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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

#231

Post by cvoss »

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...

Time spent performing thesis research is accounted as course credit hours (There's typically an 800 or 900 level course for exactly this.) After all, you must be "taking classes" every semester, with very limited exceptions, in order to even be enrolled in the program.

Moreover, in my field, RA work for an advisor should ideally coincide with your thesis work. So in that case, the main thing a PhD student does is two-for-one RA+thesis work. If it doesn't coincide, that's not a great situation to be in.

And I do understand what getting a PhD involves, as I have one.

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

#232

Post by triceratops »

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.

They're profitable because they pay their workers (the athletes) next-to-nothing. And even so, colleges would be better off spinning off their teams into professional entities that pay royalties to use the school's name. At the very least, it's one less distraction for the college administration and they can focus on their actual jobs: education and research.

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

#233

Post by triceratops »

Cerealkiller050 wrote: post #56
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...

Then you look at the revenue college football brings in to the rest of the university, the coach salaries looks like a bargain. Not only that, for most universities college football (some men's basketball) cover all the other men's and women's sports that hemorrhage money.

I, too, can run a sports team profitably if I don't have to pay my players.

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

#234

Post by dlsa »

musicale wrote: post #219
dlsa wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No idea. But aren't those campuses wonderful with their huge buildings, new carpet, great landscaping, and every admin staff member has an amazing office chair and fitout. They even refresh that carpet every year along with brand new seating. The art! Its always changing as well. The university cars are great too. I've seen plenty of amazing cars that researchers drive around. The libraries are constantly changing ea…

It may be an interesting exercise to divide the non-teaching administrative budget by the number of students.

That would be a useful comparison for ranking. Exactly what is their overhead?

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

#235

Post by metadat »

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…

Admins make ridiculous salaries relative to everyone else in education.

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

#236

Post by [deleted] »

uberman wrote: post #225
mbauman wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

[deleted]

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

#237

Post by tomcam »

arminiusreturns wrote: post #31
natly wrote: post #3

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

Is it just me or is the rampant abuse of the H1B system absolutely prolific but a sort of hush topic in SV? The more I see the hiring from the inside the more obvious the exploitation seems. I would really like some context from someone with a more positive view of the subject as it is really souring me to current management methodologies from a nationalistic perspective at least within my filter bubble.

Let me burn up my hard-earned karma to answer your question honestly. I hope you catch this before it’s flagged and downvoted into oblivion

Yes, the H1B system is grossly abused. Yes, it is a hush-hush topic in Silicon Valley and on this site.

The evidence is right there in front of us. 40 years ago, the USA was the clear leader in technology. We had no trouble producing both factory workers and tech geniuses. We were literally the envy of the world. Doctors were paid more than they are now, we made our own cars from scratch, and our press pretended not to be partisan a lot of the time.

Other countries got smart and started sending their students here, in the cases of countries like China, as official acts in their national interest.

Along with the H1B visa problem, the US has been leading in massive numbers of immigrants, legal and illegal, who are not asked to respect citizenship in their own country. Imagine China, Denmark, Iceland, or Japan doing something like that. It would be unthinkable to them.

The biggest villain is of course the citizens of the United States. They no longer encourage their children to tackle Issues that may be difficult for them or that may make them feel bad as they struggle to learn. They no longer regard the founding principles as unique and precious, which they most certainly are. They no longer view the United States as uniquely suited to help move the world forward in civil rights or ingenuity.

And finally, our political class doesn’t give a shit about citizens. Republicans and Democrats are equally rife with corruption and exist only to preserve their own power. The uniparty sends our children and our treasure to wars where no national interest is present. Our three letter institutions violate their own principles, the law, and the sovereignty of other countries routinely.

Anyone who has read the history of Rome or Britain or China can see where we are in the lifecycle of this special experiment called the United States of America. It is a tragedy not only for us, but for the rest of the world as well.

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

#238

Post by imtringued »

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.

Another commenter pointed out that German universities need 1.3% of GDP to educate 27% of the population without charging them tuition. USA actually gives more public funding to colleges than Germany and yet those colleges are still asking for tuition.

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

#239

Post by imtringued »

medvezhenok wrote: post #91
snarf21 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The good paying jobs are focused on where there is a high return on capital (or at least perceived to be a high return). The sad thing is that people start to think of returns to capital as « societal value » when the two are independent variables

That is how capitalism works. Profitability (yield on capital, exclusively for investors) trumps whether the activity is economic (Wirtschaftlichkeit in German) (i.e. maximize net capital growth per dollar of spending, for the entire economy). In fact, the latter is highly efficient yet we live in a system where capital has the ultimate say and it demands unreasonable yields that employers pass on in the form of terrible pay and working conditions and higher prices to consumers.

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

#240

Post by jhgb »

cratermoon wrote: post #4

So do vast swathes of Americans. Pop quiz: In what countries does it cost a full day's wages or more to fill a car's gas tank? US minimum wage is $7.25/hr. As of this writing, US gas prices average $4.71/gal. For a typical car the gas tank holds about 15 gallons. Even a small car would have a 12 gallon tank.

> Pop quiz: In what countries does it cost a full day's wages or more to fill a car's gas tank?

In most of them, I'd bet. Just for example, in Czech Republic we're currently at $7/US gal. Our median (NOT minimum) income is around $8.5 per hour. So this is 1.5 working days for your 15 gallon tank for the average worker.

BTW, someone already did the relevant calculations: https://www.globalpetrolprices.com/articles/85/ -- feel free to compare the situation in the US to other countries.

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