught in Unis where there was an entire team of doctoral candidates (and a couple master's candidates) teaching a big chunk of the classes offered to undergrads - not as assistants, just as the listed "professor".
I have also followed open courses online where the "Prof" gives two or three classes in the semester, and the "assistant" teaches the rest.
As far as I know and have experienced, what you are describing is less true every year.
I don’t understand how I, a grad student in the UT system make 37k a year in salary (and was offered something similar by another UT school) when my peers in California make so much less.
Depending on your department and funding period, this may not be a like-for-like comparison. The 34k is an academic-year minimum; the CS stipend at Berkeley is $50k over the full year [1] (of course, to be fair, it is Berkeley). That said, I do think other UCs pay considerably less and do not guarantee summer funding
Narrowly speaking, $100/hour is probably true. However my arrangement as a chemistry phd student at UCSD included the following conditions:
To be eligible to earn $100/hour, you must be a grad student who:
* only earns at that rate for 20 hours per week
* is forbidden to work any other job for pay
* pays $20k/year in "tuition" despite the fact that you don't take classes after the first year or two of your 5+ year program
* also works at least 30 hours per week for $0/hour in your research lab (otherwise your advisor will drop you)
So, when you include those conditions, the situation is really "work 50-80 hours per week for $30-35k/year in an expensive california city". Which people were fine to do until phd student stipends started falling behind the cost of living in these cities for the past 10 years.
Speaking of just other schools, that sounds like that would be without a tuition waver. Typically when these super low stipends are talked about, it is with full tuition paid for. Although I think I have heard that Stanford's PhDs don't get automatic tuition waiving and need to get grant money
"Tuition" is a bit nebulous for PhDs because most of your time is not actually spent doing coursework: my program had students take 4-5 classes the first year, and 2-3 more at some point in the next four years.
You were otherwise registered for placeholder courses like "Dissertation research" and expected to be full-time in the lab. There were plenty of educational opportunities (journal clubs, seminar series, the occasional workshop), but certainly nothing like a full undergrad course load.
You do have to pay tuition for those "thesis" and "dissertation" classes.
In the 1990s-early 2000s, when I was a gradual student at UT Austin, I worked for the university, but not as a TA or RA; as staff, I had to pay for my tuition. At the time, just the "dissertation" class was about $1000 per semester.
Yes but it's not guaranteed every quarter at a UC school.
At least in my department, you have to re-apply on a quarter-basis for TA positions, which are generally highly sought after for its material compensation (no tuition, fee remission, and a small stipend). For research positions, contingent on you being able to 1) produce results, 2) the duration that the research proposal runs. Unless you're a PhD student/PostDoc/PI with a compelling research narrative that is novel and impactful, it can be hard to land grants (many individuals from many schools each competing for the same dwindling pool of funds).
So I completely understand young people striking for more benefits, but truly, it has to come out of the university administrations' pockets. Professors and PIs are like cash strapped entrepreneurs who have no way of raising additional funds for students unless they leverage industry connections. EDIT: I don't have any visibility on the "under-the-table" finances of PIs and professors, however.
US universities have been running an interesting scam with grad students for several decades.
This is how it works.
* Professor obtains a grant to fund some research.
* The university takes ~80k USD from the grant per year per PhD student.
* The student gets ~30k USD per year.
* The rest is 'tuition', health insurance and other various fees ('international student fee', 'mandatory fee', 'differential fee', some university facilities fees, etc).
PhD students have bogus course requirements just to make this scam justifiable.
Contrast this to the system in most European universities where the student gets a significantly larger fraction of this money. (2x-3x in general, sometimes all of it!).
This is not really a solvable problem because a PhD is the most reliable path to US emigration for Indian and Chinese students, so there’s always going to be a demand
You are right, a US PhD degree is in more demand in general.
There is a reason our economic systems are not pure supply and demand though, because in that case workers/environment eventually end up being exploited.
The US would look very different without minimum wages, environmental protections, and a bunch of other regulations which limit supply and demand based exploitation.
This is wild and when you lay it out on terms of dollar amounts and percentages it really looks like a machine with graduate students coming in and administrative salaries coming out
I think it's important for discussions about this to distinguish between how things are and how things should be.
How things are is that grad student labor is critical to the running of the university: critical for teaching of undergraduates, critical for performing research to reach deliverables on grants. Indeed, very little research is performed directly by faculty. And grad students are hurting, often at or below the poverty line. Typically a grad school program in the UC takes 5+ years, during which time wages might stagnate around $30k, without raise or career movement that would be possible if they spent those years in industry, despite by all objective measures their day-to-day work being very similar to a research job. Sunk costs make it very difficult psychologically to leave early. Abuse is rampant.
How things should be is very much open to debate. Perhaps a grad program should be as some claim it currently is: a privileged learning role, where you can focus on learning from world-leading experts. Perhaps university institutions should not rely on grad labor as much as they do, and invest more in faculty. Perhaps individual grad students would be better off not in grad school. There are lots of good suggestions in this thread.
How we get from how things are to how things should be is also an open question, but I'd advocate we do it with the least amount of harm to the specific individuals already living within this system. This proposed contract is already weak. The grad students deserve and need a lot more. And increasing the stipend to, say, the $54k proposed would also place incentives on the institution for change.
Finally, without living wages and good contracts, there will always be diversity and inclusion issues in academia. Someone from a wealthy background may be able to slog through a few years with support from their parents, but people from a poorer background will not. It simply will not be an option for them. There is a deeper tragedy here, for everyone involved--the individual, and the institution--for what is lost when so many intelligent, driven souls are not able to participate.
