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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

#201

Post by lazyjeff »

JohnPDickerson wrote: post #177
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…

Jeff, thanks so much for putting that stipend information together; I'm sure your list has started discussions amongst students and amongst faculty at many institutions. The variance in stipends was eye-opening to me, and clearly they all need to go up. The posted numbers for my home institution, the University of Maryland, are a bit off; current offers are $25k for 9-month and up to $36k for 12-month, if funded on a…

Thanks for checking about the numbers. I did just double check the Maryland numbers, and what's in my table seems correct:

The 25K you're referring to is for 9.5-months so is normalized to 9 months to compare against the other 9-month numbers. It's already notated with the [1] footnote in the table.

The 36k is not guaranteed in the offers given to students: the UMaryland CS offer letters states "Students who are TAs or RAs over the summer earn an additional $5,600 up to $11,000", which I can only interpret to mean that 11K is not guaranteed. So what's reported in that table is my interpretation of the minimum stipend if the student does get one, but what you say makes sense, that an RA provides the higher number in that range -- I just don't have a way to represent that.

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

#202

Post by phpisthebest »

cratermoon wrote: post #67
phpisthebest wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pop Quiz: How many people in the US are working for the Federal Minimum wage right now today... I am willing to bet it is very few given what I have seen advertised for traditional minimum wage jobs. I am not sure how pointing to what the legal minimum wage is holds any value in the conversation, that matters is the current market rate for labor, we should not be looking to government as the basis of our economic wor…

About 1.1 million people have jobs that pay the federal minimum wage or less. Not counting farm jobs (think migrant labor).

That looks to be 2020 BLS data, before the Massive labor shortage, the Great Resignation, and massive wage inflation.

Do you have a current source?

But even assuming that data is still valid, that is what 1.5% of the labor force, and about 1/2 that is teens, or under 24 years old.

so the massive amount of focus on "minimum wage workers needing to support a family" we are talking about 0.75% of all workers that would fall into that categorization, we should help these people with social programs to be sure, but I would not call that a crisis, or something needing massive economic/regulatory upheaval to resolve, it seems to be the market is doing just fine with wages with out government intervention

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

#203

Post by danaris »

adventured wrote: post #191
danaris wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

First of all, I don't believe that's actually true based on what I've seen: what seems to be more often the case is that the tickets pay for the marketing and some of the athletic infrastructure.

Meanwhile, the coaches are being paid millions of dollars per year. I don't care how much money the athletic program is bringing in; that's not a responsible use of the money. (I get that it's something of a prisoner's dilemma at the individual institution level; I'm more talking about the broader issue.) If you have the money to pay the coaches $2M/year, that means you could, instead, stop paying your adjunct professors and regular staff sub-poverty wages, and/or perform proper maintenance on the buildings.

And do not get me started on the economics of stadium construction.

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

#204

Post by tombert »

hedora wrote: post #185
tombert wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of the annoyance there is that most research gigs are gatekept behind doctorates. I cannot tell you how many times I've been declined from Microsoft Research, despite having a bachelors degree and more than a decade of industry experience, specifically because I'm "not qualified enough" for a research engineer experience. > That time could have been spent gaining experience, which IMHO, is extremely valuable. I…

MSR is pretty competitive. How many papers do you publish in a typical year?

None thus far.

To be clear, and I realize that the tone of my comment might come off as a bit more bitter than I intended it to, I don't blame MS for declining me. Obviously they're free to decline anyone they'd like, and I'm sure they get people with PhDs and industry experience all the time.

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

#205

Post by tombert »

lupire wrote: post #180
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…

This is offtopic. PhD has no tuition, except in an accounting sense (you pay tuition, they pay you back as a stipend).

If you're part-time, they typically don't even give you a stipend. I have to pay roughly 11,000 pounds per year for my PhD.

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

#206

Post by uberman »

colinmhayes wrote: post #122
uberman wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Universities aren't actually providing a service to the phd candidates though. The candidates are providing a service to the university. No one would get a phd if they had to pay tuition.

As a university employee with a spouse who is tenured faculty I can assure you that phd candidates are not a net positive work wise from an institutional perspective. The good part is that you can usually rely on a phd candidate to produce the work they have been assigned. Masters candidates, you have a 50/50 shot of being assigned someone who will produce anything of value.

All you need to do to verify this is to look at the large number of candidates that languish after even a little of their institutional support goes away. Look at the percentage of candidates who can't get even to, let alone through their proposal then add on all the candidates who make it through their proposal but can't make and progress to a defense.

Everyone pays to get a phd. Like many others you are confusing a salary with compensation and in this case opportunity cost. Take 3 or 4 years to get a phd and that can be half a million in opportunity cost alone. Institutions certainly charge tuition and fees but your compensation as a candidate exceeds those benefits. The excess is what a candidate sees as their paycheck.

I know you don't want this to be the reality and I am sympathetic. I once worked as a camp counselor for an entire summer only to find my paycheck at the end of 3 months was a total of $100. I technically got paid a lot more but apparently the camp charged us for food and lodging and $100 was the net. It was a rude shock to be sure, but as an adult you need to understand how things work and why they work that way.

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

#207

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

brtkdotse wrote: post #192
engineeringwoke wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sports teams are a profit center. Season tickets are hundreds or even a thousand dollars. And then there's the absurd money they make at the concession stands and merchandising.

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

#208

Post by uberman »

mbauman wrote: post #134
uberman wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm not sure where you are going with this. Certainly you can have a TA/RA/FA appointment and sometimes a combination of the three. At the university I work at, you should not technically be assigned more than 20 hours a week over those responsibilities. This blanket policy means faculty don't have to account for the potential visa limits of the individual students they work with.

Note though that an RA is research of behalf of a faculty member. Your RA and compensation for it is for assisting with that research. It is not for conducting your own research even if you dovetail it it to a larger research/lab project. In fact, you almost certainly need to pay for the use of the lab and project data via authorship (sometimes first authorship).

I'm not debating that this is fair. Going back to my original post though I'm just calling out that the total compensation package for phd candidates far exceeds their take home pay.

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

#209

Post by uberman »

andreyk wrote: post #155
cvoss wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't speak to the "by law" part. But many universities, including two that I have experience with, consider the PhD stipend to be compensation for a part time job (RA/TA), accounting for 20 hours of the student's time, with the idea that the remaining 20 hours are to be devoted to taking classes. And during the summer, when a student may not be taking classes, a student may receive a full 40 hours' worth of compen…

If you think the main thing PhDs do aside from doing RA/TA is taking classes, you don't understand what a PhD involves that well...

I work at an elite tier 1 research university that is an international household name. My spouse is a tenured faculty member who runs a lab and several concurrent DoD funded grants.

I understand perfectly well what a phd candidate does and what they are compensated for as well as what their fully loaded costs are.

If you believe that the cost of a phd student is 18k a year, it is you who does not understand what working with a phd student involves. In fact, 18k probably does not even cover their health care costs. We can debate about what a phd candidate "should" be compensated for and if their current levels of compensation are fair but any argument needs to include the full picture.

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

#210

Post by uberman »

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…

I'm not suggesting that there is not an abundance of staff at some institutions, but at most institutions, "alumni relations" is a profit center not a cost center. At least if they are doing the job that our "alumni relations" department does. Yes, ours produces a magazine as well but their real job is (or should be) to entice giving.

This kind of thing would be like saying your typical account manager's job is surreal and perhaps in some cases that might be true :-)

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