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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

#131

Post by oefrha »

uberman wrote: post #116
oefrha wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I know for a fact that I wasn’t taking regular courses beyond my first year, even though I was still charged “tuition”.

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

#132

Post by daxfohl »

colinmhayes wrote: post #117
tyoma wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Even with the cost of medicine going through the roof, college kids don't incur a whole lot of medical costs on average. So it's surprising the university would need to spend so much there.

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

#133

Post by newsclues »

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.

Yeah but what is the return on investment?

The incentive to have a alumni department to increase donations clearly isn’t in the best interests of society.

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

#134

Post by mbauman »

uberman wrote: post #86
mbauman wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> PhD students by law cannot work more than 20 hours a week. Most have 9 month stipend appointments. Wat. Citation needed.

Sorry, I posted faster than I was thinking. F1 students are limited by law to 20 hours a week and where I work, stipend responsibilities are similarly capped at 20 hours though though that is not a legal cap, just one that aligns with the international cap.

There are both TA assistantships and research assistantships. As a graduate student researcher, your stipend "responsibilities" include research output.

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

#135

Post by CydeWeys »

prepend wrote: post #83
throwaway6734 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also know someone that works at a large university in alumni relations. Their department doesn't pay great, but the bar for performance is so low.

For my family member the salary isn’t huge, I think like $40k so the whole department is probably less than $500k/year including overhead and whatnot. My assumption was if they are spending stupid money on this they are likely spending stupid money on many other things.

$500k/yr spent on fundraising does not remotely sound like a stupid use of money to me?

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

#136

Post by apcragg »

daxfohl wrote: post #132
colinmhayes wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Even with the cost of medicine going through the roof, college kids don't incur a whole lot of medical costs on average. So it's surprising the university would need to spend so much there.

The UC Health system serves the general public through direct services and their research and teaching functions.

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

#137

Post by cosmodisk »

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…

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_University_endowment

https://facts.stanford.edu/administration/finances/#:~:text=....

https://news.mit.edu/2020/financials-endowment-2020

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

#138

Post by boldlybold »

lnwlebjel wrote: post #119
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.

Non-profit institutions with billion-dollar endowments, massive overhead costs, and "tuition" charges that make no sense. I have a really hard time believing this for the larger institutions.

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

#139

Post by Broken_Hippo »

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.

Well, sure, but it isn't like taxes are that much higher - honestly, my taxes moving from the US to Norway weren't realistically higher than state + federal + health insurance, and if you consider the out of pocket for health care, the bill is cheaper. Not to mention that Folks that go to school and wind up working a lower-paying job (teaching, for example) aren't on the hook for all of it either.

And you aren't even paying for the same sort of things: Many colleges have sports teams in the US, for example, and the degrees take longer in the US. For example, you don't have to get an undergraduate degree in Norway to become a doctor so you spend less time actually in school.

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

#140

Post by dlsa »

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…

No idea. But aren't those campuses wonderful with their huge buildings, new carpet, great landscaping, and every admin staff member has an amazing office chair and fitout. They even refresh that carpet every year along with brand new seating. The art! Its always changing as well. The university cars are great too. I've seen plenty of amazing cars that researchers drive around. The libraries are constantly changing each month. They renovated that building just last summer, didn't they? That oval is being redone as well. Amazing.

Like I said, no idea. Ok, maybe some idea.

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