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>Ideally grad students would stop pouring in, free labor would dry up at universities, and they’ll have to raise grad student salaries to acceptable wages again. Seems unlikely given how badly people want to do anthropology PhDs, and that there’ll always be people who can afford to take a poorly paid position like that because their partner or parents are paying the bills.

I like how you phrased that.

One potential solution is some feedback loop telling students how many PhDs in anthropology we really need. We're currently producing way more PhDs in non-STEM disciplines than there are post doctoral academic positions (I mean that broadly; e.g. post-docs, tenure track, full time lectureships).

Instead of giving out 5 PhD spots, maybe a program can give out 1 PhD spot and pay that student 3x more. They'd save money and could focus on creating one really good professor, instead of 5 struggling lecturers.

5 PhD spots is 5x the revenue. Theres a reason they dont provide that data to potential students

The problem is that having a large body of grad students increases your research output, allowing you to get more grants and raise the prestige of your institution at a relatively low cost. Universities are incentivized to admit more grad students if it leads to these improved outcomes.

And more students running your labs/substituting you for teaching/etc. means more time to do non-teaching stuff, which is a net positive for most professors.

How sad was I to realize that I was the only one in my PhD program who had chosen that route because I was as passionate about teaching as I was about research!

Feynman:

If you're teaching a class, you can think about the elementary things that you know very well. These things are kind of fun and delightful. It doesn't do any harm to think them over again. Is there a better way to present them? Are there any new problems associated with them? Are there any new thoughts you can make about them? The elementary things are easy to think about; if you can't think of a new thought, no harm done; what you thought about it before is good enough for the class. If you do think of something new, you're rather pleased that you have a new way of looking at it.

The questions of the students are often the source of new research. They often ask profound questions that I've thought about at times and then given up on, so to speak, for a while. It wouldn't do me any harm to think about them again and see if I can go any further now. The students may not be able to see the thing I want to answer, or the subtleties I want to think about, but they remind me of a problem by asking questions in the neighborhood of that problem. It's not so easy to remind yourself of these things.

http://www.math.utah.edu/~yplee/teaching/feynman.html

Well in the end I dropped out (:

It's not just selfish. If the school admitted fewer anthropology grad students, the marginal rejected candidate would say "Just let me in, I don't need to be guaranteed a postdoctoral position, and I'll work for a pittance -- I just really want to do my PhD." How is not admitting them kinder when they're beating down the doors to be let in and "exploited"?

From knowing a bunch of STEM PhDs over the past decade, we're producing way more of those than "needed" too. They just have cushier basically-unrelated fallback options.

> One potential solution is some feedback loop telling students how many PhDs in anthropology we really need.

Like... a cost associated with the program... and long term potential earnings?

It's so strange to me that the solution here people propose is to limit the free choice of students that want to further their education. A PhD does not have to be a professorship job training program anymore than a bachelor's should be job training. A more educated workforce is a good thing in its own right.

The economics are already there for increased grad students, yet we want to artificially restrict it to prevent what? Sounds more like enforced elitism.

> Spending 80% of your income on housing is just poor budgeting no matter how you look at it.

77% of take-home pay is closer to 40% of income. It's only a little higher than sustainable levels. When housing costs grow 5-10% per year and PhD programs last 3 years longer than they need to, anyone who had a reasonable budget at the beginning could end up with an unreasonable budget by the end.

I’m not sure how you budget, and whatever works for you works for you, but 77% of the money that hits your bank account every month going to housing when you’re a grad student is insanity, not “a little higher than sustainable levels”. Especially when there’s a kid in the picture.

According to the US government's definition[0, 1], affordable housing is less than 30% of income. Which type of income it is is up for debate but it seems the general consensus is gross income, though I can't find an authoritative source on that. If it is gross income, then it stands to reason that 77% of net income may actually be fairly close to 40% gross income. And, while 33% above the affordability limit (30% of gross income), it's not terribly outside "a little higher than sustainable levels" -- though that's a very subjective phrase.

[0] https://www.huduser.gov/portal/pdredge/pdr-edge-featd-articl...

