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Abolish the PhD (2016)

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Re: Abolish the PhD (2016)

#151

Post by fruffy »

empyrrhicist wrote: post #97
fruffy wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Why do you want to work for someone else, on their hours, answerable to them, doing their research and teaching their classes Well, you are still forced to do all that. After all, you often depend on your advisor's funding or expectations. They can make or break you. You get "freedom", but with that freedom 1) you do not have an actual contract listing your hours or any sort of vacation policy. 2) vacations in gener…

Do you not have a graduate student union?

Graduate student unions are not that common in STEM subjects. MIT just got one this year for example.

Re: Abolish the PhD (2016)

#152

Post by fruffy »

taylodl wrote: post #111
fruffy wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Why do you want to work for someone else, on their hours, answerable to them, doing their research and teaching their classes Well, you are still forced to do all that. After all, you often depend on your advisor's funding or expectations. They can make or break you. You get "freedom", but with that freedom 1) you do not have an actual contract listing your hours or any sort of vacation policy. 2) vacations in gener…

My son is currently working on his Ph.D. in CS. I've been working in industry for nearly 40 years. Let me address some of your points. 1. Many, many jobs don't have an actual contract listing your hours or any sort of vacation policy. Even for the jobs that do, there's no guarantee you'll actually be able to take your vacation, or take it when you'd like. 2. See (1). Vacations are almost always worked around projects…

Let me clarify that I do not have all these issues. I am doing well for myself. This is partially because of my own cynicism, partially because of good mentors, and partially because of plain luck.

However, not everyone has that luxury. The list I gave is a list of problems I personally witnessed friends/colleagues go through. I also have worked a fair bit of industry, so I know that these patterns are not normal or in any way acceptable.

And yes, with clever strategizing you can find your way around being exploited. However, my point is that this should not be normal. Contractual working conditions would at least give you baseline protection.

And of course, there are always worse conditions to be in in the US (except maybe the students whose immigration status depends on the whim of their advisor) but we should hold universities to higher standards than that.

>Plus the CS students have the opportunity to work over the Summer and make the "big bucks." Altogether you should be making $60K-$70K per year, which isn't a lot as far as CS grads go, but it's considerably better than subsistence living. That's the equivalent of making $30-$45 per hour which is a wage most Americans would find damn good, and can only dream about earning that kind of money.

Just want to point out that this depends. For example, if you are an F1 student you will have to get your internship approved. This can be a lengthy, uncertain process. Some departments/advisors also expect you to not do internships at all as they prefer you to do research instead. Now 60k is also not guaranteed. In NYC universities for example, a full year of funding will net you a ~40k salary before taxes, iff you manage to acquire funding over the summer. Students are thrifty and typically find a way to finance themselves (e.g., move home, find other sources of income), but again, this should not be normal.

Re: Abolish the PhD (2016)

#153

Post by adamsmith143 »

light_hue_1 wrote: post #148
adamsmith143 wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The EU is in many ways worse. You have the same problem except that your PhD is worth much less. This is debatable. >PhD students in the EU make less than students in the US! And virtually all of them in the US get full benefits. This is completely false. The absolute highest stipends in the US are at places like Stanford or Columbia and even then only reach something like 45000 per year and both Palo Alto and NYC a…

>> PhD students in the EU make less than students in the US! And virtually all of them in the US get full benefits. > This is completely false. Then you don't know the US system. As evidenced by the fact that you say: > With +16% in bonuses, paid vacations, paid sick days, etc. With bonus the salary is 32364-40600 Which is more than 90% of US stipends. Every PhD student at every university I've ever seen has paid vac…

>Then you don't know the US system. As evidenced by the fact that you say:

I've been in it, stipends in my department were ~$18,000 per year with medical insurance and some funding for conference travel. No Vacation days, no sick days, nothing else.

>I'm at one of these places. In terms of benefits, we far outstrip the EU. The flexibility we have to spend money on travel, equipment, perks, is incomparable.

Columbia: No paid time off, no sick days: https://studentbenefits.provost.columbia.edu/content/compens...

Find me Stanford's list of benefits showing they offer paid vacation.

>But let's take a step back. You started by saying that this problem is solved in the EU and now you backtracked to arguing about +/-10% salary. Big deal.

I didn't backtrack at all. You're the one ignoring the fact that Amsterdam is the same cost as Chapel Hill but offers up to 15k more in salary and much better benefits and there's an even bigger delta in cheaper Dutch cities.

So you can make up numbers all you want and pretend that conference travel is somehow better than Bonuses, PTO, Sick days and Pension plans but no one buys that.

