14 ms·

Grad student unions strike deal with University of California

116 points by Amorymeltzer 4y ago

tbruckner 4y ago
Not familiar with academia, but where does this extra $ come from? Won't this just mean departments will recruit proportionally less PhDs?
- sam0x17 4y ago
  They operate on a huge surplus from what I've heard
- Retric 4y ago
  Somewhat, but departments will likely end up spending a higher percentage of their budget on grad students. Also, student unions have different priorities because this isn’t a lifelong career so reducing the number of jobs isn’t a big deal.
- mbreese 4y ago
  There isn’t one answer to this question. It depends heavily on the department. For example, biomedical graduate students are often covered by external (federal) grant funding. This increase can be factored into the budgets for those, but only in the future. AFAICT, it is still up in the air how it will be funded in the shorter term. Humanities students are another story though. External grants for those are more rare, IIRC. I’m not sure if the universities can survive in its current model with fewer graduate students. They are very integral to the teaching/grading/etc for undergraduate classes. So, it will be tough to make the system work with fewer of them. At least, that’s what the striking students are counting on.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- lapcat 4y ago
  > Won't this just mean departments will recruit proportionally less PhDs? Maybe they should. The PhD dropout rate is almost 50%. Universities exploit PhD students for cheap labor and then throw them away.
  - beezlebroxxxxxx 4y ago
    Already happening in the humanities. Many major programs in my field when I was applying (as an international student, so there already were some "quotas" in place on how many international students a program would take) were signaling that they were reducing the recruitment number simply because they could no longer insure TT placement afterwards. It's too little too late tbh, but at least they are starting to do it. I know they are starting to do it in non-humanities programs as well. I'll add as well: the standards expected for present day PhD students is insane compared to PhD students a generation ago. When I speak to some of the tenured professors I know, they readily admit that they would not meet the standards for TT positions today. Add to that the insane number of applicants, and the tendency for hiring committees to default to applicants from top-tier programs for hiring (regardless of the quality of their research), and you end up with an increasingly bubbled and desperate profession that is extremely unwilling to break from party line and disrupt whatever sliver of a living they ended up in.
    - Jugglerofworlds 4y ago
      I'm a PhD student at a top CS research University, and I'm leaving with a master's degree. I agree that the bar for admission into the program is way too high. I only got into two Universities despite having multiple publications as well as experience working in government research labs. The majority of my fellow students are international, mostly from China. I know hardly any other Americans in my program. At this point I see the system as more or less a way for international students to gain citizenship. I'm all for immigration, but I think it has gotten to the point where American students don't even want to go to graduate school at their own Universities, and the system imports foreign students who they know they can abuse for cheap labor. If grad student salaries were higher I'm sure we would see more Americans joining. I decided to leave due to abuse by my initial advisor. So many of my fellow students have experienced abuse or neglect by their advisors. By neglect I mean that advisors won't even talk to them because the advisor has tenure and doesn't care. Many CS doctorate holders I've talked to have expressed that their degree was not worth it.
- mjhay 4y ago
  Ideally it would come from cutting the bloated administration that leeches off of research funding that professors and grad students attract, while impeding their work, but that's not going to be what happens.
  - whakim 4y ago
    I would caution against such sweeping generalizations about where the money goes. Statistics usually show tremendous increases in spending on "staff" (i.e. non-faculty) salaries, but those staff do a variety of things. For example, I previously worked as a staff researcher at a big private university; my job involved building open source software and writing papers. The research center I worked at had a couple faculty members and PhD students but probably 20 folks with jobs like mine. The fact is, a lot of the research is being done by that so-called "bloated administration."
    - 131012 4y ago
      For example, if you want to use modern tools (aka code) in a department where nobody is hired for their coding skill, you need some staff. And you need to pay them well, because... you know. Startups, SF, FAANGs.
      - mjhay 4y ago
        In scientific disciplines, professors and grad students just write their own code. At least that was the case in my department, other similar departments at my university, and people in my field from other universities. It's very bad code of course, but I've never heard of anyone getting hired specifically to program, besides a few CS undergrad interns being brought in. No one had anywhere near the kind of budget to hire professional programmers.
        stevenbedrick 4y ago
        This is thankfully beginning to change, though far more slowly than many of us would like to see. There is much more talk about "research software engineering" happening in a lot of fields, and some funding agencies are beginning to take notice. Anecdotally, I know of a couple of PIs who have been successful in arguing for higher budget caps on R01 submissions in order to cover the costs of having appropriate computational staff on their grants, which is something that I never would have believed if somebody had told me about it ten years go. And some fields (like computational biology) have been ahead of the game in this regard. It remains a huge challenge from a budgeting standpoint, though, I don't want to downplay that too much. And there are also other challenges- until very recently, my university didn't have job categories for software-related research staff roles, and so we had enormous difficulties figuring out how to hire and appropriately pay such people. The "how do we hire them" part has been fixed, which is a big help- but we still have to figure out how to pay for them ourselves.
- option 4y ago
  of course. Typically in STEM PhDs are paid from the research grants of their advisors.
- COGlory 4y ago
