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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

#221

Post by RhysU »

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.

Stop giving the panhandlers money and they will go away.

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

#222

Post by lotsofpulp »

snarf21 wrote: post #45
natly wrote: post #3

Almost as if the STEM shortage wasn't a shortage in the first place hm..

Not all STEM is created equal. While there may not be thousands and thousands of jobs for a biology PhD, there are over 1 million open software/IT jobs. The good paying jobs are focused on what we value as a society. Clearly we value tweets and tiktoks and apps on mobile. We don't value teachers and nurses and lots of other essential jobs. If we want change, that is where we need to focus; find a way to value contrib…

>find a way to value contributors to society.

We already have, it is called paying them more (and/or increasing quality of life at work such as shorter work hours, or remote work, etc). Generally, people do not like higher taxes though.

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

#223

Post by ChrisLomont »

joshuaissac wrote: post #200
ChrisLomont wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

>The remaining funding comes from the private sector

Again, that does not follow. Adding students means more students will apply for government aid, so more aid will be allocated. Lots of places get paid $X per student from the govt - adding students adds public cost.

So yes, more students means more govt cost. Any student can apply for govt help, and if they meet requirements, they get the aid. They're not told sorry, you're number N+1 and we only fund N. You have to go private funded.

>That is better value for money spent overall.

Germany, (and pretty much all countries) pays far less for all advanced jobs. You cannot hire professors in the US for what you get them for in other countries (Baumol's cost disease, for example), so again this is not an accurate comparison.

>That is better value for money spent overall.

Such things are not linear - educating the last % would cost far more per person than educating the first 1%. Just like making something 50% burglar proof is not half the cost to make something 100% burglar proof. As you reach deeper into the pool of candidates they will take more effort, more time, and more money, per person to educate to some fixed level.

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

#224

Post by gs17 »

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 finished coursework and tuition (half of which was for "non-candidate research" "courses" that seem to only really exist to collect tuition on) is no longer being included. I would not say my compensation just went down by half.

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

#225

Post by uberman »

mbauman wrote: post #218
uberman wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 work…

This is a silly take. The "true" cost of an employee is _always_ higher than their salary. Often by 50-100%. Your argument here is like saying the minimum wage needn't be increased because the "true" cost of an employee is already $15/hr. They should be grateful for those administrative costs! And doubly so that we don't tax them! TFA is literally about the take-home cash.

Minimum wage employees don't typically get healthcare that's the point

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

#226

Post by prepend »

CydeWeys wrote: post #135
prepend wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It’s stupid because there are no alumni donations for this school. They are nowhere near breaking even and won’t because there just aren’t many alumni.

The problem is that these aren’t efficient dollars anyway. Spending $500k to net $500k is not a good return. Schools should focus on better returns, like teaching and research.

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

#227

Post by t_mann »

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…

Tbf, if it's not a lab-based PhD, you'll usually manage to work on the side. I know several people who were in full-time employment throughout pretty much their whole PhD (aided by supportive employers and sabbaticals). Even at (elite) universities that had explicit rules against it, and cases where the university and the jobs were in different countries. I even know one guy who did a lab-based engineering PhD and continued doing a bit of consulting work for his old employer. It's not even that uncommon among people with prior work experience and skills that fit well with consulting/freelance work. You'll see it on LinkedIn. Internships are also common in many disciplines like Math and CS, and good advisors can even help you get them (I know a prof who sends at least one grad student to intern at Google every year).

It's not advertised and usually not recommended, but it's definitely possible. The key is to find a supervisor who's fine with it, don't even bother asking the administrators.

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

#228

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#229

Post by cudgy »

flaviut wrote: post #220
uberman wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't understand university sports revenues and expenses. Feel free to download a breakdown of revenues and expenses for the university of your choice at: https://ope.ed.gov/athletics/#/ You are going to find that almost every school is net neutral with respect to their sports programs. Football and basketball typically funding all other sports.

I haven't looked at the entire dataset, but looking at the major schools that are close to me: Expenses: 12M, 25M, 13M, 70M Revenue: 6M, 30M, 13M, 44M 1/4 is making a slight profit. 1/4 is breaking even. 2/4 are making a major loss. A Kennesaw State University (00157700 )| Total Enrollment: 27,300 B Georgia Institute of Technology-Main Campus | Total Enrollment: 14,476 C Georgia State University | Total Enrollment: 2…

These figures don’t add up:

“University of Georgia Athletics approved a new budget for the 2022 fiscal year on Friday. The budget is set at $150,290,994, which is $7.7 million more than in 2019 and $3 million short of the 2020 budget.

Georgia athletic director Josh Brooks told media that the 2020 budget shortfall is currently $30 million and was previously $53 million amid the COVID-19 pandemic.”

https://ugawire.usatoday.com/2021/05/28/georgia-foootball-ug...

Later in the article, it states that the stadiums were at partial capacity (mid 2021), so once stadiums went back to full capacity revenue surely increase significantly.

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