What gargantuan investments, tbh? I've been mostly hearing of volunteer-run DEI committees and the occasional checkmark or platitude on a forum somewhere. [Not trying to be snarky, genuinely wanting to know. I haven't heard of e.g. a trans student being paid way more money for attending grad school than a non-trans one.]
If I do a DDG search for "dei chairman university", I get listings for :
U. of Denver
U. Michigan
U. Washington
James Madison U.
Texas Tech
Emory School of Medicine
U. Virginia School of Engineering
Miami University
Washington State U.
UCLA
Now, if your argument is "All this is just empty platitudes" you might be right, but it's your turn to do the research.
Well, it’s unfortunately true. White women have by far been the greatest beneficiaries of DEI efforts. Of the POC that have benefited from these programs, many come from wealthy families. Functionally, DEI programs mostly exist to launder the reputation of universities.
When I moved from Canada to the US for my post doc, it blew my mind to hear the level of debt my American colleagues were mired in - from $70-$110K, early 2010s.
I'm pulling for the students here, and these are basic benefits, but you've gotta reign in student debt in the first place
Realistically, that means cutting administrative overhead. It's fairly ridiculous that the top UC administrators are getting higher salaries than the state's governor is. There's also a lot of contracting deals for services that could use some scrutiny in the UC system. This trend has been ongoing for years (2015):
> "Weeks after an announced increase in state funding staved off a tuition hike, the Board of Regents riled spending critics this summer by handing 3% raises to some of UC’s highest-paid employees. The number of those making at least $500,000 annually grew by 14% in the last year, to 445, and the system’s administrative ranks have swelled by 60% over the last decade — far outpacing tenure-track faculty."
The top pay goes to medical doctors, the football/basketball coaches and some admins. This money isn't coming necessarily directly from tuition costs. I agree though it is too expensive. Universities are always building new buildings.
Part of the problem is that in some states, state funding can only be used for buildings and nothing else. So universities get funding and are forced to spend it on nonsense
Football/basketball makes money for the school. If anything it's a little absurd that the players make so much money for the university with little to no compensation for themselves.
For some schools sure, but do you have any proof of that for Berkeley? I'm an alum and as much as I'd like that to be true I haven't seen anything better than handwavey guesses.
Last year the top 6 highest paid employees at Berkeley were all coaches or athletics administrators, of which the highest (head football coach Justin Wilcox) was paid $4 million. The football team isn't anything special, consistently coming in middle of the pack and not drawing in huge crowds.
The people rooting for Cal are doing it out of college/hometown spirit and not because we think our team is the best. If instead of $4M we spent $200k on a coach, would that change the outcomes at all? That would save $84/student per year in tuition, which is not a negligible amount.
It's the PAC12 TV deal more than Cal's individual performance, though obviously things will get weird with UCLA and USC leaving. If teams start hiring "cheap" coaches, the networks will object or demand lower fees.
> If instead of $4M we spent $200k on a coach […] that would save $84/student per year in tuition
I don’t know how California state schools are run, but at least in Oregon it doesn’t work like this. The athletics programs are funded from a completely different pot of money than the academics, specifically so that football spending doesn’t affect tuition. At Oregon State University (where I’m currently a grad student), the football program is profitable and brings in enough ticket sales to pay for itself and all the rest of the athletics programs too.
Athletics at most universities is an "auxilliary enterprise" it is self-funded by ticket sales and donations. This is especially true at the large D1 universities where the coaches are celebrities and highly paid. Coaches at small schools don't make a remarkable amount of money.
Also players can now be compensated for their "name, image and likeness" and top players are earning millions.
The issue is back in 2009, the US government started backing student loans, so they were guaranteed loans. There was also no loan limit on these. This is allowed universities to charge more and more money, in the fed was happy to back these loans.
This is the correct answser if the a ton of money suddenly becomes available for something the price of that thing will increase because the amount of the thing hasn't changed. You see this most especially in colleges because we've established a price floor by promising every student 5k and then promising them more loans on top of that.
Then we make the loans non-dischargable and there is no real reason for a university to every place any limit on what they charge for tuition since the customer who is buying the product is not the customer paying for the product.
1991 MIT won a supreme court case that allowed them to raise tuition as much as they wanted as long as they gave out cost breaks to students that would not be able to pay that much, this qualified MIT to be taxed as a charity and pay nothing in taxes. Other schools followed and jacked up tuition. They still are. It is all a grift. Even in the 90's the freshman class at MIT paid more than enough to fund all the teaching needs of all the other classes along with their own. Realistically, if student loan forgiveness happens, it needs to be pulled from the college endowments that the tuition stuffed into.
This system also obliterates the middle class and penalizes saving money while rewarding irresponsible behavior.
It essentially makes the system be "tell us how much money you have, and that's what the price is for you".
If you spend 18 years saving money for your kid's college, or they work and save during high school, the university just takes all that money. If you spend it all instead, you'll get more "financial aid" to lower the price.
Which, if you're a socialist school administrator is great news. No one keeps any money, everyone leaves school equally poor and dependent on the state, regardless of their previous labor or financial responsibility.
>graduate students would receive a minimum stipend of $34,000 by October 2024—a raise of $13,000
How do those numbers add up? If a degree costs $100K and a graduate student costs $25K per year, then one person can pay a personally tutoring graduate student for four years to acquire all knowledge. If 10 students pool their money, education costs only $10K.
There needs to be some space to meet and there needs to be a budget for professors but another $10K should cover that easily.
What's the obstacle that prevents students and graduate students and even professors from going back to the beginnings? They can organize their own university where the administration works for them.
There is no need to strike if the university has to match the offer of a competent competitor.
