4 ms·

It's really an employee-employer relationship with on the job training. Specifically your final promotion is a certificate (Ph.D.) that has some industry wide

by sjg007 5y ago

It's really an employee-employer relationship with on the job training. Specifically your final promotion is a certificate (Ph.D.) that has some industry wide accreditation. The fact that they charge for tuition actually seems legally tenuous (akin to a company town) which is why I think they all have these tuition waivers for RA and TA positions. The more I think about it, it seems like there is a bunch of legal issues. Maybe Congress has resolved those idk...

temp8964 5y ago
> It's really an employee-employer relationship with on the job training. I don't think so. When I was a Ph.D. student, I spent most of the time doing my own thing (learning and research), a small portion of my time was spent on working. I imagine this could be different by field, and I know some other departments pay way higher stipend than my department. I think the lowest paid graduate students belong to social sciences and humanities, but their "work" as graduate students also has lower value compared to other fields. They are also the ones with strongest push for unionization, because they (maybe for good reason) are the lowest paid and because their ideology.
- dls2016 5y ago
  Did you talk to students in biological or other lab sciences? At my PhD institution the materials science students were paid a lot more (and barely taught) because they essentially had a 9-5 job with plenty of overtime. (Compared to the math department where people would surf between commitments.)
  - temp8964 5y ago
    Yes. What you said does not contradict what I said.
- sjg007 5y ago
  That doesn’t change the employer employee relationship. You were paid right?
caddemon 5y ago
A big reason they charge tuition and then credit it is because it leads to more grants. There's a bunch of bizarre accounting between schools/departments/labs behind all this, but at the core my school "charges" tuition, then my department immediately "credits" the tution using NIH training grant money awarded to my program.

by sjg007 5y ago

temp8964 5y ago

> It's really an employee-employer relationship with on the job training. I don't think so. When I was a Ph.D. student, I spent most of the time doing my own thing (learning and research), a small portion of my time was spent on working. I imagine this could be different by field, and I know some other departments pay way higher stipend than my department. I think the lowest paid graduate students belong to social sciences and humanities, but their "work" as graduate students also has lower value compared to other fields. They are also the ones with strongest push for unionization, because they (maybe for good reason) are the lowest paid and because their ideology.

dls2016 5y ago
Did you talk to students in biological or other lab sciences? At my PhD institution the materials science students were paid a lot more (and barely taught) because they essentially had a 9-5 job with plenty of overtime. (Compared to the math department where people would surf between commitments.)
- temp8964 5y ago
  Yes. What you said does not contradict what I said.
sjg007 5y ago
That doesn’t change the employer employee relationship. You were paid right?

caddemon 5y ago

A big reason they charge tuition and then credit it is because it leads to more grants. There's a bunch of bizarre accounting between schools/departments/labs behind all this, but at the core my school "charges" tuition, then my department immediately "credits" the tution using NIH training grant money awarded to my program.