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Graduate Students, the Laborers of Academia

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Re: Graduate Students, the Laborers of Academia

#31

Post by Cyph0n »

avani wrote: post #15
rahulnair23 wrote: post #6

Grad students are absolutely that. During my grad student days in a STEM program at a large state university, professors were occasionally able to "buy-out" of their regular course load and forfeit a percentage of their salary. The department head would then hunt for the next best thing - usually an unsuspecting grad research assistant to cover the offering.

Fun fact: buying out usually means "use grant money to cover hiring an adjunct for a term," not forgoing salary. Adjuncts are cheap (they cost less than a grad student, since they don't get benefits), and a successful research semester tends to make that money back with interest in overhead from the next grant submitted.

Who said a grad student gets benefits? At my college at least, grad students are basically students with - if they're lucky - a stipend and a tuition waiver.

Re: Graduate Students, the Laborers of Academia

#32

Post by btdiehr »

auxym wrote: post #28
howandwhy wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fundamental principle about doing science has changed. It has come from becoming a true scientist(born with natural curiosity towards natures, physics, understanding and exploring fundamentals principles of physics, life and matter) to bread butter scientist where you are pigeon holed into a cubicle writing grants all day and tinkering a very narrow part of a huge field to collect as much data possible so that yo…

I don't know if you were downvoted because of the cynical tone, but that sounds pretty accurate in my experience. It's why I quit after a master's.

Academics spend a lot of time on the internet defending their poor decision of going into academia, as well as anyone who points out how obviously fruitless academia is.

For most people it's nearly impossible to admit something they just dedicated a large portion of their life too was completely worthless.

(standard disclaimer statement that of course there are exceptions to the trend.)

Re: Graduate Students, the Laborers of Academia

#33

Post by microDude »

Kephael wrote: post #29
mountaineer22 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, the student gets the class at a discount?

Typically the student gets their classes for free, plus a stipend on top of that.

I think they meant, "Does the 'undergraduate' student get a discount for a class that is being taught by a Graduate Student rather then the original faculty staff".

As everyone here knows, NO.

Re: Graduate Students, the Laborers of Academia

#34

Post by harryh »

makecheck wrote: post #30

A couple of anecdotes that really drive me crazy. One, the amount of money universities can shovel at athletics is insane . It cannot be justified, I don’t care how many reasons you come up with. They pay millions to build stadiums, pay coaches, etc. while throwing chump change at people doing academic work. I have also seen hundreds of thousands of dollars thrown at things like ugly artwork and statues. Two, the “ch…

At least for schools with successful football or men's basketball teams athletics are generally run as basically break even programs. The money brought in by those two sports funds everything else.

And that doesn't even take into account the large alumni donations that big time sports programs can bring to a school.

Here, for example, is the University of Michigan 2015 budget (the first one I found googling):

https://record.umich.edu/articles/michigan-athletics-present...

Revenues: $151 million

Expenses: $145.9 million

Re: Graduate Students, the Laborers of Academia

#35

Post by jccalhoun »

makecheck wrote: post #30

A couple of anecdotes that really drive me crazy. One, the amount of money universities can shovel at athletics is insane . It cannot be justified, I don’t care how many reasons you come up with. They pay millions to build stadiums, pay coaches, etc. while throwing chump change at people doing academic work. I have also seen hundreds of thousands of dollars thrown at things like ugly artwork and statues. Two, the “ch…

At one point in my graduate career, my university was paying the last two basketball coaches more than $100,000 each because they had been so bad at their job they had to fire them but their contracts had multiple years left on them -- including one who had been in trouble for NCAA scholarship violations in the past and shockingly got caught violating the rules again while he was at my school.

Meanwhile I didn't even have dental insurance...

Re: Graduate Students, the Laborers of Academia

#36

Post by estsauver »

howandwhy wrote: post #22

it should be written as "Cheap Labor". I can vouch this as I went to graduate school where I worked for 5 years at 8-10 hours/day including Saturday and Sunday for $12,000/year to get a PhD in Biological Science. And it was in one of the most expensive state in US. So could not afford to start a family because of perpetual state of sharing apartment and not enough money and time to go out and find a partner. And at t…

My wife went to a #1/#2 school for her field (molecular cell bio.) It certainly didn't seem much better there.

Re: Graduate Students, the Laborers of Academia

#37

Post by jccalhoun »

karmajunkie wrote: post #7
beachstartup wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Some friends in humanities were swamped though. Most because they cared a lot and spent a ton of time grading carefully. huh, strange. for undergrad i went to a "good" UC and this is the opposite of what i saw in my humanities TAs. they either didn't give a shit and handed out A's like candy or graded on a rubric (i.e. did student posit counter-argument in paragraph N and support with primary sources in p. N+1) whi…

At least these days, most grad students and adjuncts depend heavily on student feedback for their continued jobs. It creates a perverse incentive for sure.

The schools I'm at might be different but in my experience the student evals aren't the deciding factor in employment.

They are important and I was once talked to because of a poor student eval (although in that same meeting she said she wanted me to help out in course instructor meetings since I had taught the class several times and wanted me to mentor the new grads. It was a confusing meeting...) and I saw a fellow grad student come under a lot of scrutiny for some odd teaching (I really think the guy was bipolar) but there was never any fear that you wouldn't be able to teach next year.

I'm currently an adjunct at another school and luckily my evals have been quite positive overall so I haven't had to worry about it here.

Re: Graduate Students, the Laborers of Academia

#38

Post by nickfrostatx »

ben_jones wrote: post #9

At the University of Oregon it seems almost a yearly occurrence that grad students strike, usually a week or two before finals need to be graded. I'm apathetic to the ordeal because whether its administrators, professors, or grad students, getting payed, I'm still stuck paying an egregious tuition. That said in every department except for the Math department both professors and GTFs (graduate-teaching-fellows) have b…

You can always drop out if you feel the tuition is too high. We can talk all day about how much it ought to cost, but clearly you feel it's worth it to stay enrolled.

Re: Graduate Students, the Laborers of Academia

#39

Post by ben_jones »

nickfrostatx wrote: post #38
ben_jones wrote: post #9

At the University of Oregon it seems almost a yearly occurrence that grad students strike, usually a week or two before finals need to be graded. I'm apathetic to the ordeal because whether its administrators, professors, or grad students, getting payed, I'm still stuck paying an egregious tuition. That said in every department except for the Math department both professors and GTFs (graduate-teaching-fellows) have b…

You can always drop out if you feel the tuition is too high. We can talk all day about how much it ought to cost, but clearly you feel it's worth it to stay enrolled.

You can always avoid hospitals if you feel the cost is too high. We can talk all day about how much it ought to cost, but clearly you feel your health is worth it for continued check-ups.

Re: Graduate Students, the Laborers of Academia

#40

Post by Noseshine »

btdiehr wrote: post #32
auxym wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if you were downvoted because of the cynical tone, but that sounds pretty accurate in my experience. It's why I quit after a master's.

Academics spend a lot of time on the internet defending their poor decision of going into academia, as well as anyone who points out how obviously fruitless academia is. For most people it's nearly impossible to admit something they just dedicated a large portion of their life too was completely worthless. (standard disclaimer statement that of course there are exceptions to the trend.)

And your statement is something academics have shown empirically :) (I just find it slightly amusing, no point really) I think the most famous instance was that story about the cult whose prediction about the end didn't come true, and they ended up being even more convinced and made up all kinds of excuses instead of quitting (the cult).
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