  It depends. At my university, graduate students are state employees, but not standard state employees the way facilities/staff/administrators are. Those groups have a union, benefits, and pension plan, everything is very rigid. Graduate students are paid a "stipend", required to work 19 hours or less/week, and can't have any other form of state employment that might put them at 20+ hours/week. Total pay comes out to about $18,000/yr before student fees. This is because at that point, the type of employment is considered changed, and benefits have to be provided. The default appointment is for teaching, and doesn't include summer pay (no teaching in the summer). However, if your group has external funding, you can use that external funding to pay the students, but you can only pay them the default appointment (plus summer). So the wage doesn't change, the students are still paid by the university and are state employees, but the university gets the funds from grant funding, not wherever it comes from for TAing (probably undergrad revenue + state taxes). The best solution here is state legislature passing legislation to increase what graduate students are paid, take the money out of the tax budget (seriously, 100% of graduate students at my university are below the federal poverty level, which just enables this stupid degrading benefit double-dipping to subsidize salaries), and provide benefits and treatment as standard state employees. However, universities have been sucking up cheap/slave graduate student labor for years and are completely addicted to it. They have ignored this demographic completely and most state universities cannot function without graduate students. Graduate students do research. Research attracts big researchers who bring in multi-million dollar grants for the NIH and NSF. The schools take 45%-65% off the top of each grant in the form of indirect cost recapture. That heavily subsidizes the schools. Also, high quality researchers brings in more, better undergraduates. All of this while grad students are paid $16k-$30k/yr, mostly without benefits, for extremely highly skilled technical work. When fewer and fewer Americans were going to graduate school in the 80s and 90s, rather than try to make graduate school more enticing, the US simply pivoted to the H1B system. The hilarious thing is many schools claim graduate student tuition is part of their compensation, and that's worth tens of thousands of dollars, but in reality, graduate student tuition is just being in a research lab doing work that benefits the university anyways. Most graduate students in science take 4-6 classes over ~5 years of graduate school - not worth anything close to what universities claim it is. And most grad students still have to pay student fees, while having reduced access to undergrad facilities (no dining hall, no dorms, no gym access at lots of universities, reduced health clinic access, etc).
passwordoops 4y ago
When I moved from Canada to the US for my post doc, it blew my mind to hear the level of debt my American colleagues were mired in - from $70-$110K, early 2010s. I'm pulling for the students here, and these are basic benefits, but you've gotta reign in student debt in the first place
- changoplatanero 4y ago
  Rather than the students, I’m rooting for the tax payer in this one. California should determine grad student pay at state schools based on what level of funding is required to meet its educational mission, attract good students, and balance against other state priorities.
  - ummonk 4y ago
    More importantly, I'm with the undergrads. Their tuitions shouldn't go up to pay for a bunch of whiny PhDs who could have worked in industry instead.
    - lapcat 4y ago
      PhD students provide a lot of the teaching labor at universities as lecturers and teaching assistants. What do you think would happen if they were gone? This is precisely why striking is effective, because the universities need them.
      - cudgy 4y ago
        Universities would have to hire and pay actual professors instead of milking their students?
        lapcat 4y ago
        Yes, and actual professors are vastly more expensive than grad students, so how is that going to help with undergraduate costs?
Overtonwindow 4y ago
As an undergraduate, I always felt like the money given to graduate students was just a tax on undergraduates. Whenever the graduate instructors wanted more money, they would raise the fees for undergraduate students.
- CaveTech 4y ago
  Almost as if graduate research and professors are required to build an environment for high-value undergraduate studies. The distribution of fees is far from ideal, but your complaint should not be directed towards those that literally define the institution you wish to attend.
  - deodar 4y ago
    I have to agree with the GP comment. This is going to be a drain on both the undergrad programs and on the California taxpayers. I am not convinced that the value add to the undergrad environment will make up for it.
    - watwut 4y ago
      People who do bulk of work related to teaching and research on teaching and research institutions are entitled to demand to be paid. Cooks and waiters in restaurants don't work for free either. Programmers don't work for free and negotiate salary raises.
    - idontpost 4y ago
      [dead]
    - mjhay 4y ago
      Are you not aware that grad students teach sections, grade, and do most of the research work that brings in grant money? All for near-poverty wages. It's astounding how so many people are so ignorant of how universities operate, despite having attended them.
      - 4y ago
AlbertCory 4y ago
There was a proposal to unionize even when I was a grad student. It didn't go anywhere. What should happen, but won't, is: the Board of Regents says to UC, "Pay them what they want. Cut your administrative costs to pay for it. You may not raise tuition."
Overtonwindow 4y ago
The entire financial structure of higher education seems like a pyramid scheme.
- beezlebroxxxxxx 4y ago
  Part of it comes from a job market and hiring practices built around credentialism. When higher education becomes an "essential" stepping stone in ensuring a career, it gets inundated with an almost predatory mindset that cannot conceive of anything but its own necessity and will tirelessly protect that perceived necessity at all costs. Higher education was intended for the creation, protecting, and nurturing, of knowledge and liberal (in the classical sense) humanistic ideals. Nowadays, it's a career engine and often, to put it simply, pay-to-win.
amluto 4y ago
Let’s put this in perspective. Under this agreement, UC can hire a college-educated, generally high achieving, generally highly motivated researcher, in California, for $34k/yr. This worker will be motivated to work hard (to graduate) and is likely to also teach classes and work rather long hours. This is an incredibly good deal. Obviously the total cost is more than $34k/yr, because graduate students, like any other employees, have overhead. But university money has a way of going around in circles, and (although I haven’t checked the particular details here), a good fraction of this money may be chargeable to grants, this costing the university as a whole nothing except to the extent that these charges displace other charges that the university might otherwise benefit from. In fact, in some cases, universities charge more than 100%: the university can charge a “fee” (graduate tuition) and bill that fee to a grant. And in other cases (but maybe not under this agreement), the university can collect the fee from the student. For comparison, NSF GRFP currently pays $37k/yr. Stanford appears to pay about $27k/yr (which, if I understood the table right, is a bit embarrassing). The DoD’s NDSEG pays $40.8k/yr. Hertz pays $34k/yr. So, as far as I’m concerned, this agreement is a bargain for UC.
- bitL 4y ago
  Don't Stanford TAs get $100/h for running classes though? Are the wages you mentioned total or just base with a large variable portion?
  - gmadsen 4y ago
    Speaking of just other schools, that sounds like that would be without a tuition waver. Typically when these super low stipends are talked about, it is with full tuition paid for. Although I think I have heard that Stanford's PhDs don't get automatic tuition waiving and need to get grant money
    - mattkrause 4y ago
      "Tuition" is a bit nebulous for PhDs because most of your time is not actually spent doing coursework: my program had students take 4-5 classes the first year, and 2-3 more at some point in the next four years. You were otherwise registered for placeholder courses like "Dissertation research" and expected to be full-time in the lab. There were plenty of educational opportunities (journal clubs, seminar series, the occasional workshop), but certainly nothing like a full undergrad course load.
