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PhD students face cash crisis with wages that don’t cover living costs

nature.com

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Re: PhD students face cash crisis with wages that don’t cover living costs

#101

Post by prepend »

evolve2k wrote: post #95
Invictus0 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You haven't presented enough evidence to show that there is a problem. If the alumni relations department is bringing in donations greater than their salaries, they are a net benefit to the university. Even if they don't bring in that amount every year, it might still be a net plus: it might bring in better students, spread the word about the university, and it might lead to big gifts later down the line.

I also reject the assertion they shouldn’t exist. The “Alumni network” is listed as one of the additional benefits when enrolling for a degree. Further when the engineering firm you started after graduation with some of your classmates wines a National science award. Getting that profiled in the alumni newsletter could be unlocking a range of oppprtunities for your firm from grant funder interest to new commercialisa…

An alumni network is great. I think the issue is having so many admin staff working on low value activities like magazines and newsletters.

I’m a big fan of quiet work, but this is pointless. It’s not pointless because it’s quiet. It’s pointless because it has minimal to no positive impact.

Re: PhD students face cash crisis with wages that don’t cover living costs

#102

Post by dev_tty01 »

Overtonwindow wrote: post #5

I think the PhD is overrated, and along with that I think a lot of university education is overrated; note this is someone with two BA's and a Masters. Unless you're teaching, or doing some hard core research, I don't see that the PhD is necessary or even a good investment. That time could have been spent gaining experience, which IMHO, is extremely valuable.

A PhD has never been about economics. It is about impacting the type of work you do and how much control you have over the direction of that work. Want to work in a major research lab? Get a PhD. Want to be a professor building a research program in an area of your choosing (assuming available funding)? PhD required.

Re: PhD students face cash crisis with wages that don’t cover living costs

#103

Post by boldlybold »

This led to me consulting during my PhD to supplement the stipend up to a reasonable salary. A lot of PhD students, especially if your work touches on computational sciences, are a lot more valuable than the university would like you to believe.

After moving to industry, I'm starting to realize how valuable the consulting experience was. The project management and scoping skills, and wearing multiple hats, were big benefits.

Re: PhD students face cash crisis with wages that don’t cover living costs

#104

Post by throwawayboise »

BeetleB wrote: post #54
tombert wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, if you graduate in four years, and are alright with state universities or community colleges, and major in some kind of field that allows you to be an engineer, university doesn't have to put you in lifelong debt. Many students do community college for the first two years, and then finish at a university, and end up on the order of ~$30,000 of debt. That's a lot of money, but generally not a life-ruining…

> Many students do community college for the first two years, and then finish at a university, and end up on the order of ~$30,000 of debt. For people in many European countries, this is an absurd amount of debt to get a university degree. Edit: For context: About 20 years ago, my university's annual fees was $15000/year for out of state students, and $4600 for in state - in today's dollars. Now that university charg…

Your European parents paid that $30K and more in additional taxes though. The money came from somewhere; land and buildings and qualified professors do not come for free in Europe.

Re: PhD students face cash crisis with wages that don’t cover living costs

#105

Post by uberman »

the_svd_doctor wrote: post #82
uberman wrote: post #39

While I agree that PhD students don't get enough cash on a weekly basis to get buy, they are certainly compensated well above what is quoted in the article. International PhD students by law cannot work more than 20 hours a week. Most institutions cap paid responsibilities at 20 hours a week. Most have 9 month appointments, most likely get the full cost of their tuition and fees waved. Most of the time waved costs su…

> PhD students by law cannot work more than 20 hours a week. While most teaching (and research) assistanships might indeed be technically 20h/week, I can assure you most/all PhD students work >20h/week total. You still need to do your research on the side. If you RA and your PhD research align, nice. If it doesn't, tough luck.

I don't intend to assert that PhDs don't do a lot more work that 20 hours. I know first hand they do. The work they typically are compensated for (TA/RA/FA) are typically capped at 20 hours a week. This also aligns with the legal limits for international students on F1 visas.

