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Can the institutions be blamed for trying to stay afloat? Where is this money coming from to pay the scientists? A collective decision has to be made to keep sc
by greenhearth 3y ago
Can the institutions be blamed for trying to stay afloat? Where is this money coming from to pay the scientists? A collective decision has to be made to keep science healthy in a meaningful and productive way. I think academia (through its ethos of critical approach and peer review) may be the single social structure that keeps some kind of sanity.
- tptacek 3y agoAcademic research is funded by grants.
- greenhearth 3y agoCan these grants provide a living wage?
- ordersofmag 3y agoWages paid by grants in general have to match whatever the institutions 'standard' pay scales are. So it's the institutions deciding pay rates. At least in the U.S..
- CrazyStat 3y agoMy wife is currently in the middle of a fight over this. Her salary is paid by a grant from an organization that has a minimum pay scale for postdocs. The university has its own standard pay scale for postdocs, which is about $20k/year lower. So far they've refused to budge. It's not even their money, there's just 4 layers of bureaucracy who have nothing better to do than ~enforce policy~ no matter the cost.
- EatingWithForks 3y agoOf course they'd fight your wife. They don't want any history or evidence of potentially paying more under any circumstances.
- nradov 3y agoPerhaps so, if universities cut back on overhead. Much of the grant funding is taken away to pay administrators who don't directly contribute to research. There is a huge amount of waste and no real pressure to control costs.
- chriskanan 3y agoDepends on where you live: https://csstipendrankings.org/ https://csstipendrankings.org/ NSF grants are hard to get, with a small award being for about $600K over 3 years. That translates to about $300K after the university takes its overhead. For me, that would about fund about two PhD students for 3 years for about $31K per year during the 9 month academic year. Many PhD students in computer science do internships during summer where they make a lot larger salaries, or they are funded by me for that period instead. In my city, Rochester, according to this website, our stipends are the most generous in the USA based on the low cost of living here. https://csstipendrankings.org/ https://csstipendrankings.org/ We would all like to pay students more, but either we then have fewer students or need the government to award larger grants. As someone who had a hard time getting into a PhD program due to how competitive it is, I would be opposed to depriving folks of educational opportunities. Students typically take classes and do little research for their first 1-2 years, but they do receive a stipend during that time period.
- eli_gottlieb 3y agoWell, if we got rid of the administrators taking half the grants, we could probably almost double the wages. So in many cases, yes.
- kevviiinn 3y agoI don't know, can the admins stay afloat without making 200k+ per year? Maybe give some of that to us grad students
- mrguyorama 3y agoNo you see those admins are important because they went to business school so they deserve to make more money than the peons they oversee
- greenhearth 3y agoI'm not defending any administrators, m'friend. This is why I wrote "meaningful and productive." I want scientists to have all the money.