Osmium 4y ago
I think it's important for discussions about this to distinguish between how things are and how things should be. How things are is that grad student labor is critical to the running of the university: critical for teaching of undergraduates, critical for performing research to reach deliverables on grants. Indeed, very little research is performed directly by faculty. And grad students are hurting, often at or below the poverty line. Typically a grad school program in the UC takes 5+ years, during which time wages might stagnate around $30k, without raise or career movement that would be possible if they spent those years in industry, despite by all objective measures their day-to-day work being very similar to a research job. Sunk costs make it very difficult psychologically to leave early. Abuse is rampant. How things should be is very much open to debate. Perhaps a grad program should be as some claim it currently is: a privileged learning role, where you can focus on learning from world-leading experts. Perhaps university institutions should not rely on grad labor as much as they do, and invest more in faculty. Perhaps individual grad students would be better off not in grad school. There are lots of good suggestions in this thread. How we get from how things are to how things should be is also an open question, but I'd advocate we do it with the least amount of harm to the specific individuals already living within this system. This proposed contract is already weak. The grad students deserve and need a lot more. And increasing the stipend to, say, the $54k proposed would also place incentives on the institution for change. Finally, without living wages and good contracts, there will always be diversity and inclusion issues in academia. Someone from a wealthy background may be able to slog through a few years with support from their parents, but people from a poorer background will not. It simply will not be an option for them. There is a deeper tragedy here, for everyone involved--the individual, and the institution--for what is lost when so many intelligent, driven souls are not able to participate.
- AlbertCory 4y ago
  > there will always be diversity and inclusion issues This is a totally unsupported and hypothetical claim. Given the gargantuan investments in DEI by universities, I'd be amazed if it were true.
  - PuppyTailWags 4y ago
mattcantstop 4y ago
I am the first in my family to graduate from college. I grew up incredibly poor. It was presented as THE way out of poverty growing up. I work in a field completely unrelated to my degree. My university degree didn't help my earning potential. I ended up making plenty of money in tech, so my degree debt didn't matter much. I have a lot of kids. Only one of them has any plans on going to college. I try to dissuade my kids from going to college. There are a few degrees where going to school is the best path. But for most areas of higher education there are superior ways to learn the material, if the education is the goal. I majored in English Literature. Completely worthless degree. I should have just joined a few book clubs or hired a writing coach. Something like https://writeofpassage.school/ https://writeofpassage.school/. That would have been far less expensive and probably better. Higher education in the United States needs an overhaul. $34,000 in California is ridiculous. I hope they get their money on the path to us changing the foundation of higher education.
- peanuty1 4y ago
  Most tech companies' (like Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, etc) entry-level positions are new grad roles that require a degree.
- polygamous_bat 4y ago
  I believe there is a strong generational divide here. A lot of people from the previous generation seem to assume "My degree did not help me make it big/I made it big without a degree, so a degree is worthless" without realizing that the labor market has shifted (for various reasons, pick your favorite culprit) so much so that if you are looking for your first job, a lot of entry level positions will not even consider your application if you do not have a high level degree. I am glad you could make it big in tech without a degree in tech, but maybe it is necessary to rethink whether the same policy would work for your children.
  - ndriscoll 4y ago
    Alternatively, work more actively to ensure that policy will work for them. e.g. develop enough of a network at a larger company that you know someone who can make exceptions to get them hired, work at a smaller company that has more flexible policies, or start your own company and have them work for you (which is really just the limiting case of approach 2).
jedberg 4y ago
On the one hand, as a strong supporter of labor, I absolutely support the students here, striking for better conditions. On the other hand, when an employee of a private employer strikes, what they are saying is, "We want you to shift more of your profits to the employees than you are now.". But when a public worker strikes, what they are saying is, "We want you to take away resources from someone else and give it to us.". And that is when things get tricky, because you have to ask who is losing resources so that they can pay the grad students more. Will they take it away from administrative positions? (great!) Or will they hike tuition, essentially taking it from other students (who may not mind since they can get ever bigger federally backed loans which is a whole other problem). In short, I stand with the students but I don't think there is any good solution here, unless the state can be convinced to increase funding.
- theGnuMe 4y ago
  I think the UCs have plenty of revenue generating public activities that could be a reasonable funding source before taxing students more.
  - jedberg 4y ago
    Regardless, they are a non-profit entity, which means any money they take in is allocated to a certain function. So no matter what, you have to take money away from someone else, not profits away from owners.
    - feet 4y ago
      Oh no, taking money from the poor administrators making 300k/yr don't take away their resources and give them to the grad students who do the actual teaching and research!
      - jedberg 4y ago
        I specifically said that I support taking it from administrative salaries.
hedora 4y ago
This looks like more of the same from this union: Below rent pay with increased gender inequality in the health care plan. Normally, what happens is students in lower cost of living campuses vote yes, but places like UC Santa Cruz overwhelmingly vote no, and end up on wildcat strike. I hope UC doesn’t deport too many grad students this time. What should happen: Students should vote to replace the system-wide union with campus-wide unions with campus-wide contracts. If campus-wide unions / contracts are deemed illegal, they should wildcat strike until the law changes. What will happen: Grade students will realize that a $10K raise and health care for a few years is nothing compared to getting a summer internship or going to industry, so the union will continue to negotiate increasingly abusive contracts.
- patrick451 4y ago
  > This looks like more of the same from this union: Below rent pay with increased gender inequality in the health care plan. No, female graduate students are free to opt out of having kids.
fooker 4y ago
