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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

#141

Post by frumper »

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…

Looking into UC Statistics from your link gives an interesting insight.

I came away with the numbers 232k employees with earnings in 2021. https://universityofcalifornia.edu/about-us/information-cent...

And Fall 2021 has student enrollment at 294,662. https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/about-us/information-...

Some quick caveats, the employee count is for a year, and the UC system has about an 8% separation rate. The employee count also includes 29k student employees. Even so, that feels like way too many employees to service that student count, a bulk of which are listed as non-student professional and support staff.

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

#142

Post by kevinventullo »

hwbehrens wrote: post #35
IMTDb wrote: post #2

Note that this applies to biology PhD. Isn't a solution to reduce the amount of fellowship offered and increase the stipend. This would reduce the amount of publications, but potentially increase the average "quality" if more money means that students won't have to look for money on the side, and also if there is a more careful selection of the candidates.

> Note that this applies to biology PhD. While the article specifically calls out biology programs, at my university the CS department is similarly affected. (Stipends are set at a standard rate for all engineering depts.) If your stipend is $19K, a single student's take-home pay is $16,734, less ~$1,600 in required departmental fees. So, you've got about $1261/mo to pay for everything. If you split a 1-bedroom for $…

The last point is critical. This issue could largely be mitigated by subsidized grad student housing. It might be more like a dorm than an apartment, but I think many grad students would be fine with that.

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

#143

Post by exhilaration »

newsclues wrote: post #133
nostrademons wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Society has decided that it doesn't want to support American universities through tax dollars [1] so you can't really blame universities for trying to find any and all other sources of funding.

[1] https://www.cbpp.org/research/state-budget-and-tax/state-hig...

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

#144

Post by tombert »

abhgh wrote: post #98
david38 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have never heard of this for computer science. I went to UIUC so I am only talking about the Midwest. How would you have time to finish? A full time PhD works a LOT. I can’t imagine doubling the time to a PhD.

I did a part-time PhD (not in the US, so I am only responding to the latter part of your comment). It's hard, exhausting and can occasionally be frustrating. I gave up most of my weekends during the time. My sleep hours were less than what they should have been - and I did this for years. If you're wondering, it did lead to some health problems (esp. my back), thankfully not major, most of which I've recovered from.…

Out of curiosity, since you've gone through this before, do you have any advice on the best way to manage your time doing a part-time PhD.

I've started my part-time a month ago, and it's been pretty exhausting already, and I suspect it will get harder. How did you budget time to talk to family, or to do something for yourself to avoid burnout?

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

#145

Post by bachmeier »

lazyjeff wrote: post #53

I recently collected the first-year PhD stipends in computer science across 39 university departments, to have a real sense of the numbers. Basically to have a fair comparison, because a lot of reported stipends aren't clear whether they are 9-month or 12-month stipends, and stipends can different depending on the year/candidacy of the student. Data: https://jeffhuang.com/computer-science-open-data/#verified-c... The…

> universities should guarantee the 12-month stipend

I'm not sure how this would work in practice.

If you hand out 12-month contracts, you'll lose a ton of students, because they often want the summer for themselves (in many cases, they are from another country and want to travel home, or they have a spouse working somewhere else in the country).

If you give the students the option on an annual basis, a school like Columbia might have the money to cover unanticipated expenses, but mine does not.

> rather than making summer stipend dependent on availability of advisor funding or student jobs (like TAing)

The money has to come from somewhere.

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

#146

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

#147

Post by joshuaissac »

ChrisLomont wrote: post #112
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…

>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…

> [2] lets you look at country per capita spending on tertiary education

The link shows government spending per student as a percentage of GDP per capita, rather than overall government spending per capita. This figure can get distorted when there are more students in the system for any reason (such as due to private investment).

> since those places tend to make it harder to go to college, since taxpayer pressure on cost reduces opportunity.

This does not follow. Rather, having more students decreases the per-student government expenditure figure, even as the burden on the taxpayer stays the same.

As a percentage of GDP, US government expenditure on tertiary education is roughly in the middle of what various countries in Europe spend.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/707557/higher-education-...

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

#148

Post by dotnet00 »

uberman wrote: post #105
the_svd_doctor wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I suspect that even the people who wrote that rule knew it wouldn't actually mean anything practically. It's just a convenient excuse to exploit someone in a vulnerable situation.

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

#149

Post by delaynomore »

throwawayboise wrote: post #100
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? Administrative staff, which has ballooned over the past several decades. Many of these people have mediocre ability, don't really do much, but once a position is created it is hardly ever eliminated. Buildings and renovations. Ever seen a modern student dorm? They are luxurious compared to what they were in the 1980s. It's a constant competitive war as students will actually…

>Many of these people have mediocre ability Perhaps. University never intends to compete for top talent with their salary offerings. I recall during a salary discussion years ago, my manager at the time mentioned that the salary was indeed below market but offered up the point below as an advantage.

>don't really do much, but once a position is created it is hardly ever eliminated. Yup. This was true and was a definitely a benefit.

Source: 6 years working as IT for a public university.

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

#150

Post by georgeburdell »

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…

As a PhD student, I already got paid for only 20 hours of work per week. Of course, I worked at least 60.
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