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Comment by tbruckner | Hacker News Reader

Not familiar with academia, but where does this extra $ come from? Won't this just mean departments will recruit proportionally less PhDs?

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> Won't this just mean departments will recruit proportionally less PhDs?

Maybe they should. The PhD dropout rate is almost 50%. Universities exploit PhD students for cheap labor and then throw them away.

Already happening in the humanities. Many major programs in my field when I was applying (as an international student, so there already were some "quotas" in place on how many international students a program would take) were signaling that they were reducing the recruitment number simply because they could no longer insure TT placement afterwards. It's too little too late tbh, but at least they are starting to do it. I know they are starting to do it in non-humanities programs as well.

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.

I'm a PhD student at a top CS research University, and I'm leaving with a master's degree. I agree that the bar for admission into the program is way too high. I only got into two Universities despite having multiple publications as well as experience working in government research labs.

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.

There isn’t one answer to this question. It depends heavily on the department. For example, biomedical graduate students are often covered by external (federal) grant funding. This increase can be factored into the budgets for those, but only in the future. AFAICT, it is still up in the air how it will be funded in the shorter term.

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.

Ideally it would come from cutting the bloated administration that leeches off of research funding that professors and grad students attract, while impeding their work, but that's not going to be what happens.

I would caution against such sweeping generalizations about where the money goes. Statistics usually show tremendous increases in spending on "staff" (i.e. non-faculty) salaries, but those staff do a variety of things. For example, I previously worked as a staff researcher at a big private university; my job involved building open source software and writing papers. The research center I worked at had a couple faculty members and PhD students but probably 20 folks with jobs like mine. The fact is, a lot of the research is being done by that so-called "bloated administration."

For example, if you want to use modern tools (aka code) in a department where nobody is hired for their coding skill, you need some staff. And you need to pay them well, because... you know. Startups, SF, FAANGs.

In scientific disciplines, professors and grad students just write their own code. At least that was the case in my department, other similar departments at my university, and people in my field from other universities. It's very bad code of course, but I've never heard of anyone getting hired specifically to program, besides a few CS undergrad interns being brought in. No one had anywhere near the kind of budget to hire professional programmers.

This is thankfully beginning to change, though far more slowly than many of us would like to see. There is much more talk about "research software engineering" happening in a lot of fields, and some funding agencies are beginning to take notice. Anecdotally, I know of a couple of PIs who have been successful in arguing for higher budget caps on R01 submissions in order to cover the costs of having appropriate computational staff on their grants, which is something that I never would have believed if somebody had told me about it ten years go. And some fields (like computational biology) have been ahead of the game in this regard.

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.

And when it becomes a huge challenge from a budgeting standpoint, you need appropriate administrative staff to figure this out.

There are staff researchers, but at least at my university such people were mostly soft money and were responsible for bringing in their own funding, which the university then proceeded to take 56% off the top for overhead.

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.

I'd love to see the data on "insignificant compared to the administration," because it doesn't fit my actual experience in any way. (I'm not saying you're definitely wrong, but I hope you might slightly re-evaluate your priors here.) And no, many staff researchers don't bring in their own funding; like PhD students they're funded by a combination of the university and grants (which they often help write).

That's what I meant by "soft money." By administration, I am talking about more stereotypical bureaucracy, such as the ever-expanding number of various kinds of deans. I worked with soft-money people, who were called "research professors" in my department. They worked hard and brought in much more money for the university than they cost.

Thanks very much for clarifying. My original point was that these staff and their salaries are often lumped in with "stereotypical bureaucracy" when discussing administrative bloat, and I think they're a greater percentage than many people realize :)

In UC, grant overhead was 50% the last time I took. That’s money the administration takes out before the professor gets it. Staff researchers, equipment, students, etc come out of the other half. Assuming the professor is using 20% of their grant money on staff researchers (this is likely a high estimate), $5 is going to administration for every $1 spent on staff researchers.

Edit, also some admins are paid out of the professors’ budgets, after overhead is taken out.

Administration doesn't consist of the people at that lower level. The admins are the VPs, associate deans, vice provosts, assistant this and associate that. They draw in low to medium six digit salaries and recruit a bunch of people to assist them.

> 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.

> Administration doesn't consist of the people at that lower level.

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.

The non teaching staff doesn’t come out of thin air. They are employed for the people in the administrative positions.

My experience (described above) provides a direct counterexample to this.

Somewhat, but departments will likely end up spending a higher percentage of their budget on grad students.

Also, student unions have different priorities because this isn’t a lifelong career so reducing the number of jobs isn’t a big deal.

They operate on a huge surplus from what I've heard

It depends.

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).

of course. Typically in STEM PhDs are paid from the research grants of their advisors.

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