Graduate Students, the Laborers of Academia
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
For most people it's nearly impossible to admit something they just dedicated a large portion of their life too was completely worthless.
(standard disclaimer statement that of course there are exceptions to the trend.)
Well, then don't do your PhD in the US. I did my PhD in the Netherlands, had a reasonable salary and a good work-life balance. I now work as a habilitant in Germany (roughly the equivalent of an assistant professor), it's the same: good salary, good balance.
The primary problem in the Western/Northern European academic environment is getting a permanent position. So, I might end up in industry in the end ;).
In addition, a PhD is highly valued by companies in Germany (where I live now), so your higher starting salary usually makes up for the low income during your PhD.
That said, doing a PhD for financial reasons is usually a bad idea. For me, a much better reason is that you can work on a deep (and interesting) problem for 3-5 years, becoming an expert in a given topic and training your gumption, which will help you to tackle difficult problems later in your life, even in unrelated fields. Compared to research work, most projects that you can do in industry are rather boring in comparison (there are exceptions of course). So, if you do a PhD, do it out of curiosity and not because of the title or the hope to make more money later.
I would be interested to know what the process was to move from the US to France for a PhD.
Finding a grant/supervisor is quite easy for a strong candidate. The critical part is too choose wisely the topic. Research tends to be very specialized and you may end up with a PhD that gives you few marketable skills.
I would be interested to know what the process was to move from the US to the Netherlands for a PhD.
The country I would be most hesitant about is France, they really don't like speaking English, and most French PhD theses are still written in French. This is really idiotic, all it does is slow down the dissemination of research; some acquaintances who did their PhD in France were looking hard for a non-French external examiner of their PhD, which is the easiest loophole if you want to write the thesis in English.
I believe it's a stereotype and it's certainly not the case in CS research labs. I did my PhD in a French research institution (INRIA). In my group, a majority of the people didn't speak French. And of course, PhD students could write and defend their thesis in English if they wanted to (I don't know if they had to find a non-French external examiner, but it's likely to be the case that some examiners are foreign anyway).
Because English is the lingua franca of most academic fields? If you are publishing in English conference proceedings and journals, isn't it reasonable to write your thesis in English as well?
(Note that English is the default language of theses in many European countries.)
Many European research groups use English as their main language for communication. Also, outside academia many people in Western European countries and Scandinavia are proficient enough in English to communicate with. (Though in my personal experience, English proficiency in Germany is quite bad compared to e.g. The Netherlands or Denmark.)
One, the amount of money universities can shovel at athletics is insane. It cannot be justified, I don’t care how many reasons you come up with. They pay millions to build stadiums, pay coaches, etc. while throwing chump change at people doing academic work. I have also seen hundreds of thousands of dollars thrown at things like ugly artwork and statues.
Two, the “chump change” I spoke of doesn’t even come close to scaling with cost of living. I don’t even know how there can be students in cities where housing costs are out of control, unless they are the children of millionaires.
And that doesn't even take into account the large alumni donations that big time sports programs can bring to a school.
Here, for example, is the University of Michigan 2015 budget (the first one I found googling):
https://record.umich.edu/articles/michigan-athletics-present...
Revenues: $151 million
Expenses: $145.9 million
UNLV - 55% subsidized - http://projects.huffingtonpost.com/projects/ncaa/subsidy-sco... .
Then there's Eastern Michigan University, 83% subsidized (at $24M/year) - http://projects.huffingtonpost.com/projects/ncaa/subsidy-sco... . With 13K undergrads, that's $2,000/student/year.
That report points out that some 3/4ths of school have a 25% or more subsidy on their programs.
They have a summary of the subsidizes at http://projects.huffingtonpost.com/projects/ncaa/subsidy-sco... . I counted 49 with minimal subsidy (0 to 25%) out of 204 schools. U. Mich. is one of those 49.
Meanwhile I didn't even have dental insurance...
Of course it can be justified if the university is pulling in more money than it's spending. Athletics are a profit center for the stronger programs.
It isn't just money (and most universities LOSE money in athletics) but rather the change in culture with high spending in spectator sport. The top level leadership at universities is increasingly detached from academia.
