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"Problem is, “graduate students” are not students. They are workers." Graduate students are both. My students benefit heavily from me not necessarily treating

• xyzzy123 4y ago
  In industry we just call those junior and senior employees.
  • shioyama 4y ago
    This a thousand times. > And while they are the primary workhorses of research, there are large swathes of their graduate student careers where they are not particularly (or often negatively) productive. Um, hello. This happens in industry as well. It's called training, learning, whatever. It's an investment on the part of the company in the future of its workforce. Why should academia expect to only pay employees who are "fully educated" and require no non-productive time to learn things? As someone who has been there, academica is so f*cked up and those in it seem completely out of touch with the reality outside of it.
    • Fomite 4y ago
      I pay my graduate students. But the expectations are different. "Well, what do you want to work on?" and tailoring a four or five year program to meet those needs is something I'm very unlikely to do for a staff scientist, but something I discuss with every one of my graduate students.
    • krastanov 4y ago
      You have a point, but graduate students are actually paid a salary, unlike what you suggested.
      • UncleMeat 4y ago
        Rarely is this salary guaranteed. It often requires TAing to supplement research funding and graduate students are often required to be deeply involved (or even solely responsible) for sourcing their own research funding. Stipends are also often poverty wages or even lower when you consider that stipends are usually only for 3/4 of the year and you are usually expected to continue research during the summer. I know some folks who did PhDs in non-engineering fields at state universities who had to TA every single semester, often TAing multiple classes, just to earn ~$20,000 per year.
      • psi75 4y ago
        This is true in computer science, but not in all sciences, and certainly not in the humanities. Getting a TA-ship is considered undesirable in CS, but getting a TA-ship as a history PhD is considered rare and special. There are a lot of problems, though. Your funding isn't guaranteed; you can be basically kicked out of the program (because very few people can afford to self-fund) for reasons that have nothing to do with you or your performance, and if this happens in your 4th or 5th year, you're fucked. The other ugly fact is that even if you're not paying tuition, your advisor is. This means there's less money to send you to conferences or fund his lab, and it means he's under tighter financial constraints than he really should be. Your advisor gets his budget docked $80,000, and only $20,000 goes to you (the rest, to tuition). That's a bit ridiculous, especially because you're no longer taking many classes or using university resources except to do work on their behalf. There's no good reason you can't be paid $50,000 and your advisor has $30,000 more to fund his lab.
      • tpoacher 4y ago
        not the case in many countries (the UK being one of them)
  • brabel 4y ago
    Agree 100%... in tech, specifically, almost everyone is junior in at least some parts of your stack... by OP's standards we are all "students", which is true in some sense as we're always learning even after 20 years in the industry... but that doesn't mean a 20-year career veteran should be considered a "student" and given a different treatment because he/she never used Kafka or k8s and has to learn those from scratch. I really don't see how it's any different in research (I have no Phd, but I was with my wife through her whole Phd so I know how things go in that world).
  • MontyCarloHall 4y ago
    The standards for junior employees are much higher. I have encountered several PhDs in computational fields who barely knew how to code when they were first admitted to their grad programs. They would not have been hired as junior software engineers at any decent company.
    • jltsiren 4y ago
      Computational fields are not software engineering. In order to be productive, you need expertise in the field you are studying, as well as in at least two of CS, software engineering, statistics, and mathematics. Undergraduate degrees are too short to teach all that, which is why people must continue learning basic skills during PhD (and postdoc).
      • MontyCarloHall 4y ago
        >you need expertise in the field you are studying, as well as in at least two of CS, software engineering, statistics, and mathematics There are some very talented undergraduates with expertise in several of the above. They generally end up being the most successful PhD students, since they are immediately productive from the get-go. (Or, they work as a junior quant at Jane Street.) >people must continue learning basic skills during PhD Hence why they’re considered trainees, and not junior employees. Junior employees may have rudimentary skills in certain areas, but not so rudimentary that their productivity is zero (or negative!) >and postdoc No postdocs should still be learning basic skills. The (ostensible) purpose of a postdoc is a final step to prepare very talented PhDs for a faculty position. People who are faculty material should have mastered all relevant skills during their PhD. Sadly, the postdoc has been perverted to become a holding tank to absorb excess PhDs with no other career options, since, as the article points out, postdocs are a source of cheap experienced labor. I’m all for treating grad students and postdocs as real employees, but we need to acknowledge that doing so would dramatically raise standards for admission, which I’m also all for.