US universities have been running an interesting scam with grad students for several decades. This is how it works. * Professor obtains a grant to fund some research. * The university takes ~80k USD from the grant per year per PhD student. * The student gets ~30k USD per year. * The rest is 'tuition', health insurance and other various fees ('international student fee', 'mandatory fee', 'differential fee', some university facilities fees, etc). PhD students have bogus course requirements just to make this scam justifiable. Contrast this to the system in most European universities where the student gets a significantly larger fraction of this money. (2x-3x in general, sometimes all of it!). This is not really a solvable problem because a PhD is the most reliable path to US emigration for Indian and Chinese students, so there’s always going to be a demand
- cscurmudgeon 4y ago
  I think you just explained the cause. The demand for a US PhD is higher than a European one internationally. Supply and demand. Edit: downvoted for stating a fact that shows US relatively better lol
  - fooker 4y ago
    You are right, a US PhD degree is in more demand in general. There is a reason our economic systems are not pure supply and demand though, because in that case workers/environment eventually end up being exploited. The US would look very different without minimum wages, environmental protections, and a bunch of other regulations which limit supply and demand based exploitation.
    - cscurmudgeon 4y ago
      Agreed. I am just describing reality not what it ought to be. Also, supply and demand is universal and incentives for exploitation by suppliers increases when demand increases.
- deleted 4y ago
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- 4y ago
toomim 4y ago
I still remember the days when students were students, and workers were workers. First, you were a student, and paid tuition to learn. Then, you graduated into the workforce, and paid off your tuition. Now students call themselves "student workers" or "academic workers", and treat the PhD like it's a job that's supposed to pay them enough to raise a family. It's a sign of a failing bureaucracy when the terms start to contradict themselves.
- esalman 4y ago
  Okay, boomer.
  - toomim 4y ago
    That's a funny thing to say to a Millenial.
- ryanwaggoner 4y ago
  Things change. For example, now those students have enough awareness of how they were getting screwed, and ability to organize, that they did something about it. And whether you think it's fair or not, apparently the UC system needed them enough to strike this deal.
- petsfed 4y ago
  Speaking as a (former) partner of a University of Oregon grad student, what it actually came down to was that folks weren't paid enough to even live in the community they worked and taught in. I was making more at my shitty retail job for $8.50/hr, 25 hours a week, than my partner was making working 60+ hours a week, in a job that required a college degree. I was not contractually barred from taking other work, unlike my partner. And most terms, my partner was expected to teach or TA classes for the university as well as working on their dissertation. This is common for most grad students, and has been for decades. Based on average cost of living in that community, a $54k Stanford grad student stipend is fair, perhaps low: you shouldn't have to take on an additional $40k a year in debt just to afford the privilege of accepting a "full ride" graduate fellowship.
- 4y ago
jmyeet 4y ago
I see nothing in this article about housing, which is a huge problem (particularly in the Bay Area and SoCal). So these graduate students will be expected to find housing around, say Berkely, on $34,000 a year. Consider [1]: > Pay and housing demands by University of California academic workers — who launched a massive strike across the system this week — could amount to several hundred million dollars annually, an “overwhelming” financial impact, a UC senior leader says. The UC system has a lot of money [2]. Current assets stand at $140 billion. Most of that is the pension fund ($81 billion). Note that the UC system employs a ton of people because it runs a significant health and hospital system. But here's the endowment: > The General Endowment Pool stood at $18.2 billion as of June 30, 2022. The 30-year annualized net return was 9%, the 20-year return was 7.9%, the 10-year return was 9.1%, the five-year return was 8.9%, and the one-year net return was negative 7.6% (1.4% over the benchmark). So the univeristy is making >$1B a year in returns on money that it was simply given. So why can't the UC system do what the NYU system does and supply grad students with housing? NYU owns billions in Greenwich Village real estate that is deciated to student and staff housing. This would have the benefit of controlling housing costs (for the students) and still keep assets on their balance sheet. [1]: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-11-16/uc-union-demands-to-tie-pay-to-housing-costs-could-have-overwhelming-financial-impact https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-11-16/uc-union... [2]: https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/press-room/ucs-investment-assets-close-fiscal-year-152-billion https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/press-room/ucs-invest...
- atrettel 4y ago
  The UC system does provide housing for some graduate students, but they do not have enough housing for all graduate students. When I was working on my PhD at UCLA, I lived in a UCLA-owned studio apartment for the first three years. The apartment was pretty nice actually. The rent was around $1625/month including all utilities in 2018. But you can only live in university-owned apartments for three years max. I had to move into a different place after that. I really would have preferred to stay, but I was lucky to get an apartment there in the first place.
bnprks 4y ago
To add some relevant facts from my experience as a current Stanford PhD student: If I work over the summer my yearly take-home pay is about $50k pre-tax [1]. This is theoretically for 20 hours/week of research work "for my advisor", and the rest of my time is theoretically research work "for my degree completion". (In practice this is the same research) The money flow shenanigans as best as I can tell are: 1. My advisor gets grant money from the government 2. Stanford takes about 40% as "overhead" 3. Stanford charges my advisor my tuition costs, paying for my "class" which is just doing research with my advisor. This is about $35k/year for years 1-4, dropping to $14k/year for years 5+ with a "TGR" registration [2] 4. I get $50k/year as the remaining money Note that my advisor also has to spend some portion of his post-overhead grant money on paying Stanford for research space and paying for part of his own salary. Numbers are of course opaque to me, but it leaves me confused what "overhead" pays for if it's not fully covering building space and faculty salaries. From my perspective, had I skipped grad school and gone straight to work at a big tech company, I would have 5 extra years in my career earning a take-home salary of ~$250k total comp. This makes the opportunity-cost of my 6 years of graduate school about $1.5 million compared to going straight to industry out of undergrad. Of course, grad school offers lifestyle and work-focus flexibility that can be far greater than available in industry. I feel for myself the monetary tradeoff has been okay, but only because I had no debt from college and have the option to enter a highly-paid career track (software development) immediately after graduation. For students with debt coming in to grad school or less lucrative career prospects, even Stanford's $50k/year would be tough swallow in a high-cost area like Palo Alto. [1] https://gfs.stanford.edu/salary/salary22/salary_tables.pdf https://gfs.stanford.edu/salary/salary22/salary_tables.pdf [2] https://studentservices.stanford.edu/my-finances/tuition-fees/tuition-rates/2021-2022-graduate-and-professional-tuition-rates#Graduate https://studentservices.stanford.edu/my-finances/tuition-fee...

