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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

#161

Post by milesskorpen »

frumper wrote: post #141
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…

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.…

Note that these employee counts probably include whole hospital staffs (since teaching hospitals / academic medical centers are frequently part of universities).

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

#162

Post by wincy »

tombert wrote: post #114
Dma54rhs wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I met a person who went to a for profit university, never got a degree, and works at Cheesecake Factory. He owes $120,000 and has three kids. His life was effectively ruined by this college.

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

#163

Post by daniel-cussen »

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…

Audit them to find out.

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

#164

Post by rch »

milesskorpen wrote: post #160
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…

Part of the issue is TOO MUCH governance. We have loaded colleges down with regulations and requirements, which then require administrators to handle these rules. Most of these administrative roles are not optional (at least not if you don't want to get sued). Most of these requirements independently make sense, but the sum impact weighs down universities and drives up cost.

Factually unsupported cynical take: Without the made up jobs there would be even less of a market for the type of non-STEM graduates public universities like to produce.

The regulations provide the justification for the jobs program needed to soak up the excess supply of non-trade graduates generated by overenthusiastic student loan policy.

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

#165

Post by danaris »

soheil wrote: post #111
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…

> 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.

The data I've seen doesn't, by and large, bear this out.

The money goes to the athletics and the infrastructure. (Not in the sense of "the best infrastructure money can buy", sadly; no, it's more like "raise $300 million to build this new dorm and let the richest donor put their name on it, then spend about 30% of what it needs for maintenance for the next 30 years...and then spend 5x the amount we would've had to if we'd just maintained it in remediation and renovations".)

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

#166

Post by frumper »

milesskorpen wrote: post #161
frumper wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

Note that these employee counts probably include whole hospital staffs (since teaching hospitals / academic medical centers are frequently part of universities).

Yes, that is a good point. Staff employed by the hospitals are included. UC Davis alone is more than 10 thousand employees. I'd imagine a few of the other UC hospitals are also significant portions of that support staff.

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

#167

Post by lazyjeff »

bachmeier wrote: post #145
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 C…

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

It's already working in practice for almost half the universities: summer stipends are guaranteed, but if students choose to intern elsewhere, you don't get the summer stipend. Nothing changes if their advisor is already funding them. I'm just saying the other half of universities should be doing this as well, that it should be universal.

Yes it does cost a bit, but if you think about what's happening now for universities with no summer guarantee, it's that PhD students without summer internships are getting no pay in the summer. And even the ones that do find summer pay, it's still a stressful situation for them during the academic year, so a complete distraction.

Honestly, I can't think of a better use of university money than to be paying PhD students who would otherwise be working for free in the summer (if their advisor can't fund them).

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

#168

Post by misiti3780 »

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…

lots of middle mgmt.

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

#169

Post by danaris »

temp8964 wrote: post #84
twistedpair wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ever seen Football coach, and college president salaries? For state colleges, they're often some of the highest paid employees in the state. [1] 1. https://www.espn.com/espn/feature/story/_/id/28261213/dabo-s...

No. Football coaches don’t get salary from tuitions. Athletic department has separated funding sources.

This may be true for some colleges and universities, but certainly isn't universally so.

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

#170

Post by bell-cot »

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…

~6 years ago, the Univ. of Michigan did major renovations on its large student dormitories. We're talking old but structurally quite sound reinforced concrete & masonry buildings, each housing ~1,000 undergraduates.

U of M spent about $100,000 per student bed (not per room) on those renovations. They could have bought brand new, custom built, state-of-the-art suburban-sprawl McMansions and given every student their own bedroom (vs. mostly-shared dorm rooms) for less money. And had the old dorms left over.

Yes, that money was on UM's Housing (vs. academic) side. But you should not expect other non-classroom, non-academic spending (by any part of UM, or similar institutions) to be any less profligate.

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