        • jltsiren 4y ago
          > No postdocs should still be learning basic skills. The (ostensible) purpose of a postdoc is a final step to prepare very talented PhDs for a faculty position. People who are faculty material should have mastered all relevant skills during their PhD. That attitude is very bureaucratic. Computational research is always interdisciplinary. Administrators organize universities into departments according to the needs of undergraduate curricula, but those administrative boundaries have little to do with the skills needed in research. The skills you learn during PhD are probably enough for your PhD research, but then you may need new skills when you start a new project as a postdoc. And again when you start a new project as a junior faculty member. Postdoc is also the career stage where many people switch fields. For example, a background in X or even computational X is often insufficient for some research topics in computational X. You need to hire people who got their PhDs in CS, mathematics, or statistics, and then those people must learn X before they can contribute. And once they start contributing, they may have to learn software engineering to turn the methods they have developed into useful tools.
  • ModernMech 4y ago
    Is it expected that a junior employee will remain as such for 5-10 years? Of course not. Junior employees are promoted and given more responsibility, or they are fired quickly if they are not performing well. Do companies let junior employees work on whatever they want? Manage their time as they want? No, one of the key indicators of an employee status is that their time and work is managed by their employer. If a junior employee works on some passion project related to their work but on their own time, do they own the intellectual property of that work? Probably not; many employers demand that all IP created by the junior employee belongs to the company. I think this is a case of “be careful what you wish for”.
    • psi75 4y ago
      What's notable here is not that academia is so great, but that becoming an employee has become so bad. In the Bell Labs days, before our economy got taken over by criminals, smart employees really were treated as researchers-in-residence who could mostly pick and choose their projects. They didn't have as much freedom as tenured professors--they still had to work on things the company cared about--but they had a level of autonomy that, these days, doesn't really exist.
      • MontyCarloHall 4y ago
        You cannot generalize how good working conditions were in the “good old days” by using Bell Labs, which was literally exceptional, as a point of comparison.
• rjzzleep 4y ago
  It depends where. Both the article and the responses throw everything in the same basket, as if it all universities are the same and all education systems are the same. The bologna accords sure tried to make all higher-ed work in the same fashion and it has been a disaster. There is no doubt that in the US in a lot of universities graduate students are a cheap workforce that reinforces corporate interests through research that is funded by them to sway public opinion in certain directions. To some extent this is due to the sheer amounts of money that flow into academy and the amount of money that you need to stay competitive. So you can't piss off your patrons. For a long time at least the fact that graduate students in europe received a steady subsidy that is enough to comfortably live and universities received fixed amounts that are not dependent on industry push allowed universities to stay independent for the longest time. Although that too is changing. There is a fair share of critique on the latter system, but in general it allows for more independent research institutions.
  • dsr3 4y ago
    "There is no doubt that in the US in a lot of universities graduate students are a cheap workforce that reinforces corporate interests through research that is funded by them to sway public opinion in certain directions." Citation is needed for this subject. Large amount of research in University is funded by NSF or the Federal Government. While industrial interest also contribute significantly to research fund, it is excessive to accuses a lot of universities to be a crony in a corporate-academic-complex.
    • urthor 4y ago
      Industrial research contributes significantly? It was my understanding the vast majority of research funding in the US was either from the NSF, DARPA or similar, or the University. Corporations are a single digit percentage, no?
      • Fomite 4y ago
        This will vary wildly based on university and field.
• _8j50 4y ago
  You can go from undergrad to phd???
  • Fomite 4y ago
    I did, as did a number of my colleagues.
  • LudwigNagasena 4y ago
    In the US PhD often includes master's.
