> Columbia: No paid time off, no sick days: https://studentbenefits.provost.columbia.edu/content/compens https://studentbenefits.provost.columbia.edu/content/co

> Columbia: No paid time off, no sick days: https://studentbenefits.provost.columbia.edu/content/compens https://studentbenefits.provost.columbia.edu/content/compens... Fun fact, your own page shows that the the minimum at Columbia is higher than the max at University of Amsterdam! The idea that EU PhD students are paid better than US PhD students is just as absurd now, as it was when you stated it first. > No paid time off, no sick days There's a lot of confusion here. People look at lists like this and they assume they are comparable to their EU counterparts. In the EU the university tends to be king and sets the rules for departments. In the US departments are far more autonomous and many things are more informal. The university sets lower bounds that departments add to. All you need to do is look at the department website: https://www.cs.columbia.edu/education/phd/policies/ https://www.cs.columbia.edu/education/phd/policies/ CS PhD students at Columbia get two weeks vacation + 11 federal holidays. There you go! > Find me Stanford's list of benefits showing they offer paid vacation. Ok.. all you need to do is open the grad student handbook. https://adminguide.stanford.edu/chapter-10/subchapter-2/policy-10-2-1 https://adminguide.stanford.edu/chapter-10/subchapter-2/poli... But again. You need to drop your narrow EU bureaucratic view of things. I have never applied to vacation as a grad student. Never, among my 50+ grad students so far as a single grad student applied for vacation. Not one of them has ever applied for vacation time. Grad students just tell me "Hey, I'll be gone these 3 weeks." And I say "Enjoy". That's it. Same with sick leave. You cannot interpret US rules from the EU point of view. It's nonsense. > I didn't backtrack at all. You're the one ignoring the fact that Amsterdam is the same cost as Chapel Hill but offers up to 15k more in salary and much better benefits and there's an even bigger delta in cheaper Dutch cities. You have no idea about the cost of housing in UCN vs Amsterdam. Or what cheap means. You can rent, right now, a 2 bedroom / 2 bath with a pool for $1100-1200 in Chapel Hill that's an easy walking distance to the university. That's without searching and at literally the worst time of the year to rent anything in a college town. And that's walking distance. If you want to drive to stay in a "smaller town" you can pay $800 for a 2 bedroom. The US is far more sparsely settled than Western Europe. Cheap small towns here are far far cheaper. > So you can make up numbers all you want and pretend that conference travel is somehow better than Bonuses, PTO, Sick days and Pension plans but no one buys that. Your own numbers completely refute your story. And even the simplest Google search shows that perks in the US are actually far better than perks in the EU. That vacations are good, conference travel is not "business travel" in the US, that you get paid time off, etc. But you don't want to look even at the evidence you find. You want to believe what you believe. I'm out!