>Universities were generally structured along three types, depending on who paid the teachers. The first type was in Bologna, where students hired and paid for the teachers. [1]
If you want to have 40 different instructors, you need 40 times more students. That doesn't change the fundamental economics.
If you want famous professors, you either have to pay more, or create an enticing environment. You still have the option to pay for recordings of their lectures which should be more affordable.
A well-funded university will be better in several dimensions but quality of education and research is entirely within the influence of whoever starts a new university. Nothing else should matter.
The problem is that being privately tutored by UC Berkeley faculty is worth much less than a UC Berkeley degree[1], even though you might learn a lot more. And starting a new university from scratch is apparently difficult, although I share your confusion on exactly which part is so difficult, and whether the difficulty could be circumvented by getting a billion or so in private donations, or if it's a case of "no matter how much money you pump into Brown, it'll never become Harvard. Only Harvard can become Harvard".
[1]: Unless you go and make yourself famous for it, which in this case might be quite doable[2]. But the general point that just learning the material without an official piece of paper recognized by the system is often worth significantly less than having the piece of paper.
Taking on student loan debt is a choice, we need better financial literacy in this country. This is bigger than just student loan debt - look at how Americans rack up credit cards, car loans, becoming house poor with massive mortgages. Most of my friends growing up came from low or low-middle class incoming earning households. They ALL went to community colleges, then transferred to state colleges, saving tons of money in the process. The only people I know IRL who have massive student loan debt were the upper middle class kids from well off families. I think has to do more with how you're raised/your mindset about budgeting/money. Yes, colleges need to cut admin bloat too ... but good luck on that happening.
Rather than the students, I’m rooting for the tax payer in this one. California should determine grad student pay at state schools based on what level of funding is required to meet its educational mission, attract good students, and balance against other state priorities.
PhD students really don't get paid much. Tuition is waived if you're a TA, and you get a small stipend + good benefits. If you're an RA, you bring money into the university (through being the engine that pulls in grant money and having your tuition paid).
Most students I know were TA for one or two semesters and RA for the remainder of their 6 years. As far as I can tell, they are all a financial gain, not drain, for the university. That will likely depend on the department though.
No, if you’re an RA your prof brings in the money. Might also be the fund draw for post docs but I can imagine some with their own funding (awards or governmental). Based on my experience I would think PhD candidates are smart technicians for much of their residency.
You both bring the money, ideally. I co-authored grants with my professor and was expected to publish to make name for our work and fulfill the proposal's publishing requirements. Sure, the professor is infinitely better than me at this stuff, but there was a whole team, including grad students, who labored to get those grants, at least when I was there.
I did all that also, but $randomgradstudent didn’t get the grant. Like $majorprof didn’t do the lab work, work up the numbers, …. They merely edited, which was important, and had to mojo to get published.
That feels like saying it's a restaurant owner that brings in money, not the staff. If the professor couldn't do all the work on their own, then it's the team (which includes the RAs) that's bringing in the money. Sure, the professor is the "name" behind the work, but there's a lot people involved.
While the servers might keep the customers, it’s the chef and perhaps the owners that make the restaurant happen. And this is a terrible analogy for grad school as that staff is paid for shit in the states. Are we going to give ta’s $2/hour and expect their students to tip them?
Looks like you're arguing just to argue now. The analogy was making the point that more than just "the person in charge" is responsible for bringing in the money. Nothing more. The point of an analogy isn't to have every detail line up.
If I said that the introduction of the automobile to common public use was similar to the introduction of domesticated animals for riding, because it opened up a larger/wider area that people could interact with... saying that a car has wheels but a horse doesn't wouldn't invalidate that comparison.
This depends on your university, and also you should compare against a benchmark that's not cushy tech companies. I had spouse + child health care with no premium and only copays, no coinsurance. Didn't need the child care benefits so I don't know about that specifically.
PhD students provide a lot of the teaching labor at universities as lecturers and teaching assistants. What do you think would happen if they were gone? This is precisely why striking is effective, because the universities need them.
Actual professors, no. Adjuncts. They don’t need ta’s for anything other than lab safety for the major-specific courses. It’s the first two years with the gobs and gobs of students.
It's not just lab work, I TA'd for physics and students would come to TA discussion sessions to get a more detailed lesson on the material covered that week since often the professor is just repeating the contents of a textbook. Also, many TAs would spend many additional hours in tutoring and office hours, giving individualized attention to students, and this workload adds up.
TAs also grade quizzes, final exams, create questions for problems, etc... The professor often does very little work and leaves it to the TA, at least in my experience as a TA for physics courses. It's a lot more than just maintaining a lab.
Are they really that much more expensive? Also, wouldn’t that provide more actual jobs for PHd’s instead of competing for a scant number of jobs? Furthermore, I do not believe that the costs of undergraduate education are driven by professor salaries; I suspect there are other drivers like administrative overhead and overbuilt facilities.
Yes. From the article: "If the deal is approved by union members, graduate students would receive a minimum stipend of $34,000 by October 2024—a raise of $13,000 for some students". So as I said, professors are vastly more expensive.
> Also, wouldn’t that provide more actual jobs for PHd’s instead of competing for a scant number of jobs?
Yes. But it wouldn't do anything to save money on undergraduate education.
> Furthermore, I do not believe that the costs of undergraduate education are driven by professor salaries; I suspect there are other drivers like administrative overhead and overbuilt facilities.
Then what's the objection to higher stipends for PhD students?
Why pay higher stipends if the students are no longer performing professorial duties? It may be the case that they are still warranted, but fewer duties means more learning and opportunities to earn money part-time in coops or private companies.
It's a graduate student union. Both Masters and PhD students are in the same union.