  • chrisseaton 4y ago
    Doing a masters in between is usually I'd say a big waste of time and very inadvisable. If you're strong enough to start your PhD then just start it. And to literally answer your question - you don't need any kind of prior degree at all to start a PhD. I was recently investigating getting a gifted engineer onto a PhD programme without an undergraduate, and it was possible.
    • nicoburns 4y ago
      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32329786 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32329786
      • chrisseaton 4y ago
        I know many people outside the US who did a PhD without any kind of masters. I did mine with a masters but no bachelors. It's even possible to be a full professor but not have any PhD. There's lots of options - don't force yourself to fit an arbitrary pipeline.
    • _8j50 4y ago
      I can't believe I didn't know this, I thought yoy had to have masters before phd.
      • urthor 4y ago
• fruffy 4y ago
  As a current CS PhD in the US I find this sentiment aggravating. I am not a mere "student", I am a full-time employee. I do not take classes and I am not interested in taking classes. I would either like to teach or work on my research in a collaborative environment with other like-minded peers. Many PhDs are in their late 20s/early 30s, coming from all swaths of life. They are not children. However, in the American education system they are treated as if they were. While this sentiment can have its perks, as shown in the OP, it also means PhDs do not get proper contracts, pay, benefits, or any voice. Thankfully, I managed to maneuver myself into a position that is livable but I frequently talk to other CS PhDs from other American institutions. It is depressing to hear what people have to put up with in their degree. Sure, the PhD requires initial training, but the ramp-up is not so slow that it is necessary to be stuck in the same serf status for 5+ years. Unfortunately, I think this is a systemic issue that is not easy to solve.
  • chrisseaton 4y ago
    > I am not a mere "student", I am a full-time employee. Isn't 'student' the preferable option here? I was proud to be a student when I was doing my PhD. (I said 'doctoral student' when I wanted to be more clear.) Why do you want to work for someone else, on their hours, answerable to them, doing their research and teaching their classes, instead of working on your own research? I can't understand why you'd want to be an employee?!
    • bunbunbun 4y ago
      I can say from experience that employees get some protections that students don’t. Particularly when it comes to: - working hours (often paid for 20 but working close to 40) - paid time off (I have worked through a lot of ‘vacations’ and ‘holidays’) - health insurance (for my whole family, not just me) - behavioral requirements for managers (I have stories) - retirement funding - credit for work products (imagine being told your name isn’t on a pub because you were in training)
      • chrisseaton 4y ago
        But you're opting into them having more control over you. If you're an employee they can set your hours. They can't as a student. You're opting into a HR-managed vacation system instead of managing your own time. Health insurance, behaviours, retirement, etc I guess so.
• ModernMech 4y ago
  Agreed 100%. As a grad student, I made so many mistakes, destroying expensive equipment in the process. I took a 3 year leave of absence to join a startup and was taken back without question when it failed. I went on intellectual flights of fancy on a whim when I found things interesting without telling my PI, wasting precious time and missing deadlines. I took classes and then dropped them when I got too busy, wasting my PI’s grant money. I was given tasks to accomplish and failed them miserably. He tolerated all of it because I was a student and the expectations were set accordingly. As a professor today, I take the same attitude toward my students, and I think it’s for their benefit. If they want to be treated as employees, the bar for admission becomes a lot higher, and the expectations do as well. The capacity for mistakes goes down, and the latitude and freedom afforded to them to explore their interests goes away entirely. Employees do what they’re told when they’re told it, and they are paid accordingly. I’m not sure that’s what many PhD students actually want when they say they want to be treated as employees.
• watwut 4y ago
  > My students benefit heavily from me not necessarily treating them to the same standards as I would treat a full time research employee. Aren't PhD students working long hours already? I really dont see where is the supposed additional slack they are having. > I will take a chance on a promising student straight out of undergrad who seems like they might be interesting, knowing that it will take them some time to get their feet under them. That would be very different if they were employees. That is called junior.
