The peculiar status of PhD-employees
crookedtimber.org
crookedtimber.org
The idea that students should be free to choose their own topics is...odd. You choose your topics based on choosing your lab and the projects on offer - at least in science.
The observations from the author in the comments section that they know people who want to do a PhD (in Arts/Humanities) but can't because they can't find an offered project seems more like the system working properly - professors, who can be presumed to be aware of their field and by extension national interests via grants, offer projects to hopefully efficiently allocate the research dollars of the nation.
Which leads back to my first paragraph: in science I really don't know what you'd get out of students making up their own projects in a vacuum. Which makes me think the author has a very narrow perspective on PhD research.
The reason is that choosing what problems to work on is a fundamental research skill. Someone who doesn't learn that skill hasn't really learnt to do research.
This isn't to say that a student shouldn't spend time talking with their advisor about choice of problem. Of course they should -- they should talk to as many people as possible! But the responsibility for the choice of problem should be theirs. If that's not the case, then they're missing much of what it is to do research.
To quote a letter of Feynman to a former student of his ( http://genius.cat-v.org/richard-feynman/writtings/letters/pr... )
"I had another Ph.D. Student (Albert Hibbs) [who worked on] how it is that the winds build up waves blowing over water in the sea. I accepted him as a student because he came to me with the problem he wanted to solve. With you I made a mistake, I gave you the problem instead of letting you find your own; and left you with a wrong idea of what is interesting or pleasant or important to work on..."
[1] This is actually pretty complicated. Many students don't have ideas they're confident pursuing. Some don't grow into it, even after gaining some experience solving research problems. That presents challenges. And sometimes students badly misjudge what is important or interesting to work on. Should a supervisor interfere when that's happening? It depends. Making mistakes in choosing which problem to work on is an important part of learning to do research. So some floundering around is fine. But allowing it to go on for years and years is just cruel.
Most physics PhD candidates do not have free choice of research questions (or, at best, they are spending their "10% time" on their own questions, which is what I did).
On institutions: I did my PhD at the University of New Mexico. A fine institution, but also not Harvard / MIT / etc. I went there because Carl Caves had created a great environment to work on quantum information. Carl encouraged me to work on whatever problems I wanted, but was also happy to provide advice upon request. My fellow PhD students enjoyed similar freedom, and I believe it benefited them enormously as well.
Edit: To clarify my earlier comment: I am certainly _not_ saying that it is universally the case that people are able to choose their PhD project. That's not true, especially in fields involving expensive experimental equipment. I'm saying that someone not able to choose their project is being badly trained. It should count as a very heavy mark against doing a PhD when the advisor believes they should control the direction of the project.
The cost/benefit tradeoffs are atrkly different.
/s
Proposing a research project is a lot like pitching a product idea. If you bring your own money, or don't need any, then you can do whatever you want, including failing. If you need funding, space, collaboration, mentoring, whatever, then your pitch has to mesh with the interests with other people.
But even if given a project, it's not really a "project" in the sense of having a plan, budget, and timeline. Depending on the professor, the project may just be a vague concept, with no idea of how to carry it out. That was the case with my thesis project. I started with an inchoate idea, and ended up developing an experimental technique that opened up a new research program for my advisor.
There are professors who assign cookie cutter projects, and I think it's a disservice to their students.
About the freedom of choosing a thesis topic, I think this depends on both the style of supervision (controlling boss vs. laissez-faire situation) and the funding project (some have vague goals and can accept a wide range of topics, while others are very focused on mini areas).
And I think danieldk is right about the money: you are welcome to accept less of it, this doesn't mean that the money saved by the state is really going where you want it to go...
I do think that PhD students need to be paid a living wage, because of practical considerations, but you definitely don't need to pay anywhere near a normal wage. Your job as a PhD student is to get your degree and graduate, not to make anyone else money directly with your labor.
