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The Back Page: Graduate Students Should Be Paid Living Wages

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32 pointselashri10 comments

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How should this be funded?

- more money from government grants?

- less money to professors?

- less money to administrators?

- higher fees for undergraduate students?

- fewer graduate students?

Absolutely fewer graduate students. The market just isn't there. There are exceptionally few professorial positions and commercial positions benefiting from graduate degrees available relative to the number of graduated students. This is true in every single field. The whole system is a giant scam against the students who are lied to aggressively by their schools for cheap labor.

That's an easy one, less money to administration

I think postdocs would be the best population to trial a basic income program. That might mean taking money from every one else. Oddly, I used to have the opinion that science should be a positive sum endeavour.

Non-disclosure: If there were such a program, I might have considered becoming a postdoc.

Taxes? These students will more than likely pay more taxes than they cost

- grants are worth less than they were before (https://drugmonkey.scientopia.org/2020/12/16/updating-the-er...)

-Profs receive money from several other sources - especially patents and are not reliant on as grants for incomes. As such I don't believe it's a massive issue

-Uni's take massive cut from grants (+50% in some cases) so that would be a starting point, especially since a grant now is worth less than one from 2001. (https://www.quora.com/How-much-of-a-research-grant-does-a-un...)

-Labs rarely get money from undergrad fees which are already insanely high

-Science at the current scale (at least in my area of biology) would stand to benefit from more grad students, the infrastructure just isn't there. This is ignoring the pyramid scheme that is grad school.

The argument advanced here is that we "need future scientists." Certainly a few, but if the past is any indication the universities are geared up to vastly overproduce. There are plenty of perfectly well-educated PhDs who want to do science but can't find any positions. It's not uncommon for many disciplines to graduate four to ten times as many new PhDs as are needed.

So why not cut the number of students in half and use the savings to boost the stipends?

> Certainly a few, but if the past is any indication the universities are geared up to vastly overproduce

No kidding. 90% of my cohort (who finished a PhD) went on to jobs outside academia, and my impression is that that’s pretty typical.

> So why not cut the number of students in half and use the savings to boost the stipends?

Easy, because then you have to hire more faculty.

Even if you could pay faculty as little as grad students (you can’t—because they have other options), universities get away with failing to pay payroll taxes (social security, Medicare, unemployment insurance) for grad TAs because they are not classified as “employees”. Grad TAs also have essentially no benefits (no 401k, no vacation time, no sick time, crappy health insurance, etc.)

Faculty are also likely to actually take their labor elsewhere if you jerk them around and treat them like minimum-wage retail employees (as many universities do to grad TAs): You will show up to your assigned sections (which may change at short notice). If you have a conflict, you need to find another TA to cover your time—and you will need to have the switch approved by your boss.

One you have earned your PhD, who is going to teach a lab or recitation section part time for $20/hr under those conditions when you can earn literally 10x that figure in industry, and be treated like a king (relatively speaking)?

In short, this whole thing makes more sense when you realize that graduate students are nothing more than cheap labor for universities.

For postdocs, the situation is even worse. Postdocs typically get paid ~1.5x that of a PhD student. And in some fields that are closer to the Basic Sciences, one (virtually) cannot land a permanent research position without spending 2+ years as a PostDoc research associate. The current generation of professors are the worst folks when it comes to the reasoning about sustainability of research in their field.

Why? If there is no market for graduate students with a certain degree then the market will (correctly) reduce the number of graduates with those less-in-demand degrees. Nobody has a right to be paid a wage just because they finish a degree. A lot of degrees are completely useless.

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