> senior undergrads
1) They're not qualified.
2) Why would they even want to? It's time consuming and low paying. In fact, it would be even lower paying without a union, so senior undergrads would need to form one. Also keep in mind that PhD students are generally intending to go into teaching in the future, whereas undergrads generally aren't.
Universities have many needs besides TAs. the key to figuring out what a fair price for satisfying those needs is to have a market where supply can match demand. The same process can be used to set a fair price for grad student TA labor.
That's a dumb thing to say, because it sounds like striking worked in this situation. By this same all-caps libertarian logic, any strikes would be ineffective because the workers need "The FACTORY" or whatever.
The "university" is a huge collection of thousands of people, numerous competing groups, etc. The grad students can shut the whole thing down if they strike, because they are integral towards research and undergrad education happening.
There's nothing quite like the unfounded confidence that ignorance brings.
Replying to lapcat’s comment (which wasn’t possible), I suspect the schools would just look to adjuncts or senior u-grad students to be the necessary ta’s. It’s not like a 1st or 2nd year PhD student is particularly good or interested in ta’ing - they might be taking courses and are certainly fulfilling program entry requirements. Any research out of these people is gravy.
Interesting concept. Paying students to attend. I survived on this support in ancient times as somebody has to handle all those pre med/vet/dental students. But it was lean and I still can’t enjoy Mac and cheese. It certainly wasn’t a job or career.
Edit: reply again to deeper in the thread: we used the early students for things like 1-2 year lab as they were way better at lab than the students. Nobody handled a recitation unless they were 3rd year or more, had neutral+ evaluations and their boss lacked RA funding. Those with funded profs didn’t waste time ta’ing as they did work and wrote paper drafts. Those with new or unfunded profs did the ta gig and they also did full time work and writing drafts. 10+ extra hours a week ta.
You can get adjuncts and undergrads to be replacement TAs, but from my 2nd-hand experience via my wife (PhD in psychology) it would be research where things fall apart. The tenured professors rely heavily on PhD students to run grant-funded research and write papers for the lab.
The general public thinks first and foremost about education, but for lots of academics, teaching is a necessary evil and research is where the prestige (and money) is.
Exactly. Fundamentally, these grad students want to further enhance a system where undergrads pay tuition for an education, and that tuition gets paid to research-focused academics instead.
> I suspect the schools would just look to adjuncts
Adjuncts are more expensive than PhD students. That's not going to help at all with undergraduate costs.
> or senior u-grad students to be the necessary ta’s. It’s not like a 1st or 2nd year PhD student is particularly good or interested in ta’ing - they might be taking courses and are certainly fulfilling program entry requirements.
If 1st or 2nd year PhD students are not particularly good, then wouldn't senior undergraduate students be even worse? Anyway, in my experience 1st or 2nd year PhD students didn't usually TA. It was the longer tenured students who were the TAs.
Tuition increases are by far going towards administrative faculty rather than academic faculty. Most academic faculty, especially those doing research, are getting their own funding and not burdening the tax payer in the slightest.
Research is also incredibly important, especially at state schools, so that undergraduate students have more opportunity to participate in and learn from active research.
In my experience having worked at both prestigious private and low ranking state schools, state school doing research are much more willing to have undergrads involved in research. I've seen plenty of young students coming from low income, rural homes go on to become more successful than they ever imagined because they had access to research facilities and teams.
edit: it's worth noting as another commenter has that most of the teaching in universities is done by highly underpaid grad students.
This looks like more of the same from this union: Below rent pay with increased gender inequality in the health care plan.
Normally, what happens is students in lower cost of living campuses vote yes, but places like UC Santa Cruz overwhelmingly vote no, and end up on wildcat strike. I hope UC doesn’t deport too many grad students this time.
What should happen: Students should vote to replace the system-wide union with campus-wide unions with campus-wide contracts. If campus-wide unions / contracts are deemed illegal, they should wildcat strike until the law changes.
What will happen: Grade students will realize that a $10K raise and health care for a few years is nothing compared to getting a summer internship or going to industry, so the union will continue to negotiate increasingly abusive contracts.
There was a proposal to unionize even when I was a grad student. It didn't go anywhere.
What should happen, but won't, is: the Board of Regents says to UC, "Pay them what they want. Cut your administrative costs to pay for it. You may not raise tuition."
To add some relevant facts from my experience as a current Stanford PhD student: If I work over the summer my yearly take-home pay is about $50k pre-tax [1]. This is theoretically for 20 hours/week of research work "for my advisor", and the rest of my time is theoretically research work "for my degree completion". (In practice this is the same research)
The money flow shenanigans as best as I can tell are:
1. My advisor gets grant money from the government
2. Stanford takes about 40% as "overhead"
3. Stanford charges my advisor my tuition costs, paying for my "class" which is just doing research with my advisor.
This is about $35k/year for years 1-4, dropping to $14k/year for years 5+ with a "TGR" registration [2]
4. I get $50k/year as the remaining money
Note that my advisor also has to spend some portion of his post-overhead grant money on paying Stanford for research space and paying for part of his own salary. Numbers are of course opaque to me, but it leaves me confused what "overhead" pays for if it's not fully covering building space and faculty salaries.
From my perspective, had I skipped grad school and gone straight to work at a big tech company, I would have 5 extra years in my career earning a take-home salary of ~$250k total comp. This makes the opportunity-cost of my 6 years of graduate school about $1.5 million compared to going straight to industry out of undergrad.
