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

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

#111

Post by soheil »

prepend wrote: post #57
LewisVerstappen wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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…

> There’s an admin costs problem in this country.

The money goes to the college administrators. They're major bureaucracies that plague and control universities money supply and more or less dictate universities' policies.

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

#112

Post by ChrisLomont »

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…

>Schools in the US charge an absurd amount of tuition compared to schools in Europe/Asia

US schools get far less from the state than Europe and Asia. You can find many school budgets online, including sources of revenue. So this is easy to check. [2] lets you look at country per capita spending on tertiary education - the regions you mention tend to spend significantly more tax dollars than the US does.

The result is that most European and Asian schools get funded by taxpayers, i.e., those not attending university end up helping pay for those who do, while in the US more of the funding is paid by people that attend schools.

Also, the US, as a result, also ends up with a higher percentage of adults with college degrees than those with state sponsored schools [1], since those places tend to make it harder to go to college, since taxpayer pressure on cost reduces opportunity.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tertiary_...

[2] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SE.XPD.TERT.PC.ZS

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

#113

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#114

Post by tombert »

Dma54rhs wrote: post #99
tombert wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's entirely fair, I'm a big proponent of making colleges either free, or extremely heavily subsidized by the government. I completely agree that it's still ridiculous to leave with $30,000 of debt. I'm just saying that, for someone working an engineering job, that is not generally a life-ruining amount of money, especially in comparison to the increased earning potential that a degree affords you (which is, I sus…

Are dormitories / living expenses included in those American debt numbers or you take them as separate?

I was taking them as separate. I did my bachelors online (while working full time), so I didn't know how to factor that into the calculation. I just texted a friend to ask, and he said he left his state school with about $35,000 in debt, but that was with a partial scholarship for the tuition, so I suspect a good chunk of that was the dorm.

If we double the number I gave to $60,000, that's a lot more, and starting to approach life-ruining territory, but I'd say still falls a bit shy of it for an engineer.

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

#115

Post by BeetleB »

throwawayboise wrote: post #104
BeetleB wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I'm failing to connect your comment with mine. Yes, of course it came from additional taxes. Those additional taxes did not put people into $30K of debt in those countries. If you're poor, you don't pay that much in taxes. My mythical European parents did not get go into debt paying those taxes so I could go to school.

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

#116

Post by uberman »

oefrha wrote: post #92
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…

> effective compensation well above 75k per year What are you even talking about? Are you counting the bullshit known as “tuition” in the compensation? PhD candidates are really employees, not students. Even a Princeton postdoc’s comp doesn’t reach 75k. A bit more than 50k actually in the physics department (might have risen a bit in the past few years, not sure).

Of course tuition should be counted as part of compensation just as health care should be counted. You can be mad at the cost of tuition or healthcare if you like, but that is a separate issue.

Waved tuition is a benefit and it was a hairs breath from being a taxable benefit in the USA several years ago. It is still the case that if your employer pays more than about 5k of your tuition then that is taxable so clearly tuition waved or paid by your employer is a benefit at least in the US.

There are compelling arguments and union movements supporting the notion that graduate and PhD students should be classed as employees and I certainly don't have a big issue with that. That is also a separate issue though.

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

#117

Post by colinmhayes »

tyoma wrote: post #70
LewisVerstappen wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

We don’t have to guess. Most US universities are public institutions so you can just Google up their budget. As an example, here is the UC system: https://lao.ca.gov/Publications/Report/4511 https://accountability.universityofcalifornia.edu/2021/chapt... About 70% of the UC budget goes to salaries and benefits. Of that, 70% of staff is non-academic. Full context below: Non-academic staff employees constitute nearly 7…

So 40% of employees aren't paid by the university system's academic arm, but by the healthcare section. 30% are academic staff, and 30% are support staff.

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

#118

Post by draw_down »

mbauman wrote: post #52
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. Most have 9 month stipend appointments. Wat. Citation needed.

No post body was provided.

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

#119

Post by lnwlebjel »

boldlybold wrote: post #103

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 b…

> than the university would like you to believe.

You may not know it, but the truth is more like "than the university is able to pay". These are non-profit institutions, typically. Consulting is a great idea for many reasons, not the least of which is building your network.

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

#120

Post by uberman »

yxwvut wrote: post #108
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…

Why should you be paid to attend your classes or to conduct your own research? That is like asking to be paid to go to the gym.

If your employer pays more that 5k of your tuition then you own tax on it so the US tax system clearly sees tuition as a benefit. You can call BS on the cost of tuition but that does not fundamentally change the fact that a waived charge is a benefit. The US tax system was a hairs breath away from making all tuition benefits even institutional grants at the undergraduate level taxable.

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