116 points by Amorymeltzer 4y ago

Not familiar with academia, but where does this extra $ come from? Won't this just mean departments will recruit proportionally less PhDs?

sam0x17 4y ago
They operate on a huge surplus from what I've heard
Retric 4y ago
Somewhat, but departments will likely end up spending a higher percentage of their budget on grad students. Also, student unions have different priorities because this isn’t a lifelong career so reducing the number of jobs isn’t a big deal.
mbreese 4y ago
There isn’t one answer to this question. It depends heavily on the department. For example, biomedical graduate students are often covered by external (federal) grant funding. This increase can be factored into the budgets for those, but only in the future. AFAICT, it is still up in the air how it will be funded in the shorter term. Humanities students are another story though. External grants for those are more rare, IIRC. I’m not sure if the universities can survive in its current model with fewer graduate students. They are very integral to the teaching/grading/etc for undergraduate classes. So, it will be tough to make the system work with fewer of them. At least, that’s what the striking students are counting on.
- deleted 4y ago
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lapcat 4y ago
> Won't this just mean departments will recruit proportionally less PhDs? Maybe they should. The PhD dropout rate is almost 50%. Universities exploit PhD students for cheap labor and then throw them away.
- beezlebroxxxxxx 4y ago
  Already happening in the humanities. Many major programs in my field when I was applying (as an international student, so there already were some "quotas" in place on how many international students a program would take) were signaling that they were reducing the recruitment number simply because they could no longer insure TT placement afterwards. It's too little too late tbh, but at least they are starting to do it. I know they are starting to do it in non-humanities programs as well. I'll add as well: the standards expected for present day PhD students is insane compared to PhD students a generation ago. When I speak to some of the tenured professors I know, they readily admit that they would not meet the standards for TT positions today. Add to that the insane number of applicants, and the tendency for hiring committees to default to applicants from top-tier programs for hiring (regardless of the quality of their research), and you end up with an increasingly bubbled and desperate profession that is extremely unwilling to break from party line and disrupt whatever sliver of a living they ended up in.
  - Jugglerofworlds 4y ago
    I'm a PhD student at a top CS research University, and I'm leaving with a master's degree. I agree that the bar for admission into the program is way too high. I only got into two Universities despite having multiple publications as well as experience working in government research labs. The majority of my fellow students are international, mostly from China. I know hardly any other Americans in my program. At this point I see the system as more or less a way for international students to gain citizenship. I'm all for immigration, but I think it has gotten to the point where American students don't even want to go to graduate school at their own Universities, and the system imports foreign students who they know they can abuse for cheap labor. If grad student salaries were higher I'm sure we would see more Americans joining. I decided to leave due to abuse by my initial advisor. So many of my fellow students have experienced abuse or neglect by their advisors. By neglect I mean that advisors won't even talk to them because the advisor has tenure and doesn't care. Many CS doctorate holders I've talked to have expressed that their degree was not worth it.
mjhay 4y ago
Ideally it would come from cutting the bloated administration that leeches off of research funding that professors and grad students attract, while impeding their work, but that's not going to be what happens.
- whakim 4y ago
  I would caution against such sweeping generalizations about where the money goes. Statistics usually show tremendous increases in spending on "staff" (i.e. non-faculty) salaries, but those staff do a variety of things. For example, I previously worked as a staff researcher at a big private university; my job involved building open source software and writing papers. The research center I worked at had a couple faculty members and PhD students but probably 20 folks with jobs like mine. The fact is, a lot of the research is being done by that so-called "bloated administration."
  - 131012 4y ago
    For example, if you want to use modern tools (aka code) in a department where nobody is hired for their coding skill, you need some staff. And you need to pay them well, because... you know. Startups, SF, FAANGs.
    - mjhay 4y ago
      In scientific disciplines, professors and grad students just write their own code. At least that was the case in my department, other similar departments at my university, and people in my field from other universities. It's very bad code of course, but I've never heard of anyone getting hired specifically to program, besides a few CS undergrad interns being brought in. No one had anywhere near the kind of budget to hire professional programmers.
      - stevenbedrick 4y ago
        This is thankfully beginning to change, though far more slowly than many of us would like to see. There is much more talk about "research software engineering" happening in a lot of fields, and some funding agencies are beginning to take notice. Anecdotally, I know of a couple of PIs who have been successful in arguing for higher budget caps on R01 submissions in order to cover the costs of having appropriate computational staff on their grants, which is something that I never would have believed if somebody had told me about it ten years go. And some fields (like computational biology) have been ahead of the game in this regard. It remains a huge challenge from a budgeting standpoint, though, I don't want to downplay that too much. And there are also other challenges- until very recently, my university didn't have job categories for software-related research staff roles, and so we had enormous difficulties figuring out how to hire and appropriately pay such people. The "how do we hire them" part has been fixed, which is a big help- but we still have to figure out how to pay for them ourselves.
option 4y ago
of course. Typically in STEM PhDs are paid from the research grants of their advisors.
COGlory 4y ago
It depends. At my university, graduate students are state employees, but not standard state employees the way facilities/staff/administrators are. Those groups have a union, benefits, and pension plan, everything is very rigid. Graduate students are paid a "stipend", required to work 19 hours or less/week, and can't have any other form of state employment that might put them at 20+ hours/week. Total pay comes out to about $18,000/yr before student fees. This is because at that point, the type of employment is considered changed, and benefits have to be provided. The default appointment is for teaching, and doesn't include summer pay (no teaching in the summer). However, if your group has external funding, you can use that external funding to pay the students, but you can only pay them the default appointment (plus summer). So the wage doesn't change, the students are still paid by the university and are state employees, but the university gets the funds from grant funding, not wherever it comes from for TAing (probably undergrad revenue + state taxes). The best solution here is state legislature passing legislation to increase what graduate students are paid, take the money out of the tax budget (seriously, 100% of graduate students at my university are below the federal poverty level, which just enables this stupid degrading benefit double-dipping to subsidize salaries), and provide benefits and treatment as standard state employees. However, universities have been sucking up cheap/slave graduate student labor for years and are completely addicted to it. They have ignored this demographic completely and most state universities cannot function without graduate students. Graduate students do research. Research attracts big researchers who bring in multi-million dollar grants for the NIH and NSF. The schools take 45%-65% off the top of each grant in the form of indirect cost recapture. That heavily subsidizes the schools. Also, high quality researchers brings in more, better undergraduates. All of this while grad students are paid $16k-$30k/yr, mostly without benefits, for extremely highly skilled technical work. When fewer and fewer Americans were going to graduate school in the 80s and 90s, rather than try to make graduate school more enticing, the US simply pivoted to the H1B system. The hilarious thing is many schools claim graduate student tuition is part of their compensation, and that's worth tens of thousands of dollars, but in reality, graduate student tuition is just being in a research lab doing work that benefits the university anyways. Most graduate students in science take 4-6 classes over ~5 years of graduate school - not worth anything close to what universities claim it is. And most grad students still have to pay student fees, while having reduced access to undergrad facilities (no dining hall, no dorms, no gym access at lots of universities, reduced health clinic access, etc).

