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Comment by skosuri | Hacker News Reader

Really, that is surprising, because it is disallowed. Stanford, like all UC's where I am at, have salary minimums. Stanford's minimum is higher than the NIH levels [1]. It would be hard to pay someone under the table, so I don't see how this is really occurring.

[1] http://postdocs.stanford.edu/handbook/salary.html

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Hmmm. Unless Stanford and the NIH turn a blind eye to it---this is trivial to audit---this could not be happening without the faculty getting kickbacks.

It's not happening as far as I know (I'm faculty at UCLA and employ several postdocs).

I heard from my postdoc friends at Stanford a couple of years ago about the pay levels. It could have changed now but I doubt it. Do postdocs at Stanford still pay tuitions? My experience is that UCSF > UC Berkeley > Stanford as far as postdocs' compensation is concerned.

Stanford has always been pretty good with postdoc pay, and postdocs never paid tuition. Pretty much all of these schools and mine (UCLA) are on similar levels. At all UC's postdocs are unionized as well given additional protections (like 1yr contracts, limits on training time, etc).

The tuition part is wrong. Stanford postdocs do pay tuition, but it isn't out of pocket. They are legally unmatriculated graduate students, so they pay some kind of tuition/registration fee for the year/quarter (I can't remember which).

It isn't something that they are necessarily responsible for, and it is a small amount. But it is paid in their name.

That's a peculiarity of stanford; but it's like $200/year. At UCLA we have something similar called an infrastructure fee which is about the same amount a year. Importantly, this is not something they are responsible for paying ever.

I think that the point is so that it looks like you are really a student for tax purposes. It is a small amount that isn't ever directly billed to you - but it does count as a taxable benefit.

according to glassdoor, it's exactly the opposite. Stanford > Cal > UCSF.

And things seem to have changed. I was a postdoc 2 years ago and salaries seem to be higher (although glassdoor typically reports exit salaries).

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