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UC Santa Cruz fires 54 grad students who were striking for higher pay

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Re: UC Santa Cruz fires 54 grad students who were striking for higher pay

#421

Post by gammadens »

asdff wrote: post #290
sjg007 wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole grad school equation is foobar. Universities import foreign labor and they under pay given their monopoly where paid positions exist. They also rely on students obtaining external funding.

Then they take half of said external grant funding as overhead.

Indirect funds on grants need to be eliminated in my opinion. The GOP is a disaster at the moment in my opinion but introducing bills to eliminate them is one of the things they've done right. Indirect funds distort the purpose of grants and give perverse incentives to university administration and other funding sources.

Re: UC Santa Cruz fires 54 grad students who were striking for higher pay

#422

Post by gammadens »

raverbashing wrote: post #361
rumanator wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately a PhD is sold as a key step for a well-paying and fulfilling career where you can make a difference. As we live in a society where education is fundamental to success and having a good life, a PhD is considered as the last and most exclusive step in a promising career path. But then the disappointing part is that the system in place is designed to exploit newcomers and place them in an abuse relationshi…

> a PhD is sold as a key step for a well-paying and fulfilling career where you can make a difference Yes, it is sold as such. But the appeal is fading fast. Academia nowadays is something between a Beauty Pageant and the Hunger Games where people struggle with underpayment for years for maybe one day getting the famed tenured position.

Tenured positions aren't all they're cracked up to be either.

Re: UC Santa Cruz fires 54 grad students who were striking for higher pay

#423

Post by sjg007 »

ChrisLomont wrote: post #419
sjg007 wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole grad school equation is foobar. Universities import foreign labor and they under pay given their monopoly where paid positions exist. They also rely on students obtaining external funding.

>Universities import foreign labor and they under pay given their monopoly Given that there's hundreds of schools with thousands of grad programs to choose from, with none of them having more than a tiny percentage of the total market, this is not monopoly pricing. It's simply supply and demand. People are willing to show up and work for the vast majority of these programs.

Are you sure about that?

Re: UC Santa Cruz fires 54 grad students who were striking for higher pay

#424

Post by therealdrag0 »

lisper wrote: post #191
gyrgtyn wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/news/2017/10/26/all... The $500K Club: Here are the hundreds of U.C. employees who made more than $500,000 last year

They all seem to be medical doctors.

Wait, but is that normal for medical doctors? I thought doctors were still in the 3-500k range?

Re: UC Santa Cruz fires 54 grad students who were striking for higher pay

#425

Post by shitgoose »

inferiorhuman wrote: post #365
shitgoose wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a union of software developers? Would you like to start an imperfect one? Anyone?

Yes. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/18/technology/kickstarter-un... https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/01/game-dev-union-leader...

Both articles indicate that unionization has flopped. The broader question is - what is the purpose of unionization in the software industry? You want more money? You want ping pong tables at work?

Re: UC Santa Cruz fires 54 grad students who were striking for higher pay

#426

Post by asdff »

cycrutchfield wrote: post #330
asdff wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And what do you know, the rents are still high. At what point do we realize that an administrator making 600k a year off the backs of people toiling long hours in labs to bring in grant money for the school and coming home to live in tenement conditions isn't the fault of the students, but the administrators making half a million dollars a year? Quite a hill to die on.

An administrator is paid that much because that is how much value they provide to the university system. A graduate student provides minimal value, in fact barely above replacement level. That’s why they are a student. Are you a grad student? And you never took an economics course? This is pretty basic material.

I've seen graduate students bring in millions of dollars of federal grant money from the NIH, NSF, and the DOE that would have been awarded to other institutions had that grant student not written their proposal. I've seen schools take half of this grant money for overhead and use it to pay for administrative bloat under the pretext of 'keeping the lights on.'

Re: UC Santa Cruz fires 54 grad students who were striking for higher pay

#427

Post by asdff »

overeater wrote: post #315
asdff wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Grad students at UCSC didn't arbitrarily think the deal they struck isn't good enough anymore, they never thought it was good enough in the first place. 83% of UCSC grad students felt the minimums outlined in the agreement, which was a UC wide agreement and not between UCSC and the UCSC grad students by the way, were insufficient for the growing rents in Santa Cruz. This 13m number isn't arbitrary. In fact that $1400…

Weren't they the ones who had to vote in the union in the first place? Seems like they should have figured out what they want from the union before giving it the power to negotiate a contract on their behalf.

83% of these grad students voted against this deal that the UAW negotiated on their behalf.

Re: UC Santa Cruz fires 54 grad students who were striking for higher pay

#428

Post by logifail »

Balgair wrote: post #395
logifail wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Chancellor Larvie made $364,754 last year at UCR Was that the annual base salary? What was the value of the rest of the package?

Go ahead and put her name in yourself! :P The data set is fairly informative for it's size and publicity.

> Go ahead and put her name in yourself

My question was more or less rhetorical, since institutions don't always rush to put a figure on all the elements of a package.

Anecdotal data point: the person at the top of the tree at my old university gets a private 200 year-old house inside campus (so long as they're in post). What's that worth?

Re: UC Santa Cruz fires 54 grad students who were striking for higher pay

#429

Post by logifail »

WalterBright wrote: post #413
logifail wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The person running your investments can make or break you How would one propose to distinguish* someone who will deliver growth for - say - 25 consecutive years from someone who delivers growth for 5 years yet blows up your endowment in year 6 ? * beforehand ;)

Their track record.

> Their track record

If you think that "25 years of not blowing up" is a sure-fire way to predict the risk of blowing up in year 26, I would recommend reading Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

Re: UC Santa Cruz fires 54 grad students who were striking for higher pay

#430

Post by WalterBright »

logifail wrote: post #429
WalterBright wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their track record.

> Their track record If you think that "25 years of not blowing up" is a sure-fire way to predict the risk of blowing up in year 26, I would recommend reading Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

I never said "sure-fire" or anything like it. Anyone who believes in "sure-fire" investments is a fool. The theory that people with lots of money to hire the best are fools doesn't seem credible to me.

Besides, Warren Buffet has a stellar track record much longer than 25 years. People paying him to manage their money has made him very, very rich and those people very happy with him.

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