I get that there needs to be some spending in support structure but the first and main goal should be education. Too much money (and more importantly attention) is being wasted in brand recognition and marketing.
Side note: would it be possible for universities to build small private cubicles/rooms or something assigned to each student where they can go study or whatever (probably with noise restrictions and so on to prevent distracting neighbors)? Even at its best, such a place would hardly be something a university can boast in its marketing pieces unlike a 80k seat football stadium.
like study carrels in a library?
http://www.ncaa.org/about/resources/media-center/news/athlet...
Real estate and businesses have a vibrant financial market, so you don't necessarily need large figures to participate. You're not going to raise $100 million in revenue bonds for a professor to study sea slugs, because there isn't any revenue.
University administrators do not have the power to make investors fund sea slugs over stadiums. If you can convince the nation's pension funds, hedge funds, and private investors to somehow buy science bonds rather than revenue bonds, then the administrators would stop buying stadiums and start hiring sea slug researchers.
I would tend to agree that the money might be better spent on building up dormitory or apartment housing for students rather than stadiums, if the revenue and costs were equal. But I'd need to look at the financials.
And to piggyback on your comment, modern academic science is the way it is because their "investors" (i.e. granting institutions like NSF) have certain stipulations for grant funds or at the very least prefer certain applications over others. Applications that have some aspect dealing with STEM education, for example, are incredibly popular with NSF and other institutions at the moment.
When you talk to research academics in the sciences, they often complain about what a burden education and outreach are on their time. Most of them would rather spend 100% of the time on their research. However, their public sector "investors" have an agenda for how their money is spent. They want to see certain results - it's not just enough to see more sea slug research, they want to have grantees also encourage STEM education growth.
On the other hand, the administrative stuff (writing your own grants, reviewing other people's papers and grants, and getting things like purchase orders and experiment approval through the university) takes a huge amount of time and is fantastically unrewarding.
For me personally, I had to teach one semester as a TA, but the Prof. I worked with was extremely helpful, and would pitch in to help when the workload was too much. After that, all my semesters were spent as an RA, which is a pretty awesome job if you work in the lab of a good professor and on an interesting project, which I did. And many of my friends pursuing graduate degrees in engineering seem to be in a similar position.
Maybe even a matching market, much like medical residency in the US.
Another thing to watch out for is to make a cold and cynical calculation about whether or not the PI will still be there when you are done with your thesis. My brother-in-law had his PI and another member of his committee leave 1 year short of his thesis being done. Fortunately, they both made arrangements to continue on his committee so that he could actually graduate, and he did, and has maintained good relationships with them.
On the other side... I know a guy who was not nearly as far along. His PI left, triggering others, and that sub-group in the department more-or-less collapsed. He was on the opposite coast doing a summer internship while that all went down. So.... "Heyyyyy, my internship is up in a couple of weeks, do you think I could go full time?"
Between all the stories like that I have, and the relatively low improvement in outcomes when things really work out, I am so very happy I ignored academia and went straight to industry.
My experience at a state-school, tier 1 research university was that the grad student TA workload varied greatly by department. I calculated I was making just under $25/hr while there with the time I put into TA responsibilities. It wasn't too bad.
Some friends in humanities were swamped though. Most because they cared a lot and spent a ton of time grading carefully.
huh, strange. for undergrad i went to a "good" UC and this is the opposite of what i saw in my humanities TAs. they either didn't give a shit and handed out A's like candy or graded on a rubric (i.e. did student posit counter-argument in paragraph N and support with primary sources in p. N+1) while paying little attention to content.
either way they certainly didn't seem stressed... unlike the STEM ta's... who were literally going gray in their mid 20s and clearly drank a lot.
They are important and I was once talked to because of a poor student eval (although in that same meeting she said she wanted me to help out in course instructor meetings since I had taught the class several times and wanted me to mentor the new grads. It was a confusing meeting...) and I saw a fellow grad student come under a lot of scrutiny for some odd teaching (I really think the guy was bipolar) but there was never any fear that you wouldn't be able to teach next year.