A PhD student should get a "living wage" as you say -- enough compensation to be able to continue and finish. Industry wages and research wages are different: being paid to work on a product which has a financial plan behind it works differently from trying to improve the state of the art, which can lead to small contributions or even a mathematical proof that it cannot be done :-)
Here's what I mean by that: The opportunity cost of a Ph.D. in physics, in terms of foregone salary, earnings on tax-advantaged savings accounts, stress, etc., is north of half a million dollars (and 5 to 8 of the best years of your life). Talking to people I know from my own department, and those I've met at conferences, and such, the lifetime value added to one's salary from having a Ph.D. is probably greater than the opportunity cost. But it's not obviously greater--a Ph.D. is a pretty good signal for "smart and gets things done."
In other words, it tells you "this person was probably going to do well anyway." You can't compare the mean or median salary of Ph.D.'s with those of, say, people with a Bachelor's in some STEM field. If you were to compare median STEM Ph.D. salaries with same-field top-quartile (or maybe top-decile) Bachelor's salaries, you'd find there is not much difference.
Am I just a bitter washed-out Ph.D.? Hell no! I did all sorts of fun things (like intermural sports and traveling) that I wouldn't have been able to do otherwise. I cherish those memories. But, if someone asked me "Should I go to grad school to improve my chances of earning a decent living?" my answer would be "Hell no!"
"(and 5 to 8 of the best years of your life)" I'm not sure about a physics Ph.D. but most of my friends who are finishing up their Ph.Ds enjoyed their mid 20's more than the ones of us who decided to did the daily work grind.
I love teaching, and I hate fighting with the computer (especially for dull line-of-business CRUD apps), so I don't particularly want an industry job, but the fact that I'm spending most of a decade (counting Master's) in grad school working well below the market wage for someone of my skillset still rankles. The fact that I'm going to spend 3/4 of my PhD taking no courses, but paying $12,000 a year in tuition grates too, as it's essentially a quarter of my salary clawed back for "job training", which in my case is a (very supportive) mentor and a desk in a windowless room - I may as well be a miner in a company town paying the company for pickaxes and head lamps (on the other hand, I also get all the same tax breaks I did in undergrad, so at least I'm not paying income tax).
When I describe my job to friends and family, I describe it as a sort of apprentice professor, because that's much closer to the truth than some sort of super-student. I'd rather be paid like an apprentice professor too, rather than a ramen-eating subsistence wage, as the original poster suggests.
And I am again, not talking about PhD's in computer science, which seem to be irrelevant in industry. I'm talking about things like physics or biology.
This is deeply troubling to students like myself who would like to invest and save a significant part of our salary for the future, as we would if we were truly employees in industry.
some student friends of mine get paid in very sketchy ways, like in personal checks from the department administrator, and don't even know if the university has done withholding. these are ivy league schools too! every few years there is a big IRS thing but nothing changes.
universities are shady as hell.
“Scholarship and fellowship payments are compensation for IRA purposes only if shown in box 1 of Form W-2.”
This is nonsense. Although my PhD was in a project with a predefined topic, many of my colleagues were doing a PhD in a topic of their choice. The faculty would have N open PhD positions every year, and people could submit proposals.
Also, the primary argument set forth in this post is financial. If you avoid paying income tax (through scholarships), you can spend your money on other things. No shit. If you change the amount of the scholarship to $500 per month, you can also spend more money, but you'll only get garbage. You have to find some level of compensation where you still get good candidates. In some fields, candidates will go to industry at the proposed compensation level (I would).
Another problem that is not taken into account is how government budgeting works. They won't see a switch to a bursary system as a way to save money to hire more faculty staff. They will see it as a way to save money, period. Especially in economically difficult times where we have to increase our military spending because of conflicts in Ukraine and the middle east.
Changing supervisors (at least in my experience) is not a problem, and this happens fairly regularly. It is better for a university to change supervisor than to lose a PhD student, as that happens often enough.
The salary here ($4500 or so per month, pre tax) for a PhD at a university is enough to lure those interested in academic work (especially after spending 5 years on Student payments of around $1k/month), whilst not being incredibly high. Of course, if you go into the private sector to do your PhD, you can expect a higher salary.
