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Comment by 72948957 | Hacker News Reader

To be honest, I don't really get the point of the strike.

The grad students are not only getting a free education, they're also getting paid a stipend on top of that. Grad students tend to have extremely flexible schedules, freedom to pursue their intellectual interests, the ability to attend seminars and travel to conferences, etc.

At least in STEM fields, anyone in grad school probably could have gotten a higher-paying job in industry, but chose to attend grad school, knowing the tradeoffs, because it's what they wanted to do with their life.

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A stipend on average of $19,500 a year:

"On average, such workers make $19,500 a year, according to the Temple University Graduate Students' Association (TUGSA), a union that represents nearly 750 affected workers. In recent negotiations, the university had proposed increasing base pay to $22,500 by 2026." https://www.businessinsider.com/temple-university-suspends-f...

> Grad students tend to have extremely flexible schedules, freedom to pursue their intellectual interests, the ability to attend seminars and travel to conferences, etc.

The flexibility doesn't mean less hours. A majority work 40 hours or more. Many work way more:

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-03419-8#:~:text=G....

It's amazing how we continually look down on others for wanting better conditions. In general, not many on here would trade places.

We possibly have encountered graduate students with differing lifestyles, but a lot of the grad students I know in the natural sciences have grueling schedules between taking classes, TAing, and conducting research. The way these activities are structured may not correspond to a typical 9-5 but they’re still intense in their own right. To add onto this - attending conferences isn’t always on the universities dime, often it comes out of grants and other associated project costs that are allotted for your research. Maybe the university does foot the bill in other cases, but these are marginal costs when compared to the realizable value brought by graduate students in the form of monetizable knowledge and subsidized teaching costs. The latter point is at the crux of most tension between graduate students and university administrations, and there’s a large imbalance between the tangible value that grad students (and most academic researchers) bring to universities and the way that they’re compensated.

I don't like "grad students" as a category.

Master's students, or early stage PhD students, are typically continuing their undergraduate education. They should be considered students for all intents and purposes.

People doing research for a PhD should be considered junior professionals rather than students and paid accordingly. When I was doing it, the pay was 2/3 of what you could reasonably expect in the industry. That was a fair sum, considering the freedom and flexibility that came with the job. When I look back at that time, it was the period in my life when I had the best balance between income and free time.

> When I was doing it, the pay was 2/3 of what you could reasonably expect in the industry

You must be quite old or not in CS :) It was conservatively 1/5 when I was a PhD student (30K was a quite good stipend vs 150K was a kinda mid MS offer). It's as low as 1/10 now.

If STEM PHD students at Temple are really making 19K then it's gotta be at most 1/10 and as low as 1/20 for the good ones.

I do agree, though. We should just separate MS from PhD and pay post-MS PhD students something like what post-docs make. I think that would be very fair -- way less than industry, but a proper wage for a real laborer.

CS, in Finland, 10-15 years ago. I think the initial salary was something like €30k and it increased to €40k, which would be roughly $40k to $50k using the exchange rates at that time. Typical industry salaries for people who started their undergrads at the same time as me were ~50% higher.

The reason why PhD stipends are so low in the US is probably the same as the reason why industry salaries are so high: a culture that favors the top 20% at the expense of the bottom 50%.

>the pay was 2/3 of what you could reasonably expect in the industry

I think this is very high amount compared to the situation today. We are talking about people here making ~19k per year in a city where the minimum cost of living is ~30k.

"Free" education, except that they have to work for the university, and, as you note, they lose out on all the income they could have earned during those years. It's effectively quite expensive.

Some of the complaints from prior strikes were rather basic issues like not being able to afford nessesary dental care.

Who is going to teach anyone in your equation, if everything was about money there wouldn't be professors to educate the STEM majors. There is more to building a society than balancing the checkbooks.

They have to work a ton. They're being used for cheap labor.

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