Grad student unions strike deal with University of California
science.org
science.org
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.
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.
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.
What did the institution claim the justification was?
Taking an extra cut from a student, a group who are already generally pretty poor, is peak scumbag.
An extreme case from earlier this year, in which a university employee was caught stealing: https://www.npr.org/2022/03/29/1089525660/a-former-yale-empl...
How much of this happens on a per-employee basis? What is the expected value of loss if everything is tallied and reconciled?
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.
- Library 2%
- Admin & General 9.4%
- Departmental Admin 26.6%
- Plant Maintenance 24%
- Interest on Financed Bldgs 4.6%
- Equipment Depreciation 11.6%
- Building & Improv. Depreciation 11.3%
- Sponsored Programs Admin & GTRC 8.4%
- Student Services 2.1%
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.
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.
What happened to the UC system?
[1] https://jeffhuang.com/computer-science-open-data/#verified-c...
Same thing that happened to the state and all its institutions - it became culturally and morally corrupt.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Supply and demand.
Edit: downvoted for stating a fact that shows US relatively better lol
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.
Also, supply and demand is universal and incentives for exploitation by suppliers increases when demand increases.
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.
This is a totally unsupported and hypothetical claim. Given the gargantuan investments in DEI by universities, I'd be amazed if it were true.
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.
I'm pulling for the students here, and these are basic benefits, but you've gotta reign in student debt in the first place
> "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."
https://www.latimes.com/local/education/la-me-uc-spending-20...
Not a professorship; an actual, physical chair.
They weren't amused. I think they'd heard that one before.
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.
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.
The lottery also makes money for a few of its participants.
Also players can now be compensated for their "name, image and likeness" and top players are earning millions.
This is led to bloat within universities. See: https://stanfordreview.org/stanfords-administrative-bloat-is...
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.
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.
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]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_university#Characteri...
Don't get me wrong, I really liked Bruce Porter, but I don't think he could replace Bob Mugerauer teaching Contemporary Moral Problems.
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.
[2]: And someone should do it and make headlines.
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.
I don't know about Masters students.
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.
That would be interesting, because TAs do the grading. ;-)
"“The current child care subsidy will be enough to cover … less than 2 months of child care per year”"
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.
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?
Right, and this is why they are trying to underpay teaching staff.
There is no problem with “whiny” PhDs. The problem is with overpaid self-dealing administrators betraying the purpose of the institution.
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.
If they don't work for the university, these union negotiations don't affect them.
That is exactly what the union is negotiating.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Look I'm for affordable tuition, but is frankly going to be a lot[1] easier with the jobs that homomorphic is gonna bring to cloud.
1: "a lot" spoken suddenly guttural, like Trump does
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.
No, female graduate students are free to opt out of having kids.
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."
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.
[1] https://gfs.stanford.edu/salary/salary22/salary_tables.pdf
[2] https://studentservices.stanford.edu/my-finances/tuition-fee...
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.
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.
[1]: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-11-16/uc-union...
[2]: https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/press-room/ucs-invest...
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 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 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.
Maybe they should. The PhD dropout rate is almost 50%. Universities exploit PhD students for cheap labor and then throw them away.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Edit, also some admins are paid out of the professors’ budgets, after overhead is taken out.
> 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.
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.
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.
Also, student unions have different priorities because this isn’t a lifelong career so reducing the number of jobs isn’t a big deal.
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).
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.
https://cardinalatwork.stanford.edu/benefits-rewards/compens...
I am not convinced that the value add to the undergrad environment will make up for it.
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).
https://www.science.org/content/article/postdoc-union-reache...
Cooks and waiters in restaurants don't work for free either. Programmers don't work for free and negotiate salary raises.
Every university has numbers on their site claiming how awesome they are, it's meaningless
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.
https://www.hmc.edu/research/student-research-opportunities/
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.
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".
I don't know if that's an unheard of arrangement or not, but it sounded totally weird to me.
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
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And whether you think it's fair or not, apparently the UC system needed them enough to strike this deal.