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Comment by some-human | Hacker News Reader

In the UK, most students are members of their universitys' branch of the National Union of Students.[1]

The unions have a big presence on campus and a bar with heavily discounted drinks and organise a lot of the social clubs and events that happen outside of the study.

They also negotiate with the university and faculty, fighting for students, and you can get individual advise and help too.

Enrolling to the student union usual happens almost automatically when you turn up and register for your dorm, classes and doctors etc.

The staff of the university (academics, lecturers, trainers, instructors, researchers, etc) tend to belong to The University and College Union.[2]

I didn't know this was abnormal in other countries?

[1] https://www.nus.org.uk/ [2] https://www.ucu.org.uk/article/1685/About-UCU

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The health of the student union is a very good litmus test for the culture of the university. Anyone looking to study at university in the UK should check out the student union and try to gauge how independent it is from the institution and whether they're actually active as a union or just an extension of the university's student experience department.

Can you find out much about the history of the SU at the intitution?

The names of previous people elected into officer positions?

What sort of jobs do those people have now?

Do you get a feeling like they might have used the officer roles to maneuver into those jobs rather than to actually advocate for students? (hint: SU Officers doing their jobs properly will be in conflict with faculty staff and see the worst of the institution, and therefore are not very likely to want to hang around after graduation)

Are multiple officers taking credit for the same achievement (campaign, event, milestone)?

Is there a good spread across demographics among the officers?

Do they get training? What do they say about their training?

What's going on on their social media? Does it feel like it's being used to market the university?

Source: was an SU rep

Phd student salaries in uk are probably the worst in the developed world. The student union in uk hasn’t been doing a good job to make salaries competitive with other countries at the PhD level.

Exactly. Unions end up becoming chums with the university admins. The students come and go but the admins are around a long time. Eventually the university just turns the union into a lower tier of management that effectively keeps all of the students in line. The admins learn which "issues" are favored by the unions and which issues hold sway with union. Then when they want to fire someone, they just frame it as an issue about which the union doesn't care.

I’m curious, what’s the going rate? I was a phd student in France circa 2013 and the salary was 1.3k€/month.

Currently about 16.5k tax free. If you live in London you get slightly more, and if you're an STFC-CASE student you get more again (total of around 20k in London). It equates to somewhere between 19-22k if you were paying income tax. For anywhere outside London and Oxford/Cambridge (where rents are also extremely inflated) it's a fairly liveable wage. Shared housing pretty much anywhere else is in the range of 500 a month, possibly a bit less in the North of England. UK citizens generally don't have to pay tuition fees directly, they're all rolled into the PhD "grant".

This is true, and they are valuable. But a students union is best thought of as a very distinct sort of organisation; they are not the same as a labour union.

(You obviously know this, but it may help prevent some misleading comparisons down the line…)

This is why I continued that people (including students) who are employed by the university are typically members of The University and College Union.

This includes "lecturers, trainers, instructors, researchers, managers, administrators, computer staff, librarians and postgraduates in universities, colleges, prisons, adult education and training organisations across the UK."

It is abnormal in the _USA_. The USA is not a very typical place, so probably should not be taken as representative of other countries, or even other rich countries.

I suspect a similar kind of student organization is normal in Europe as well as the british commonwealth, at least, but I'm not sure.

It is not how it works in the USA.

A student's union is not the same as a labor union. The student's union represents students.

This is a labor union representing graduate student-workers who are employed by MIT.

Again, The staff of the university (academics, lecturers, trainers, instructors, researchers, etc) tend to belong to The University and College Union.[2]

If they are employed by the university in the UK, they typically belong to this union.

We used to have the same system in Australia but it was abolished by our centre right party (Liberals). The result has been an erosion of student rights and tertiary education quality.

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