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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

#191

Post by adventured »

danaris wrote: post #165
soheil wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> The money goes to the athletics and the infrastructure.

Athletics for most schools are a net profit center, even for the #100 football program. The smaller schools aren't spending nearly so much on athletics as the schools with football programs.

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

#192

Post by brtkdotse »

engineeringwoke wrote: post #156
exhilaration wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Providing education isn't expensive; big campuses and teams of administrators are. Universities could easily return to the old ways, just cap annual loans at $20k per head. It would be painful, but they're fat, and what they're doing is bad for society.

Not to mention sports teams.

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

#193

Post by seoaeu »

lupire wrote: post #188
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…

> are a lot more valuable than the university would like you to believe. Category error. Correction: You have the ability to do outside work that pays more than anything the University needs. It's not the university's fault if you want to do a low value research job at the university.

The rate universities charge external funding agencies for one hour or one year of grad student research work is substantially higher than what the student gets paid for that amount of work

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

#194

Post by SoftTalker »

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.

> Most of these administrative roles are not optional (at least not if you don't want to get sued.

They are mostly not optional if you want to receive federal funding. There are some small colleges that are totally private, do not take government funds, and so don't have to implement and administer many government regulations.

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

#195

Post by ChrisLomont »

joshuaissac wrote: post #147
ChrisLomont wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

>Rather, having more students decreases the per-student government expenditure figure, even as the burden on the taxpayer stays the same.

That does not follow unless students cost zero to educate.

As more students enter, it costs more.

>As a percentage of GDP,....

And the US educates a larger portion of their population than most (if not all?) European countries. This is why using % of GDP is misleading, since the countries are paying for a different rate of educated people. The cost per student is more applicable, since as those other countries scale up the number educated will necessarily spend more, since on the margin people don't cost zero to educate.

This is why I pointed out the rates of education are different. Comparing a country spending 1% to educate 2% to one spending 3% to educate 10%, only looking at the 1% and 3%, is missing important information.

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

#196

Post by grier »

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…

This article is about graduate student stipends. Tuition does not have a cost for these students, so the stipend only needs to cover living costs (which as the article points out, it frequently does not).

In CS, graduate students often intern over the summer and can make up for some of the difference.

Tuition is paid by the university, typically from a grant.

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

#197

Post by [deleted] »

david38 wrote: post #33
FunnyBadger wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They definitely do in engineering - USC and UCLA had most of its PhD students working full time in industry and only part time in their PhD program and grad school generally. I know because I was one of them.

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.

[deleted]

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

#198

Post by dathinab »

As far as I can tell what he did is more or less common business in high speed currency trading (and part of the reason the EU originally planed to ban it, until lobby corruption happened).

If your trading bot (here the "algorithm of the index") messes up you are deep in problems because other bots and people will find it and will use it to their advantage.

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

#199

Post by abcc8 »

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…

I believe that the stipulation of no part-time PhD is dependent on training grant requirements. I couldn't have a second job during graduate school and it would cause big problems for the department, and by extension, me, if I was found to have a second job. It might work differently in other fields, but this is at least my experience in a hospital-affiliated biology department.

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

#200

Post by joshuaissac »

ChrisLomont wrote: post #195
joshuaissac wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> [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…

>Rather, having more students decreases the per-student government expenditure figure, even as the burden on the taxpayer stays the same. That does not follow unless students cost zero to educate. As more students enter, it costs more. >As a percentage of GDP,.... And the US educates a larger portion of their population than most (if not all?) European countries. This is why using % of GDP is misleading, since the co…

> That does not follow unless students cost zero to educate

The remaining funding comes from the private sector (e.g. tuition fees).

Comparing the US with Germany, for example, the US spends 0.9% of GDP from public funds and 1.6% of GDP privately for a total of 2.5% of GDP, resulting in 44% of the population being tertiary graduates.

Germany spends 1.1% of GDP from public funds and 0.2% of GDP privately, for a total of 1.3% of GDP, and 27% of its population are tertiary graduates.

So as a proportion of GDP, Germany pays only about half of what the US does, but still manages to have three fifths as many graduates as the US, proportionally. That is better value for money spent overall.

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