Of course, grad school offers lifestyle and work-focus flexibility that can be far greater than available in industry. I feel for myself the monetary tradeoff has been okay, but only because I had no debt from college and have the option to enter a highly-paid career track (software development) immediately after graduation. For students with debt coming in to grad school or less lucrative career prospects, even Stanford's $50k/year would be tough swallow in a high-cost area like Palo Alto.
Part of it comes from a job market and hiring practices built around credentialism. When higher education becomes an "essential" stepping stone in ensuring a career, it gets inundated with an almost predatory mindset that cannot conceive of anything but its own necessity and will tirelessly protect that perceived necessity at all costs. Higher education was intended for the creation, protecting, and nurturing, of knowledge and liberal (in the classical sense) humanistic ideals. Nowadays, it's a career engine and often, to put it simply, pay-to-win.
On the one hand, as a strong supporter of labor, I absolutely support the students here, striking for better conditions.
On the other hand, when an employee of a private employer strikes, what they are saying is, "We want you to shift more of your profits to the employees than you are now.".
But when a public worker strikes, what they are saying is, "We want you to take away resources from someone else and give it to us.". And that is when things get tricky, because you have to ask who is losing resources so that they can pay the grad students more. Will they take it away from administrative positions? (great!) Or will they hike tuition, essentially taking it from other students (who may not mind since they can get ever bigger federally backed loans which is a whole other problem).
In short, I stand with the students but I don't think there is any good solution here, unless the state can be convinced to increase funding.
Regardless, they are a non-profit entity, which means any money they take in is allocated to a certain function. So no matter what, you have to take money away from someone else, not profits away from owners.
Oh no, taking money from the poor administrators making 300k/yr don't take away their resources and give them to the grad students who do the actual teaching and research!
I see nothing in this article about housing, which is a huge problem (particularly in the Bay Area and SoCal). So these graduate students will be expected to find housing around, say Berkely, on $34,000 a year.
Consider [1]:
> Pay and housing demands by University of California academic workers — who launched a massive strike across the system this week — could amount to several hundred million dollars annually, an “overwhelming” financial impact, a UC senior leader says.
The UC system has a lot of money [2]. Current assets stand at $140 billion. Most of that is the pension fund ($81 billion). Note that the UC system employs a ton of people because it runs a significant health and hospital system. But here's the endowment:
> The General Endowment Pool stood at $18.2 billion as of June 30, 2022. The 30-year annualized net return was 9%, the 20-year return was 7.9%, the 10-year return was 9.1%, the five-year return was 8.9%, and the one-year net return was negative 7.6% (1.4% over the benchmark).
So the univeristy is making >$1B a year in returns on money that it was simply given.
So why can't the UC system do what the NYU system does and supply grad students with housing? NYU owns billions in Greenwich Village real estate that is deciated to student and staff housing. This would have the benefit of controlling housing costs (for the students) and still keep assets on their balance sheet.
The UC system does provide housing for some graduate students, but they do not have enough housing for all graduate students.
When I was working on my PhD at UCLA, I lived in a UCLA-owned studio apartment for the first three years. The apartment was pretty nice actually. The rent was around $1625/month including all utilities in 2018. But you can only live in university-owned apartments for three years max. I had to move into a different place after that. I really would have preferred to stay, but I was lucky to get an apartment there in the first place.
I am the first in my family to graduate from college. I grew up incredibly poor. It was presented as THE way out of poverty growing up. I work in a field completely unrelated to my degree. My university degree didn't help my earning potential. I ended up making plenty of money in tech, so my degree debt didn't matter much.
I have a lot of kids. Only one of them has any plans on going to college. I try to dissuade my kids from going to college. There are a few degrees where going to school is the best path. But for most areas of higher education there are superior ways to learn the material, if the education is the goal. I majored in English Literature. Completely worthless degree. I should have just joined a few book clubs or hired a writing coach. Something like https://writeofpassage.school/. That would have been far less expensive and probably better.
Higher education in the United States needs an overhaul. $34,000 in California is ridiculous. I hope they get their money on the path to us changing the foundation of higher education.
I believe there is a strong generational divide here. A lot of people from the previous generation seem to assume "My degree did not help me make it big/I made it big without a degree, so a degree is worthless" without realizing that the labor market has shifted (for various reasons, pick your favorite culprit) so much so that if you are looking for your first job, a lot of entry level positions will not even consider your application if you do not have a high level degree.
I am glad you could make it big in tech without a degree in tech, but maybe it is necessary to rethink whether the same policy would work for your children.
Alternatively, work more actively to ensure that policy will work for them. e.g. develop enough of a network at a larger company that you know someone who can make exceptions to get them hired, work at a smaller company that has more flexible policies, or start your own company and have them work for you (which is really just the limiting case of approach 2).
Already happening in the humanities. Many major programs in my field when I was applying (as an international student, so there already were some "quotas" in place on how many international students a program would take) were signaling that they were reducing the recruitment number simply because they could no longer insure TT placement afterwards. It's too little too late tbh, but at least they are starting to do it. I know they are starting to do it in non-humanities programs as well.
I'll add as well: the standards expected for present day PhD students is insane compared to PhD students a generation ago. When I speak to some of the tenured professors I know, they readily admit that they would not meet the standards for TT positions today. Add to that the insane number of applicants, and the tendency for hiring committees to default to applicants from top-tier programs for hiring (regardless of the quality of their research), and you end up with an increasingly bubbled and desperate profession that is extremely unwilling to break from party line and disrupt whatever sliver of a living they ended up in.
I'm a PhD student at a top CS research University, and I'm leaving with a master's degree. I agree that the bar for admission into the program is way too high. I only got into two Universities despite having multiple publications as well as experience working in government research labs.