Re: PhD students face cash crisis with wages that don’t cover living costs

#106

Post by nostrademons »

LewisVerstappen wrote: post #16
tombert wrote: post #7

It's a bit of a shame that the US doesn't really allow part time PhDs (at least not in any of the schools that I asked). If they did, conceivably a lot of these students could get a relatively well-paying job in engineering or a lab or something, and as such the schools could get away with paying less. Part of the reason that I didn't bother trying to pursue the CUNY PhD in mathematics was specifically because the st…

Where is all this tuition even going to? Schools in the US charge an absurd amount of tuition compared to schools in Europe/Asia and yet these colleges are also systematically underpaying PhD students, Teaching Assistants, etc. College Professors don't exactly make the big bucks either. Yet, universities in the US have made put many Americans in lifelong debt. These colleges are all "nonprofit" (and get significant t…

Baumol's Cost Disease. Basically anything that requires non-scalable human interactions is super expensive, because the cost of labor in the U.S. is super expensive. People don't realize it because when the Baby Boomers grew up, the U.S. effectively had a monopoly on capital, which meant that our "ordinary factory workers" could enjoy massively outsized productivity relative to the rest of the world. Now our ordinary factory workers are being undercut by ordinary factory workers abroad, since the rest of the world has rebuilt its capital stock, and so only professions that still enjoy global monopolies (eg. big tech) can afford service workers.

For comparison, a mid-range preschool in the Bay Area costs about $30K/year, vs. $14K/year in-state tuition for UC Berkeley. If students get about 24 hours of instruction/week, for two 13-week semesters, that works out to about $22/hour. A nanny is about $25-30/hour, a therapist is $100+/hour, plumbers are about $200/hour, a lawyer can be $750-1000/hour. Given 20-30 students in the classroom, costs are not all that different from lawyers.

Schools in Europe/Asia are government-subsidized, like the public school system in the U.S, so you don't see the true cost.

Re: PhD students face cash crisis with wages that don’t cover living costs

#107

Post by madengr »

nostrademons wrote: post #87
prepend wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Where is all this tuition even going to? I have a family member who works in the “alumni relations” department of a small, regional public university. Probably ranked like #300 or something. There are like 5 people in the department. They make a magazine, email newsletter and schedule alumni events. It was really surreal when they explained their job and that the department exists. There’s an admin costs problem in…

Alumni relations is a profit center for universities, not a cost center. Many universities are funded as much by alumni donations and endowment gains on them as they are by tuition.

No post body was provided.

Re: PhD students face cash crisis with wages that don’t cover living costs

#108

Post by yxwvut »

uberman wrote: post #39

While I agree that PhD students don't get enough cash on a weekly basis to get buy, they are certainly compensated well above what is quoted in the article. International PhD students by law cannot work more than 20 hours a week. Most institutions cap paid responsibilities at 20 hours a week. Most have 9 month appointments, most likely get the full cost of their tuition and fees waved. Most of the time waved costs su…

There's not a line in this that makes any sense. Sure, maybe you're only TA'ing 20 hrs a week max, but you're also doing research work well beyond those 20 hrs regardless of whether your advisor has enough grant money to let you escape the TA time sink by putting you on the clock as an RA for work you were already going to do.

And it's a joke to pretend that you should owe tuition. That's nothing but a tax dodge for the university so they can pay you even less (pre-tax) for the same post-tax take-home.

Re: PhD students face cash crisis with wages that don’t cover living costs

#110

Post by mediaman »

the_lonely_road wrote: post #68
mediaman wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was a little skeptical of this because of the impact of state-level minimum wage laws that are higher than the federal, so I pulled up the data on how many people are paid the US federal minimum wage. Turns out that 1.1 million people have jobs that pay the federal minimum wage or less. But that number does not include tips, and about 60% of those people work in restaurants or bars. It's hard to say how much in the…

Doesn’t make sense to use federal average gas price here. Anyone making the federal minimum wage is in one of the lowest cost of living parts of the country and will subsequently also have one of the lowest gas prices to go along with that lowest income.

It doesn't vary enough to make a big impact. Regular gas in Alabama is only about 8-9% cheaper than the national average. So it almost cuts an hour off.
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