Re: Abolish the PhD (2016)

#154

Post by anonimamente »

sigmoid10 wrote: post #49
anonimamente wrote: post #36

That we only need to abolish PhD programs is like shaving the foam off the top of a spoiled bear and thinking that fixes it. The whole premise of college has been rendered obsolete by the Internet a long time ago. What does a University provide that you cannot find online? You are paying to read textbooks and listen to someone quote from those textbooks. Do you need someone to tell you that you must study X for N hou…

To be fair, while this works great for certain subjects like computer science, there are things you can't learn online. Medicine, chemistry, biology, experimental physics and most of engineering require labs and tools and a level of personal oversight or interaction that's just not accessible to young people otherwise. You might be able to get rid of lecture halls in the long run, but you'll never get rid of labs.

This makes a great case for community-based labs. There have been some startups doing this for mechanical engineering, at least. A big issue is the monopoly over labwork by the university system and then industry. The first requires your money, the second requires that you give money to the first.

Re: Abolish the PhD (2016)

#155

Post by anonimamente »

danielscrubs wrote: post #54
anonimamente wrote: post #36

That we only need to abolish PhD programs is like shaving the foam off the top of a spoiled bear and thinking that fixes it. The whole premise of college has been rendered obsolete by the Internet a long time ago. What does a University provide that you cannot find online? You are paying to read textbooks and listen to someone quote from those textbooks. Do you need someone to tell you that you must study X for N hou…

“ What does a University provide that you cannot find online? ” Motivation and likeminded students who put in effort for years. Programming happens to be very addictive but this is rarely the case in other types of work.

Do you think that in the hypothetical absence of the formal education system, the vacuum would be filled by the collaboration of a likeminded community? Social communication among groups with common interest is easier now than it has ever been, particular across vast geographies. This is a least one positive effect of social media, notwithstanding all its negative societal impacts.

Re: Abolish the PhD (2016)

#156

Post by borroka »

adamsmith143 wrote: post #112
Fomite wrote: post #6

"Problem is, “graduate students” are not students. They are workers." Graduate students are both . My students benefit heavily from me not necessarily treating them to the same standards as I would treat a full time research employee. And while they are the primary workhorses of research, there are large swathes of their graduate student careers where they are not particularly (or often negatively) productive. I will…

It's simple, much of Europe has already figured this out. Pay PhD students appropriately, and give them full benefits. The idea that they are only contributing work worth the equivalent of minimum wage in the US is completely absurd and ensures only students with particularly forgiving attitudes or ones from wealthy backgrounds can reasonably complete PhDs here. I recently saw PhD stipends at UNC Chapel Hill advertis…

When did my PhD in a Southern European country -- I completed it 15 years ago -- I was getting 800 euros a month after taxes. Right now, PhD students get no more than 1000 euros a month after taxes. It is peanuts, difficult to live on that salary, almost impossible to have a family. Difficult to say if it is too little or too much, on the one hand it is a student position, on the other we are talking about skilled graduates with possible important contributions to offer.

Re: Abolish the PhD (2016)

#159

Post by slotrans »

KindAndFriendly wrote: post #37

I thoroughly enjoyed my time as a PhD student. Imho it might be the only time in your career when you are truly, 100% your own boss. You own your PhD thesis. While your professor/advisors give input and feedback you ultimately decide what goes in there and what not. You have the freedom to explore anything you deem as relevant and there are no customers/co-workers/VCs etc who tell you otherwise.

> 100% your own boss

I don't think those words mean what you think they mean.

A more accurate description would be that you are your advisor's slave.

Re: Abolish the PhD (2016)

#160

Post by Test0129 »

I dropped from my PhD program after 2 years because I could not afford it. I didn't even get the masters, even though I had no problem maintaining class work with an external job.

There was too much pressure for funding and I was excluded from a lot of good research because I was "paying my own way". They offered me a 13,000/year stipend if I was an RA + teaching summer classes. I could not take this because even with my wife's salary we would not be able to pay rent. In addition, with taxes, healthcare, and other small university fees removed I'd net around $10,000. The only benefit was getting ~$6,000/year in classes but that wasn't a huge sell for me.

I wish universities would pay more. The selection process for a PhD deserves justification for a living wage (~45,000/year or better). I would abandon my day job in a heart beat to go back if they offered me this despite it being astronomically less than I make today. I wanted to be a professor so bad but the cards life dealt me had me needing a job since I was a kid, and healthcare for just as long. I just never had the opportunity, and when I tried the system was so broken I could not navigate it. There seems to be far more opportunity for H1Bs, who are capable of making such sacrifices. The vast majority of my cohort in school were foreign-born visa students which also made me sad for the state of my country.

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