[1] https://www.hud.gov/program_offices/comm_planning/affordable...

I’m not sure what sort of accounting tricks you are doing.

40% of gross income becomes 77% of net income given 48% of deductions. 48% of deductions for a grad student making $25k a year would also be insane.

Yeah, for a take home income of 2,200 per month in santa cruz, your before tax income would be about 2,666. 1,700 of that is 77% pretax and 64% after tax.

As a PhD candidate in my last years I was paid 2500 gross per month (for 9 months of the year), take-home was 2250 or so.

70% of net is 1575. 1575 is 63% of my gross pay.

Remember, these workers are paid so little they are in the bottom tax brackets at 10-12%.

>Ideally grad students would stop pouring in, free labor would dry up at universities, and they’ll have to raise grad student salaries to acceptable wages again.

That won't happen. Universities will bring in foreigners instead unless Congress gets involved.

For the most part the same grad students get tuitions wavers, which if accounted for, would up their income for what is part time work significantly.

Current US tuition is a scam driven by an exploitative loan industry. Giving tuition waivers to grad students is something universities do precisely because it lets them say "no but really when you consider your total compensation it's very competitive with the industry". It's nonsense.

There is a lot of that going on, but it is important that factor only came into play in the 1980s and then in a big way after Biden and friends changed the rules around student loans. That is a huge problem that must be dealt with, but underpaid graduate students, exploding tuition, and colleges going under has been going on for a while even without the lending.

Except that for research programs these tuition wavers are for "research credits" for the majority of grad school duration. That is, there is no classes, only work on behalf of the university. Unlike normal work, you pay them. Calling most grad students "students" is a fiction. They are workers.

> That is, there is no classes, only work on behalf of the university.

On a PhD you do your own research. You aren’t working for anyone but yourself. You may do some teaching but that’s just an optional part-time job.

That's not true. Do you even know how grad school works? Research you produce and grants you pull in benefit the university. Your research also is directed by your PI, a university employee and your boss, and often involves directly assisting their projects. How would a research university look if all of its grad students stopped doing research?

It is true. I’m sure the university benefits, but you decide what to do yourself. You aren’t doing work given to you by the university or your advisor. Your advisor is absolutely not your ‘boss’, they’re a tutor, almost a peer.

> You aren’t doing work given to you by the university or your advisor.

Something tells me you have not been through PhD, or are have not interacted with other PhD students. You absolutely work on what your PI got their grant for.

Nope I do have a PhD.

It's safe to say your experience is highly atypical. Even if a grad student's stipend is not funded on an RA for their research, the research still costs money. It is certainly funded from somewhere, and it's not coming from the tuition. It's almost always the PI's grant. And that means your research is on a specific problem.

I can't speak to what your experience is, but what I am saying here is typical in US universities.

Replying to your lower comment: That is just not remotely my experience or the experience of most people I know. Most people in science I knew already know what project they would be working on before entered grad school at all. It is very much directed, with some latitude like any other skilled job.

> It is very much directed

Graduate school is very much directed? The usual criticism is that it’s completely undirected and you can drift if you aren’t careful!

Not anymore. There’s no money to linger around because many schools don’t let you TA for a long time.

This is emphatically not true and shows a major misunderstanding of graduate funding.

If you want to have a PhD you need funding. To get funding you need to work.

Then you get to research in your free time.

Source: I’m a PhD student.

Some funding requires you to work, some doesn’t.

And the funding that doesn't require you to work is increasingly offered less.

Um, I had a TAship and the tuition waiver during my Master's period at UCSC as well as when I needed to take any required classes post-Masters.

This is exactly it. Unviersity education in particular has developed an irresistable cachet that means people keep coming even under the most diabolical conditions. The other part of it is a lack of good other options, and also a great reduction in labour mobility.

Yep. Sometimes you just have to realize you can't take certain paths in life. In my late 20s I can no longer become a race car driver or a pilot. When you're 33 and you have a 10 year old son you can no longer get an anthropology PhD. That's just how the world works. This lady made bad choices and keeps making them.