  • Fomite 4y ago
    "Aren't PhD students working long hours already? I really dont see where is the supposed additional slack they are having." They are - but I rarely impose my preferences for when they work, don't check to see if they've accrued enough vacation time, etc. There's also slack that's not just "hours worked". A PhD student going down an intellectually stimulating but ultimately tangental rabbit hole that doesn't tie itself to a grant aim but might spawn a side project is something I'd encourage. I would not do the same for a staff scientist.
  • dls2016 4y ago
    > Aren't PhD students working long hours already? Depends highly on the field. I knew some materials science PhD students who were relatively well-funded to work in the lab (~$35k per year), but often spent nights and weekends baby sitting experiments. But there was no undergraduate materials science program, so no teaching! I was in the mathematics department where most people worked as teaching assistants for $22k per year (summer work available) but otherwise did as they pleased. I would maybe meet with my adviser for a few minutes per week? And after you've taught calculus five times, you can kind of coast.
• ur-whale 4y ago
  > "And while they are the primary workhorses of research" If find this sentence borderline offensive, and for many reasons. I'll just lay out the most prominent one: don't you miss doing actual work yourself?
  • Fomite 4y ago
    I miss it rather a lot - though I do do a fair amount of actual work myself still. But I also take my responsibility to keep my lab - including both staff scientists and graduate students - funded rather seriously.
• adamsmith143 4y ago
  It's simple, much of Europe has already figured this out. Pay PhD students appropriately, and give them full benefits. The idea that they are only contributing work worth the equivalent of minimum wage in the US is completely absurd and ensures only students with particularly forgiving attitudes or ones from wealthy backgrounds can reasonably complete PhDs here. I recently saw PhD stipends at UNC Chapel Hill advertised at 20000 per year and this comes with virtually 0 benefits which for a major research university is frankly shameful. University of Amsterdam for example: "Included Benefits: University of Amsterdam PhD candidates are fully-funded for four years and earn competitive salaries. The salary will be in accordance with the University regulations for academic personnel, and will range from €2,325 to €2,972 (salary scale P) gross per month. This is excl. 8% holiday allowance and 8,3% end of year bonus. The Collective Labour Agreement for Dutch Universities is applicable. Additional comprehensive benefits include paid vacation, sick leave, disability insurance, maternity and parental leave and pension contribution. The mandatory Dutch health insurance is not included, but is very affordable (~€100 per month). Relocation costs (within reason) will also be reimbursed."
  • Fomite 4y ago
    I did my PhD at UNC Chapel Hill. I was able to live without debt, pay for flights to see my (at the time) long distance girlfriend, and I got medical insurance when I needed it. The dental plan was indeed appallingly bad.
  • light_hue_1 4y ago
    > It's simple, much of Europe has already figured this out. Pay PhD students appropriately, and give them full benefits. The EU is in many ways worse. You have the same problem except that your PhD is worth much less. PhD students in the EU make less than students in the US! And virtually all of them in the US get full benefits. You just said good salary, and listed University of Amsterdam as offering 27900-35000 per year. At UNC, minimums are: bio $33k, chemistry $28k, CS $25k. And North Carolina is far cheaper than Amsterdam. PhDs in the EU live often in much more expensive areas and make less than PhD students in the US.
    • 4y ago
• kergonath 4y ago
  > But they are students. They are trainees or apprentices. Our job as supervisors is to show them how the thing is done, and then provide them conditions to do it themselves. Like with any trainee, it is true that productivity is initially not great, because they need training and experience. Apprenticeships are sometimes looked down upon because they tend to be associated with professions considered unglamorous, but that’s what a PhD is. They have a student status with the implicit acknowledgment that they would not be as productive as accomplished professionals but their job is not to study as in high school or undergrad, it’s to learn the job by doing it supervised.
  • Fomite 4y ago
    A number of them are also just flat out students in that they take non-trivial amounts of coursework. In my program at least, as well as the one I went through, they were still paid.
• eli_gottlieb 4y ago
  >the same standards as I would treat a full time research employee. And while they are the primary workhorses of research They can't be the primary workhorses and also not research employees.