In the US, in the labs I am aware of, most of the student stipend for the experimental work is paid by the lab from its funds. As a consequence most of the time it is on the grant's topic. Choosing the lab is a way of choosing the range of the topics.
"Our proposal would give PhD-students decent wage contracts for the research assistance or teaching which they would do"
PhD students do not merely provide research assistance. They design protocols, carry them out and ask new questions, at least the good ones. The only thing that most PhD students lack is the ability to safely shift focus since most of their ideas have already been done but they don't know that since they are not aware of the literature.
What I don't like about the articles on academics lately is that on the one side they are focusing on how to keep highly educated people with low salaries and on the other hand how to bring more people in academia. Increase the salaries and more smart people will come, it is as simple as that... instead they are trying to get more people in academia so more people get trapped by inertia in bad paying jobs...
However, a big problem that I have experienced and seen is that PhDs negatively impact the quality of teaching. Master programs in the NL aim at being very high level (often succeeding), offering also courses on specific advanced subjects. Usually, PhDs have no control over what they will teach, they are simply allocated as "resources" by the faculty, even just to cover a minor part of a course or to supervise/correct practical assignments. This leads to ridiculous situations with courses that, for example, teach advanced rendering techniques but for supervising the practical part allocate a PhD candidate that has clearly never ever rendered a triangle on a screen in his/her life, and who had no time to properly prepare beforehand. I think this is a visible "weak point" of the whole system, and it should be addressed, somehow, also because I have noticed it being treated as some kind of "taboo argument" in the past.
I think that for humanities things tend to work differently (I'm in a STEM) in the States though.
I'm not sure where the OP gets the idea that PhD students in the U.S. usually have to pay their own way entirely and do not receive employment benefits (healthcare etc).
Humanities PhD students in the U.S. probably do have somewhat greater leeway in choosing/defining their projects, although they still need to pick one that their advisor approves and is comfortable with.
EDIT: to readers, the reason posts like this are downvoted is not because they're false, but because they're true. The anonymous downvoters are trying to conceal the truth.
The guarantee of funding doesn't mean that you won't have to work for your income. In my field, it is common for theorists to teach for much of their graduate career in order to support themselves.
1) social security taxes
The government has carved out a special status for these Phd "employees", which means that social security taxes are not paid for these employees, and of course the resulting burden is carried entirely by the employee. Ironically, and because this results in a higher effective wage for these young people, who are too young to care about pension and generally don't need health insurance, they actually like this part.
a) you can't get unemployment if you get fired, or after you "graduate" (which amounts to firing with a nicer pink slip for 9/10 Phd employees)
b) you don't build up pension rights
c) health insurance is the employee's problem (though many universities "solve" this through private means, but it means significantly less coverage)
c) No paid holidays (again, universities sometimes make up for this, but not the same as private sector. This is pretty much the only European job I know that doesn't come with 4 weeks paid holidays. This is legal, because it's not a "job", legally speaking)
d) very few other employee rights (e.g. no rights to unions, even though I doubt any union would stand a chance their anyway). No rights if you get fired. If a university downscales (thankfully, doesn't happen often), these people are treated worse than contractors.
2) They are most definitely not "civil servants"
The legal differences and problems this poses are too numerous to go into. Let's just say, once again, the Phd student is the loser here.
3) about the one thing these people do have going for them is that government sponsorships are tied to the person, and include a (small) amount to the university and the pay for the Phd student him/herself. So if the university fires a Phd student, they lose the funding.
In other words, unless you commit a crime or something as a Phd student, if you're on a government scholarship, getting fired is not a concern.
Being a Phd student on either a university or private scholarship ... you don't want that. Or, at least, make DAMN sure you like your promotor.
Is there not a student union in the Netherlands?
And yes, there are organisations for PhD students, which are employee organisations not student organisations, by the way.
There are some universities that are trying to change the status from a real employee towards a funded student, but that's not happening very fast, as of now.