I'm currently an adjunct at another school and luckily my evals have been quite positive overall so I haven't had to worry about it here.
That said in every department except for the Math department both professors and GTFs (graduate-teaching-fellows) have been top notch and gone above and beyond their duties to educate.
They're priced about the same, though, it seems to me. I'm left wondering what you think a reasonable price is. Unless you're from out of state. Those prices are could very well more than the education is worth.
Being at a top research school probably helped, but the majority of grad students in this country are not at those types of homes.
The bigger problem I have is in deciding to leave academia. There are still questions I would like to know the answer to (and I expect there always would be). It just doesn't seem to make sense to take that path. Low pay, high competition, and the likelihood of being on a series of 18month contracts for the majority of your career. Indeed, in my specific field (Bioinformatics) the career path isn't even that well defined, and you can more easily get a job at a software company who will pay several multiple of what you could expect as a postdoc. It just doesn't make sense to do it.
If I and my fellow students/etc want to boycott something, compare notes on pay, share legal actions, or protest shouldn't that be protected by law?
I'm not a fan of unions or political parties but it blows my mind that the legality of organizing with others is even a question.
And since you're talking about software startup employees, probably the closest comparison is CS phd students, who are nowhere near suffering. The vast majority of graduate students are at least as satisfied as a developer, otherwise whole programs would have disappeared decades ago from inability to recruit. New admits always ask current graduate students what it's like. There seems to be this dissonance between people here on Hacker News believing that everything is like the horror stories of grad students being abused by psychopathic advisors and at best will get poorly paid adjunct positions before burning out, and what's really happening.
All of which is to say, grad school is horrible. Sometimes. Sometimes it's awesome, and YMMV.
The US takes 1.2 million immigrants a year, but it is extremely difficult to gain admission as a random applicant without family connections.
One possible way for in is graduate degrees in STEM fields. There are various work visa programs that are far easier to access through STEM graduate school in the US. You can get here on a student visa, gain some connections, interview on campus, and perhaps get a work visa through a tech employer - and this is easier with a grad degree, as those degrees grant certain exemptions from visa caps. If you remain in the good graces of your employer or university, you may eventually qualify for a green card.
It's a slog, but keep in mind, we're not talking about people with freedom of choice here. It might be more rational to sell real estate, open a sandwich shop, or become a dental hygienist if you were allowed to do so legally without fear of deportation.
But if your options are very limited due to visa and immigration restrictions? Sure, it can be highly rational to pursue a graduate degree in a narrow subsection of STEM fields. Unfortunately, as long as universities have this power, they probably won't have much incentive to make the degrees rational for people with the freedom to choose their careers.
NYU, for example only recently increased min pay to $15 per hour up from $10 after the union fought for like 2 years. It's a double edged sword to allow unions in universities, but given the state now, perhaps it's wise that they allowed them.
exactly. With number and salaries of administrators (and various non-education positions like sport coaches, etc.) swelling, i don't see why the grads performing the actual labor of education, serving direct business purpose of universities/colleges, shouldn't be let in on their share of the pie.
I would suggest that "professional median salary for holder of degree with 0-3 years experience" is the rubric that should be applied for compensation. More for relevant experience.
Of course, that would entirely shatter the entire US academic system, since it is, today, built on the backs of grad students working in penury (often having a blast, it must be said). The entire current system is built around VERY cheap willing labor.
a remark: grad students working for nil and startup employees working for nil have a facially similar appearance. The difference is the startup employees should have some fat options to compensate. The grad students don't have any upside...
Without the opportunity I was given to serve as one of those "Laborer of Academia" during my time, I'd still be paying student loans.
Three years of grad school and I didn't owe a dime at the end.
During my grad student days in a STEM program at a large state university, professors were occasionally able to "buy-out" of their regular course load and forfeit a percentage of their salary. The department head would then hunt for the next best thing - usually an unsuspecting grad research assistant to cover the offering.
As everyone here knows, NO.
That said, I found teaching to be pretty fun and helpful in solidifying my own understanding so it was helpful (but I'm sure the school also likes the free labor).