passwordoops 4y ago

When I moved from Canada to the US for my post doc, it blew my mind to hear the level of debt my American colleagues were mired in - from $70-$110K, early 2010s. I'm pulling for the students here, and these are basic benefits, but you've gotta reign in student debt in the first place

changoplatanero 4y ago
Rather than the students, I’m rooting for the tax payer in this one. California should determine grad student pay at state schools based on what level of funding is required to meet its educational mission, attract good students, and balance against other state priorities.
- ummonk 4y ago
  More importantly, I'm with the undergrads. Their tuitions shouldn't go up to pay for a bunch of whiny PhDs who could have worked in industry instead.
  - lapcat 4y ago
    PhD students provide a lot of the teaching labor at universities as lecturers and teaching assistants. What do you think would happen if they were gone? This is precisely why striking is effective, because the universities need them.
    - cudgy 4y ago
      Universities would have to hire and pay actual professors instead of milking their students?
      - lapcat 4y ago
        Yes, and actual professors are vastly more expensive than grad students, so how is that going to help with undergraduate costs?

Overtonwindow 4y ago

As an undergraduate, I always felt like the money given to graduate students was just a tax on undergraduates. Whenever the graduate instructors wanted more money, they would raise the fees for undergraduate students.

CaveTech 4y ago
Almost as if graduate research and professors are required to build an environment for high-value undergraduate studies. The distribution of fees is far from ideal, but your complaint should not be directed towards those that literally define the institution you wish to attend.
- deodar 4y ago
  I have to agree with the GP comment. This is going to be a drain on both the undergrad programs and on the California taxpayers. I am not convinced that the value add to the undergrad environment will make up for it.
  - watwut 4y ago
    People who do bulk of work related to teaching and research on teaching and research institutions are entitled to demand to be paid. Cooks and waiters in restaurants don't work for free either. Programmers don't work for free and negotiate salary raises.
  - idontpost 4y ago
    [dead]
  - mjhay 4y ago
    Are you not aware that grad students teach sections, grade, and do most of the research work that brings in grant money? All for near-poverty wages. It's astounding how so many people are so ignorant of how universities operate, despite having attended them.
    - 4y ago

AlbertCory 4y ago

There was a proposal to unionize even when I was a grad student. It didn't go anywhere. What should happen, but won't, is: the Board of Regents says to UC, "Pay them what they want. Cut your administrative costs to pay for it. You may not raise tuition."

Overtonwindow 4y ago

The entire financial structure of higher education seems like a pyramid scheme.

beezlebroxxxxxx 4y ago
Part of it comes from a job market and hiring practices built around credentialism. When higher education becomes an "essential" stepping stone in ensuring a career, it gets inundated with an almost predatory mindset that cannot conceive of anything but its own necessity and will tirelessly protect that perceived necessity at all costs. Higher education was intended for the creation, protecting, and nurturing, of knowledge and liberal (in the classical sense) humanistic ideals. Nowadays, it's a career engine and often, to put it simply, pay-to-win.

amluto 4y ago

Let’s put this in perspective. Under this agreement, UC can hire a college-educated, generally high achieving, generally highly motivated researcher, in California, for $34k/yr. This worker will be motivated to work hard (to graduate) and is likely to also teach classes and work rather long hours. This is an incredibly good deal. Obviously the total cost is more than $34k/yr, because graduate students, like any other employees, have overhead. But university money has a way of going around in circles, and (although I haven’t checked the particular details here), a good fraction of this money may be chargeable to grants, this costing the university as a whole nothing except to the extent that these charges displace other charges that the university might otherwise benefit from. In fact, in some cases, universities charge more than 100%: the university can charge a “fee” (graduate tuition) and bill that fee to a grant. And in other cases (but maybe not under this agreement), the university can collect the fee from the student. For comparison, NSF GRFP currently pays $37k/yr. Stanford appears to pay about $27k/yr (which, if I understood the table right, is a bit embarrassing). The DoD’s NDSEG pays $40.8k/yr. Hertz pays $34k/yr. So, as far as I’m concerned, this agreement is a bargain for UC.

bitL 4y ago
Don't Stanford TAs get $100/h for running classes though? Are the wages you mentioned total or just base with a large variable portion?
- gmadsen 4y ago
  Speaking of just other schools, that sounds like that would be without a tuition waver. Typically when these super low stipends are talked about, it is with full tuition paid for. Although I think I have heard that Stanford's PhDs don't get automatic tuition waiving and need to get grant money
  - mattkrause 4y ago
    "Tuition" is a bit nebulous for PhDs because most of your time is not actually spent doing coursework: my program had students take 4-5 classes the first year, and 2-3 more at some point in the next four years. You were otherwise registered for placeholder courses like "Dissertation research" and expected to be full-time in the lab. There were plenty of educational opportunities (journal clubs, seminar series, the occasional workshop), but certainly nothing like a full undergrad course load.