The majority of my fellow students are international, mostly from China. I know hardly any other Americans in my program. At this point I see the system as more or less a way for international students to gain citizenship. I'm all for immigration, but I think it has gotten to the point where American students don't even want to go to graduate school at their own Universities, and the system imports foreign students who they know they can abuse for cheap labor. If grad student salaries were higher I'm sure we would see more Americans joining.
I decided to leave due to abuse by my initial advisor. So many of my fellow students have experienced abuse or neglect by their advisors. By neglect I mean that advisors won't even talk to them because the advisor has tenure and doesn't care. Many CS doctorate holders I've talked to have expressed that their degree was not worth it.
There isn’t one answer to this question. It depends heavily on the department. For example, biomedical graduate students are often covered by external (federal) grant funding. This increase can be factored into the budgets for those, but only in the future. AFAICT, it is still up in the air how it will be funded in the shorter term.
Humanities students are another story though. External grants for those are more rare, IIRC.
I’m not sure if the universities can survive in its current model with fewer graduate students. They are very integral to the teaching/grading/etc for undergraduate classes. So, it will be tough to make the system work with fewer of them. At least, that’s what the striking students are counting on.
Ideally it would come from cutting the bloated administration that leeches off of research funding that professors and grad students attract, while impeding their work, but that's not going to be what happens.
I would caution against such sweeping generalizations about where the money goes. Statistics usually show tremendous increases in spending on "staff" (i.e. non-faculty) salaries, but those staff do a variety of things. For example, I previously worked as a staff researcher at a big private university; my job involved building open source software and writing papers. The research center I worked at had a couple faculty members and PhD students but probably 20 folks with jobs like mine. The fact is, a lot of the research is being done by that so-called "bloated administration."
There are staff researchers, but at least at my university such people were mostly soft money and were responsible for bringing in their own funding, which the university then proceeded to take 56% off the top for overhead.
At any rate, their numbers were insignificant compared to the administration, which occupied numerous buildings, including an entire skyskcraper. They didn't help us, and in fact made our jobs more difficult.
I'd love to see the data on "insignificant compared to the administration," because it doesn't fit my actual experience in any way. (I'm not saying you're definitely wrong, but I hope you might slightly re-evaluate your priors here.) And no, many staff researchers don't bring in their own funding; like PhD students they're funded by a combination of the university and grants (which they often help write).
That's what I meant by "soft money." By administration, I am talking about more stereotypical bureaucracy, such as the ever-expanding number of various kinds of deans. I worked with soft-money people, who were called "research professors" in my department. They worked hard and brought in much more money for the university than they cost.
Thanks very much for clarifying. My original point was that these staff and their salaries are often lumped in with "stereotypical bureaucracy" when discussing administrative bloat, and I think they're a greater percentage than many people realize :)
In UC, grant overhead was 50% the last time I took. That’s money the administration takes out before the professor gets it. Staff researchers, equipment, students, etc come out of the other half. Assuming the professor is using 20% of their grant money on staff researchers (this is likely a high estimate), $5 is going to administration for every $1 spent on staff researchers.
Edit, also some admins are paid out of the professors’ budgets, after overhead is taken out.
Administration doesn't consist of the people at that lower level. The admins are the VPs, associate deans, vice provosts, assistant this and associate that. They draw in low to medium six digit salaries and recruit a bunch of people to assist them.
> The fact is, a lot of the research is being done by that so-called "bloated administration."
That's such bs! Admin have no time to read a single paper, forget about doing original research. Admins do exactly zero research.
> Administration doesn't consist of the people at that lower level.
This isn't the way "administration" is calculated. Statistics showing "administrative bloat" point to growth in spending on "staff"/"non-teaching employees"/etc. The job I describe above would have fit this definition of bloat.
For example, if you want to use modern tools (aka code) in a department where nobody is hired for their coding skill, you need some staff. And you need to pay them well, because... you know. Startups, SF, FAANGs.
In scientific disciplines, professors and grad students just write their own code. At least that was the case in my department, other similar departments at my university, and people in my field from other universities. It's very bad code of course, but I've never heard of anyone getting hired specifically to program, besides a few CS undergrad interns being brought in. No one had anywhere near the kind of budget to hire professional programmers.
This is thankfully beginning to change, though far more slowly than many of us would like to see. There is much more talk about "research software engineering" happening in a lot of fields, and some funding agencies are beginning to take notice. Anecdotally, I know of a couple of PIs who have been successful in arguing for higher budget caps on R01 submissions in order to cover the costs of having appropriate computational staff on their grants, which is something that I never would have believed if somebody had told me about it ten years go. And some fields (like computational biology) have been ahead of the game in this regard.
It remains a huge challenge from a budgeting standpoint, though, I don't want to downplay that too much. And there are also other challenges- until very recently, my university didn't have job categories for software-related research staff roles, and so we had enormous difficulties figuring out how to hire and appropriately pay such people. The "how do we hire them" part has been fixed, which is a big help- but we still have to figure out how to pay for them ourselves.
At my university, graduate students are state employees, but not standard state employees the way facilities/staff/administrators are. Those groups have a union, benefits, and pension plan, everything is very rigid.
Graduate students are paid a "stipend", required to work 19 hours or less/week, and can't have any other form of state employment that might put them at 20+ hours/week. Total pay comes out to about $18,000/yr before student fees. This is because at that point, the type of employment is considered changed, and benefits have to be provided. The default appointment is for teaching, and doesn't include summer pay (no teaching in the summer).
However, if your group has external funding, you can use that external funding to pay the students, but you can only pay them the default appointment (plus summer). So the wage doesn't change, the students are still paid by the university and are state employees, but the university gets the funds from grant funding, not wherever it comes from for TAing (probably undergrad revenue + state taxes).
