After Learning Her TA Would Be Paid More Than She Was, This Lecturer Quit | Hacker News Reader

After Learning Her TA Would Be Paid More Than She Was, This Lecturer Quit

chronicle.com

25 pointschippy19 comments

I had a similar experience at another UC, where I lectured (and am now a PhD student!) -- and the general thrust here is correct: lecturers are often paid a FTE-equivalent salary that is not much higher than what a graduate student would be paid.

That said, there are a few pieces to this that unfortunately didn't make it into the article:

1) At that pay rate, the TA would have been expected to work at 50% effort (20h/week) in that position, in order to earn that salary.

2) At my UC, a "full-time" load for lecturers is 6 courses per year, or 3 per semester. (This may be different at quarter-system UCs.) That means that a course is considered 1/3 of full-time, not 50%, with an expected time commitment of ~ 13h/week over that same time period.

3) Thus from a "compensation for labor" perspective, the hourly rate for the TA is thus about 30% less than the lecturer -- of course, this rests on many assumptions about how much time is actually spent per course -- and the TA is expected to spend quite a bit more time on the course than the lecturer is. (This ignores the work needed to develop a course, of course, but often lecturers are asked to teach already-designed courses.)

The kicker, though, is that the TA is probably also getting their tuition covered, an extra benefit worth $7-15k, depending on a student's circumstances, and depending on whether you believe this tuition reimbursement is an accounting gimmick, as some do. If you do include this amount, the TA is indeed paid much more than the lecturer!

"Tuition reimbursement" is definitely an accounting gimmick, at least once you're done taking classes. After qualifying exams, the idea that a PhD candidate is receiving anything that you would pay tuition for is laughable. You're doing research and teaching, both of which are things a professor does, albeit at a smaller scale and with some oversight/guidance, but that is far more akin to having a manager than having a course instructor. I'm all for including tuition as a concept when you're still taking courses, but after that point it makes no sense.

I think the typical argument about tuition being an "accounting gimmick" is that it's the univerity paying itself for something -- does it actually come out of a budget, paid for by other students? (Unclear.) If there were no "tuition", would that money instead go to the student? (Unlikely.)

The question of whether senior doctoral students who aren't taking classes anymore should be paying tuition is a good one too! In the case described in the original article, though the student was in a masters program and quite likely taking classes—so not quite this scenario.

Anecdotal data from the grad programs in my area is that at least for PhD students your supervisor pays their tuition from whatever funding source they use to pay the stipend.

Yes, and the supervisor also pays a fraction (often 50%+!) of any incoming grant money to “overhead” — to the institution, for lab space, staff, operations, etc.

Why some of this money is categorized as “tuition” and other money as “overhead” is at the root of the question I think.

It sounds like they are just two different unions?

> That’s because after 48,000 graduate students, postdocs, and researchers in the University of California system went on strike in 2022 and won pay increases and expanded benefits, some TAs are now earning more than the instructors in their own classes. The minimum academic-year salary for first-year teaching assistants, for example, will increase from the $25,000 they got in the spring of 2023 to $36,000 this fall.

I can't tell what you're implying by the use of the word "just".

No implication. One union got a raise and the other seems to be following suit. The whole thing seems to be unfair right now but will likely be fixed:

> The University Council-American Federation of Teachers, the union that represents UC-system librarians and non-tenure-track lecturers, including Reiterman, recently kicked off an effort, including an online letter-writing campaign and a couple of town halls, to persuade the system to confront what they’re calling a pay inversion. The union’s existing contract ends June 30, 2026, but union leaders are urging administrators to pay lecturers more immediately.

https://archive.is/NNmGI

If the issues is TAs went on strike for more pay, clearly the answer is for the professors to strike as well. It seems to work.

Greek history really isn't the prestige area of study it used to be. I wonder how much funding universities are going to be redirected away from liberal arts and the humanities to fund machine learning departments in the next few years? The money shuffle is pervasive.

Liberal arts and humanities departments are a lot cheaper to fund than machine learning though. They aren't competing with Silicon Valley for talent.

My point was that universities, like other corporations, have fixed budgets and additional funding for machine learning resources has to come from somewhere. Talent isn't really the issue. Universities will be using those limited AI resources to develop new technologies they can patent, to attract researchers and students interested in using those resources. There is not currently a deluge of students that want to learn Greek history.

Sounds like the professors and lecturers should form a union (or push their union to do better)

This happens in other professions too where non-unionized folks manage unionized folks. The managers can make less because they don't have collective bargaining.

They seem to have a union already. From what I can tell FTA, the ones who got a raise are "UAW 2865" and the ones who didn't are "The University Council-American Federation of Teachers".

> This happens in other professions too where non-unionized folks manage unionized folks. The managers can make less because they don't have collective bargaining.

It doesn't make much sense in this particular case, but the assumption that managers should make more than workers is in fact kind of odd, and probably more of a reflection of power and hierarchies than the actual value-add of the work.

She was making $2936 a month teaching with a PhD? Even if it is part-time, that seems fairly low. She had 120 students in each class, let's say tuition is about 5k per class which comes out to $1.2 million. Revenue at universities have increased dramatically and is approaching nearly a trillion total.

I've heard of this kind of thing happening when faculty are based in a developing country and they hire a post-doc who has to live in, say, Switzerland.

When they live in the same place, definitely smells a bit weird. But hey, could have been worse, she could have taken an unpaid professorship [1].

[1]: https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2022-03-21/ucla-recru...

as she should

Reply on news.ycombinator.com