Why significant numbers of US PhD students rely on donated and discounted food | Hacker News Reader

Why significant numbers of US PhD students rely on donated and discounted food

nature.com

40 pointsrntn14 comments

> "I was always one unanticipated expense away from not being able to finish my degree."

I finished the article but I am left struggling to understand what happens afterwards. Do these struggling students finish their degrees and have improved food security afterwards?

Presumably they aren't tied up with school obligations after they finish their degrees, and they have time to take an adult job. But for many of us, the time between graduation and that first paycheck can be pretty hairy.

Doing a PhD is an adult job though.

Here in Europe we even have industrial PhD students, who do a PhD some of their time, and work in industry on stuff relating to the topic of their PhD part of the time. These people can be quite experienced even at the start.

As a PhD student, I was paid about a third of what I was paid at the first job I landed as a PhD, except for one year when I got a sweet scholarship and I made two thirds. Yes, they were adult jobs, but I don't describe them as such because those TA/RA/sessional positions have Mickey mouse wages.

I think that remains reasonable. However, it's still necessary to have doing a PhD be seen as a real job and to set things up so that PhD students are paid a wage they can live on.

This kind of 'I can't afford thing, even though I'm doing world-leading research'-thing isn't reasonable, and since we treat it as a job in Europe, one where you get a lower wage than in industry, but still one that pays a wage you can live on, shows that it's probably feasible to do the same in the US.

I agree, it's feasible to do this but the article, and the experience I relay, is the truth on the ground in the US and Canada today. In STEM, it's totally possible to pay one's way through grad school without taking on extreme debt -- but it requires continual employment and strict frugality.

Relevant PhD Comic: https://phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=39

Relevant Simpsons: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qqrCoyVK80I

Rent was too high and the stipend too low. It sucked. There’s no incentive to fix it because international students will take the slots. Qualified Americans rarely apply. Med school is a better deal.

What’s amazing to me is that US institutes are responding to these cries for help.

PhD stipends at Harvard are increasing from 35k to 50k minimums. I have heard postdoc programs at Harvard now give 80k.

It is almost a double from just the pre covid years.

Places like UK, on the other hand, has not changed at all, and is rapidly becoming the worst place to do a PhD in the western world.

My UKRI stipend is less than national minimum wage. And is also without any employer benefits. I'm lucky to have a spouse that supports me through it.

Many in the department are now struggling to attract new PhD researchers within the UK or Europe. And funding rules are restrictive to any interest from further afield.

Just as a comparison. An assistant professor in UK makes about the same as a Harvard PhD student (50k).

Isn’t this why there are student loans or do they not cover post graduate work like this?

I worked at Dartmouth College in the CS dept and grad students there were paid and treated as employees (they got health insurance, not sure if they got any other benefits) out of grant funds. It wasn't a lot of money though (the school took a large cut of the PhD student grants for overhead). The profs would often joke that they could guarantee full attendence at meetings if they announced there would be free pizza (for both grads and undergrads). Students often kept boxes of the cheapest breakfast cereals at their desks/workspaces. If test subjects were needed for experiments or people needed to clean the lab just offer them pizza. It gave them power over the students, and they didn't really seem to care that students were always hungry, maybe some of them just assumed young people are always hungry. They sometimes made grad students buy supplies necessary to their work with the students own funds. I believe the grad students are now unionized there, so things may have changed. Loans often cover tuition and sometimes a cafeteria food plan. If you don't like the food you have to buy your own. If you have to pay for the food plan you might not have enough. Paying for food competes with other things also, books, travel, drinks with friends, concerts. Kind of miserable if you have to trade off food versus life, it created a lot of stress. There was a lot of inequality there even though it is an ivy league college, some students had SUV's and would go on trips to France for holidays, some had bicycles/skateboards and boxes of cereal and didn't go anywhere on holidays.

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