The best solution here is state legislature passing legislation to increase what graduate students are paid, take the money out of the tax budget (seriously, 100% of graduate students at my university are below the federal poverty level, which just enables this stupid degrading benefit double-dipping to subsidize salaries), and provide benefits and treatment as standard state employees.
However, universities have been sucking up cheap/slave graduate student labor for years and are completely addicted to it. They have ignored this demographic completely and most state universities cannot function without graduate students. Graduate students do research. Research attracts big researchers who bring in multi-million dollar grants for the NIH and NSF. The schools take 45%-65% off the top of each grant in the form of indirect cost recapture. That heavily subsidizes the schools. Also, high quality researchers brings in more, better undergraduates. All of this while grad students are paid $16k-$30k/yr, mostly without benefits, for extremely highly skilled technical work. When fewer and fewer Americans were going to graduate school in the 80s and 90s, rather than try to make graduate school more enticing, the US simply pivoted to the H1B system. The hilarious thing is many schools claim graduate student tuition is part of their compensation, and that's worth tens of thousands of dollars, but in reality, graduate student tuition is just being in a research lab doing work that benefits the university anyways. Most graduate students in science take 4-6 classes over ~5 years of graduate school - not worth anything close to what universities claim it is. And most grad students still have to pay student fees, while having reduced access to undergrad facilities (no dining hall, no dorms, no gym access at lots of universities, reduced health clinic access, etc).
As an undergraduate, I always felt like the money given to graduate students was just a tax on undergraduates. Whenever the graduate instructors wanted more money, they would raise the fees for undergraduate students.
Thank you! All the anti-union comments here kind of baffle me given that grad students meaningfully contribute to the academic mission. If anything, the economics of tutoring as a side gig in grad school led me to realize how much I was getting ripped off as a TA. There is much better fat to trim in the UC system than grad student stipends.
Honestly, I’d much rather student tuitions be going to grad students working as TAs. It makes for better grad students (experience as teachers is invaluable in solidifying that undergrad knowledge which can fade) and encourages them to continue on their academic career path to PhD and beyond (which themselves are career tracks on life support).
The dubious administrators are a symptom, not a cause. The root cause is guaranteed loan money. About a decade ago, I remember seeing a study posted here that said that for every dollar of increased guaranteed loans, tuition went up 71 cents. There’s just no incentive for a university to charge much less than the maximum amount that the student can borrow.
The first step to addressing the college affordability crisis is to get the government out of student loans to attend private universities and colleges. If private lenders want to step in, that’s fine, but then they have to do an actual actuarial process to determine which students will be capable of repaying. Once the government is only involved in public education, they can start working on cost cutting, but that too has to start with cutting back on loans, because those just make tuition go up.
I get that guaranteed loans come from a place of wanting to make education more accessible and not just a part of the entrenched privilege of the wealthy, but guaranteed loans are one of those zombie policies that makes the situation worse rather than accomplishing its goal.
My department at Stanford has a diversity administrator, a fund raising admin, a sustainability admin, and some more I am probably not aware of. Only senior admins get six figures.
It would be interesting to see the full salary structure at Stanford compared to Berkeley. It's not freely available, but they have a link that requires an email (waiting for my burner account to be approved):
Almost as if graduate research and professors are required to build an environment for high-value undergraduate studies. The distribution of fees is far from ideal, but your complaint should not be directed towards those that literally define the institution you wish to attend.
Are you not aware that grad students teach sections, grade, and do most of the research work that brings in grant money? All for near-poverty wages. It's astounding how so many people are so ignorant of how universities operate, despite having attended them.
In my experience, graduate students aren't really that effective at research until several years in to their education. From a productivity standpoint, it is largely a loss. Many would prefer to hire post-docs instead. They end up being not much more expensive after everything else is taken into account, and they are ready to do good work from the get-go (which, for people who's livelihoods depend on getting tenure and/or grant money, is pretty dang important).
The data in that link shows that HMC provides a high quality undergraduate education. But they have very few graduate students doing research and teaching (just a handful of Master's degrees candidates) and don't have a doctoral program at all. So the statement by @CaveTech above is incorrect.
Those are just marketing numbers used by every university. You could look at any university's website and say the same thing, not to mention it says nothing about graduate students or programs
Every university has numbers on their site claiming how awesome they are, it's meaningless
Pick a different set of metrics if it makes you happy. There are a bunch of independent sites where you can find data on education outcomes. Whatever.
The point is that by any reasonable standard, HMC delivers very high quality undergraduate education without having a bunch of graduate students doing research and assisting with teaching. Therefore the point made by @CaveTech above is invalid.
Grad students aren't just "older undergrads who really like studying", they are researchers, assistants to professors, and teachers of undergrad courses.
For that reason, they deserve to be paid, and I would argue given their role presently and for the future of the country, they should be paid at least enough to rent a 1 br apartment and cook their own meals.
In continental Europe (not the UK afaik), grad "students" are considered proper employees of the university. In my home country, they have been traditionally called "Assistant in Training", much akin to a paid apprenticeship in the sciences.
Mind you, they are not paid a lot, but enough to be able to rent an apartment in the city the university is in.
In English, we have started calling them PhD "students" as well, which imo very much undermines the perceived position of these "students".
A friend had a UC professor ask if she'd be interested in a remote postdoc because it would have been impossible for them to hire someone in California given the postdoc pay rates.
I don't know if that's an unheard of arrangement or not, but it sounded totally weird to me.
Your comment could be read in two ways. Could you clarify?