Osmium 4y ago

I think it's important for discussions about this to distinguish between how things are and how things should be. How things are is that grad student labor is critical to the running of the university: critical for teaching of undergraduates, critical for performing research to reach deliverables on grants. Indeed, very little research is performed directly by faculty. And grad students are hurting, often at or below the poverty line. Typically a grad school program in the UC takes 5+ years, during which time wages might stagnate around $30k, without raise or career movement that would be possible if they spent those years in industry, despite by all objective measures their day-to-day work being very similar to a research job. Sunk costs make it very difficult psychologically to leave early. Abuse is rampant. How things should be is very much open to debate. Perhaps a grad program should be as some claim it currently is: a privileged learning role, where you can focus on learning from world-leading experts. Perhaps university institutions should not rely on grad labor as much as they do, and invest more in faculty. Perhaps individual grad students would be better off not in grad school. There are lots of good suggestions in this thread. How we get from how things are to how things should be is also an open question, but I'd advocate we do it with the least amount of harm to the specific individuals already living within this system. This proposed contract is already weak. The grad students deserve and need a lot more. And increasing the stipend to, say, the $54k proposed would also place incentives on the institution for change. Finally, without living wages and good contracts, there will always be diversity and inclusion issues in academia. Someone from a wealthy background may be able to slog through a few years with support from their parents, but people from a poorer background will not. It simply will not be an option for them. There is a deeper tragedy here, for everyone involved--the individual, and the institution--for what is lost when so many intelligent, driven souls are not able to participate.

AlbertCory 4y ago
> there will always be diversity and inclusion issues This is a totally unsupported and hypothetical claim. Given the gargantuan investments in DEI by universities, I'd be amazed if it were true.
- PuppyTailWags 4y ago

mattcantstop 4y ago

I am the first in my family to graduate from college. I grew up incredibly poor. It was presented as THE way out of poverty growing up. I work in a field completely unrelated to my degree. My university degree didn't help my earning potential. I ended up making plenty of money in tech, so my degree debt didn't matter much. I have a lot of kids. Only one of them has any plans on going to college. I try to dissuade my kids from going to college. There are a few degrees where going to school is the best path. But for most areas of higher education there are superior ways to learn the material, if the education is the goal. I majored in English Literature. Completely worthless degree. I should have just joined a few book clubs or hired a writing coach. Something like https://writeofpassage.school/ https://writeofpassage.school/. That would have been far less expensive and probably better. Higher education in the United States needs an overhaul. $34,000 in California is ridiculous. I hope they get their money on the path to us changing the foundation of higher education.

peanuty1 4y ago
Most tech companies' (like Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, etc) entry-level positions are new grad roles that require a degree.
polygamous_bat 4y ago
I believe there is a strong generational divide here. A lot of people from the previous generation seem to assume "My degree did not help me make it big/I made it big without a degree, so a degree is worthless" without realizing that the labor market has shifted (for various reasons, pick your favorite culprit) so much so that if you are looking for your first job, a lot of entry level positions will not even consider your application if you do not have a high level degree. I am glad you could make it big in tech without a degree in tech, but maybe it is necessary to rethink whether the same policy would work for your children.
- ndriscoll 4y ago
  Alternatively, work more actively to ensure that policy will work for them. e.g. develop enough of a network at a larger company that you know someone who can make exceptions to get them hired, work at a smaller company that has more flexible policies, or start your own company and have them work for you (which is really just the limiting case of approach 2).

jedberg 4y ago

On the one hand, as a strong supporter of labor, I absolutely support the students here, striking for better conditions. On the other hand, when an employee of a private employer strikes, what they are saying is, "We want you to shift more of your profits to the employees than you are now.". But when a public worker strikes, what they are saying is, "We want you to take away resources from someone else and give it to us.". And that is when things get tricky, because you have to ask who is losing resources so that they can pay the grad students more. Will they take it away from administrative positions? (great!) Or will they hike tuition, essentially taking it from other students (who may not mind since they can get ever bigger federally backed loans which is a whole other problem). In short, I stand with the students but I don't think there is any good solution here, unless the state can be convinced to increase funding.

theGnuMe 4y ago
I think the UCs have plenty of revenue generating public activities that could be a reasonable funding source before taxing students more.
- jedberg 4y ago
  Regardless, they are a non-profit entity, which means any money they take in is allocated to a certain function. So no matter what, you have to take money away from someone else, not profits away from owners.
  - feet 4y ago
    Oh no, taking money from the poor administrators making 300k/yr don't take away their resources and give them to the grad students who do the actual teaching and research!
    - jedberg 4y ago
      I specifically said that I support taking it from administrative salaries.

hedora 4y ago

This looks like more of the same from this union: Below rent pay with increased gender inequality in the health care plan. Normally, what happens is students in lower cost of living campuses vote yes, but places like UC Santa Cruz overwhelmingly vote no, and end up on wildcat strike. I hope UC doesn’t deport too many grad students this time. What should happen: Students should vote to replace the system-wide union with campus-wide unions with campus-wide contracts. If campus-wide unions / contracts are deemed illegal, they should wildcat strike until the law changes. What will happen: Grade students will realize that a $10K raise and health care for a few years is nothing compared to getting a summer internship or going to industry, so the union will continue to negotiate increasingly abusive contracts.

patrick451 4y ago
> This looks like more of the same from this union: Below rent pay with increased gender inequality in the health care plan. No, female graduate students are free to opt out of having kids.

