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To use an analogy to the trades, the PhD students are the apprentices, the senior researchers / professors are the journeymen. Do not misunderstand, the PhD students are doing labor for the benefit of the university, and getting paid to do so. The problem arises from uninformed people who ask exactly your question, operating on the misguided assumption that graduate school is just more, harder undergraduate school.
Grad students are getting an education and a big bump to their future earning potential, often at significant taxpayer expense. What entitlement do they have to have a free ride, much less make living wage on top of that?
• There is a University-sanctioned monthly food bank for students. https://rde.stanford.edu/food-pantry-pop-up
• After securing an apartment community specifically for postdocs, the minimum income required for many rentals was set higher than minimum postdoc funding. https://stanforddaily.com/2023/04/23/postdocs-say-theyre-fin...
Do I have hard numbers? No, but I’m not going to take the time to gather hard numbers for this site.
Also, telling postdocs (and grad students) to simply live off campus would be detrimental to the University, given it’s relationship with the County.
An entire ecosystem based on pleasing arbitrary government committees doling out funds.
Most PhD students are pretty much done with classes after the first year or two. They get their PhDs through research (often writing their own grants) or the vital function of teaching. They are workers. It is disingenuous to view them as students. If PhD students were not able to make a living, very, very few people would ever be able to enter science.
Somehow my 6 years of PhD in physics begs to differ.
As I said in another comment, grad students are going to grad school and getting a big bump to their future earning potential, subsidized often by the state. I don't think it's an entitlement that they get to do that for free, much less claim a right to earn living wage level on top of that.
> Maybe you were doing a CS PhD or something
LOL
> PhDs in most fields are not a good good way to maximize earning potential, especially when taking into account lost potential wages and the time value of money.
Nobody made anyone get a PhD in a field that doesn't pay, and so that doesn't mean they're entitled to high pay.
It's not hard to google "starting pay for major x" before making a choice. Nobody should be surprised at what the pay is, especially for someone capable of getting a PhD.
(And it’s not true grad students ‘often’ write their own successful grants. The vast majority of STEM grad students are supported on stipends from their advisor’s research grants or do a TA-ship when desperate.)
But still, I doubt you would have found many grad students who were independently wealthy before unionization. Or at least, in the field where they were lobbying the hardest for unionization, is probably where the most independently wealthy students were.