1) The UC professor offered a remote postdoc because they did not have enough funding to pay the minimum UC postdoc salary, but could pay less to out of state employees
2) The UC professor offered a remote postdoc because the allowed UC postdoc salary was not sufficient to attract candidates given the area's cost of living
2 was my impression for why they were looking for remote candidates, pretty hard sell to move to any of UC's areas on a $55k salary.
Someone else probably accepted, in her case she'd already taken a better opportunity elsewhere. I just thought it was strange for a grad student position to be so disconnected from the university campus.
But with the insane cost of living I guess it's not surprising.
The entire academic institution is a scheme to extract money from undergrads to pay for research and administrators. Easy to see when you realize how much contempt professors have for undergrads.
It's very much the opposite. Most good professors (and good teachers) would rather be doing research. Their research brings in millions and millions of federal funding, and colleges take 45%-65% off the top of each grand in the form of indirect cost recapture. Most research professors also pay some or all of their salary from their grants. And the good, successful ones, wouldn't be at that university teaching at all if the schools didn't supply the necessary research infrastructure. Those IDCs heavily subsidize the school.
It sounds like you are quite ignorant of how research happens - the situation is precisely the opposite of what you describe. The research money comes almost exclusively from external grants, and the universities take a large chunk, often > 50%, off the top.
The research subsidizes the university, not the other way around as you somehow think. Most professors would love to spend more time on undergrad education, but that's not what keeps the lights on - research grants do.
You have a bizarre idea of how this works. I take it you have never done grad school research? You can't just independently get research grants, you basically have to be in an established university or research center.
The lab equipment, the computers, all of that comes from research grants. Professors are incentivized by the university to get more grant money (e.g. focus more on research), because that means the university gets more money. This isn't complicated.
I guess I'm just jaded from having to deal with professors who obviously couldn't stand undergrads and did everything in their power to ignore them. Undergrad would be much more effective if it was separated from research.
Sure, it's not an ideal situation, but one that just kind of arose. Non-research focused liberal arts schools pretty consistently give higher-quality undergrad educations, but they are also a lot more expensive. Many professors suck, but many people in any profession suck.
My experience was the opposite. The best classes were those taught by professors doing active research on the topic. Separating research would drastically harm instruction.
Thank you for your perspective. What do you think should be done about professors who have no interest in teaching but are forced to anyway by their university? The issue as I see it is about incentives. There are no incentives for being a good teacher, so all the effort goes into research, leading to subpar experiences for undergrads.
If professors were paid to actually educate students I would agree. But that's not what's expected of them. I went to a top 25 university and would say most professors actively detracted from my education because they saw undergrads as nothing but a nuisance.
I'm happy to reconsider in the face of evidence. My conversations indicate that professor contempt for undergrads is a relatively universal concept that most of my peers have experienced. If you have any evidence I'm happy to consider it.
I'm sure we had very different majors and I definitely didn't go to a top 25 school, but I don't think I experienced this once getting my bachelor's. I had a couple crappy professors, but it was never due to them not caring about undergrads. They just sucked at teaching, mostly. Every one of my professors once I got to the more focused courses were passionate about educating new minds in their area of expertise.
The career-building part after getting my BS was an exercise in futility, but if I could go back in time and go straight into my trade at my current workplace, I wouldn't. Thankfully I had a scholarship that covered tuition, so loans weren't an issue.
My experience was not like yours, I had numerous professors who not only took the time to entertain my questions but I also had some mentor me on research
I still remember the days when students were students, and workers were workers.
First, you were a student, and paid tuition to learn.
Then, you graduated into the workforce, and paid off your tuition.
Now students call themselves "student workers" or "academic workers", and treat the PhD like it's a job that's supposed to pay them enough to raise a family.
It's a sign of a failing bureaucracy when the terms start to contradict themselves.
Speaking as a (former) partner of a University of Oregon grad student, what it actually came down to was that folks weren't paid enough to even live in the community they worked and taught in. I was making more at my shitty retail job for $8.50/hr, 25 hours a week, than my partner was making working 60+ hours a week, in a job that required a college degree. I was not contractually barred from taking other work, unlike my partner. And most terms, my partner was expected to teach or TA classes for the university as well as working on their dissertation. This is common for most grad students, and has been for decades.
Based on average cost of living in that community, a $54k Stanford grad student stipend is fair, perhaps low: you shouldn't have to take on an additional $40k a year in debt just to afford the privilege of accepting a "full ride" graduate fellowship.
I believe that’s too narrow of a viewpoint and disregards the nuances of the relationship between graduate students and their universities. In recent times universities have increasingly relied on grad students for teaching and research functions. If you asked a graduate student to describe their experience they will most likely compare it to a job because it has the same responsibilities as one.
Things change. For example, now those students have enough awareness of how they were getting screwed, and ability to organize, that they did something about it.
And whether you think it's fair or not, apparently the UC system needed them enough to strike this deal.
Obviously the total cost is more than $34k/yr, because graduate students, like any other employees, have overhead. But university money has a way of going around in circles, and (although I haven’t checked the particular details here), a good fraction of this money may be chargeable to grants, this costing the university as a whole nothing except to the extent that these charges displace other charges that the university might otherwise benefit from.
In fact, in some cases, universities charge more than 100%: the university can charge a “fee” (graduate tuition) and bill that fee to a grant. And in other cases (but maybe not under this agreement), the university can collect the fee from the student.
For comparison, NSF GRFP currently pays $37k/yr. Stanford appears to pay about $27k/yr (which, if I understood the table right, is a bit embarrassing). The DoD’s NDSEG pays $40.8k/yr. Hertz pays $34k/yr.
So, as far as I’m concerned, this agreement is a bargain for UC.