fooker 4y ago

US universities have been running an interesting scam with grad students for several decades. This is how it works. * Professor obtains a grant to fund some research. * The university takes ~80k USD from the grant per year per PhD student. * The student gets ~30k USD per year. * The rest is 'tuition', health insurance and other various fees ('international student fee', 'mandatory fee', 'differential fee', some university facilities fees, etc). PhD students have bogus course requirements just to make this scam justifiable. Contrast this to the system in most European universities where the student gets a significantly larger fraction of this money. (2x-3x in general, sometimes all of it!). This is not really a solvable problem because a PhD is the most reliable path to US emigration for Indian and Chinese students, so there’s always going to be a demand

cscurmudgeon 4y ago
I think you just explained the cause. The demand for a US PhD is higher than a European one internationally. Supply and demand. Edit: downvoted for stating a fact that shows US relatively better lol
- fooker 4y ago
  You are right, a US PhD degree is in more demand in general. There is a reason our economic systems are not pure supply and demand though, because in that case workers/environment eventually end up being exploited. The US would look very different without minimum wages, environmental protections, and a bunch of other regulations which limit supply and demand based exploitation.
  - cscurmudgeon 4y ago
    Agreed. I am just describing reality not what it ought to be. Also, supply and demand is universal and incentives for exploitation by suppliers increases when demand increases.
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4y ago

toomim 4y ago

I still remember the days when students were students, and workers were workers. First, you were a student, and paid tuition to learn. Then, you graduated into the workforce, and paid off your tuition. Now students call themselves "student workers" or "academic workers", and treat the PhD like it's a job that's supposed to pay them enough to raise a family. It's a sign of a failing bureaucracy when the terms start to contradict themselves.

esalman 4y ago
Okay, boomer.
- toomim 4y ago
  That's a funny thing to say to a Millenial.
ryanwaggoner 4y ago
Things change. For example, now those students have enough awareness of how they were getting screwed, and ability to organize, that they did something about it. And whether you think it's fair or not, apparently the UC system needed them enough to strike this deal.
petsfed 4y ago
Speaking as a (former) partner of a University of Oregon grad student, what it actually came down to was that folks weren't paid enough to even live in the community they worked and taught in. I was making more at my shitty retail job for $8.50/hr, 25 hours a week, than my partner was making working 60+ hours a week, in a job that required a college degree. I was not contractually barred from taking other work, unlike my partner. And most terms, my partner was expected to teach or TA classes for the university as well as working on their dissertation. This is common for most grad students, and has been for decades. Based on average cost of living in that community, a $54k Stanford grad student stipend is fair, perhaps low: you shouldn't have to take on an additional $40k a year in debt just to afford the privilege of accepting a "full ride" graduate fellowship.
4y ago

jmyeet 4y ago

I see nothing in this article about housing, which is a huge problem (particularly in the Bay Area and SoCal). So these graduate students will be expected to find housing around, say Berkely, on $34,000 a year. Consider [1]: > Pay and housing demands by University of California academic workers — who launched a massive strike across the system this week — could amount to several hundred million dollars annually, an “overwhelming” financial impact, a UC senior leader says. The UC system has a lot of money [2]. Current assets stand at $140 billion. Most of that is the pension fund ($81 billion). Note that the UC system employs a ton of people because it runs a significant health and hospital system. But here's the endowment: > The General Endowment Pool stood at $18.2 billion as of June 30, 2022. The 30-year annualized net return was 9%, the 20-year return was 7.9%, the 10-year return was 9.1%, the five-year return was 8.9%, and the one-year net return was negative 7.6% (1.4% over the benchmark). So the univeristy is making >$1B a year in returns on money that it was simply given. So why can't the UC system do what the NYU system does and supply grad students with housing? NYU owns billions in Greenwich Village real estate that is deciated to student and staff housing. This would have the benefit of controlling housing costs (for the students) and still keep assets on their balance sheet. [1]: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-11-16/uc-union-demands-to-tie-pay-to-housing-costs-could-have-overwhelming-financial-impact https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-11-16/uc-union... [2]: https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/press-room/ucs-investment-assets-close-fiscal-year-152-billion https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/press-room/ucs-invest...

atrettel 4y ago
The UC system does provide housing for some graduate students, but they do not have enough housing for all graduate students. When I was working on my PhD at UCLA, I lived in a UCLA-owned studio apartment for the first three years. The apartment was pretty nice actually. The rent was around $1625/month including all utilities in 2018. But you can only live in university-owned apartments for three years max. I had to move into a different place after that. I really would have preferred to stay, but I was lucky to get an apartment there in the first place.

bnprks 4y ago

To add some relevant facts from my experience as a current Stanford PhD student: If I work over the summer my yearly take-home pay is about $50k pre-tax [1]. This is theoretically for 20 hours/week of research work "for my advisor", and the rest of my time is theoretically research work "for my degree completion". (In practice this is the same research) The money flow shenanigans as best as I can tell are: 1. My advisor gets grant money from the government 2. Stanford takes about 40% as "overhead" 3. Stanford charges my advisor my tuition costs, paying for my "class" which is just doing research with my advisor. This is about $35k/year for years 1-4, dropping to $14k/year for years 5+ with a "TGR" registration [2] 4. I get $50k/year as the remaining money Note that my advisor also has to spend some portion of his post-overhead grant money on paying Stanford for research space and paying for part of his own salary. Numbers are of course opaque to me, but it leaves me confused what "overhead" pays for if it's not fully covering building space and faculty salaries. From my perspective, had I skipped grad school and gone straight to work at a big tech company, I would have 5 extra years in my career earning a take-home salary of ~$250k total comp. This makes the opportunity-cost of my 6 years of graduate school about $1.5 million compared to going straight to industry out of undergrad. Of course, grad school offers lifestyle and work-focus flexibility that can be far greater than available in industry. I feel for myself the monetary tradeoff has been okay, but only because I had no debt from college and have the option to enter a highly-paid career track (software development) immediately after graduation. For students with debt coming in to grad school or less lucrative career prospects, even Stanford's $50k/year would be tough swallow in a high-cost area like Palo Alto. [1] https://gfs.stanford.edu/salary/salary22/salary_tables.pdf https://gfs.stanford.edu/salary/salary22/salary_tables.pdf [2] https://studentservices.stanford.edu/my-finances/tuition-fees/tuition-rates/2021-2022-graduate-and-professional-tuition-rates#Graduate https://studentservices.stanford.edu/my-finances/tuition-fee...