5 ms·

Harvard Tells Grad Students to Get Food Stamps

35 points by hammock 3y ago

whimsicalism 3y ago
I am very pro-union and specifically the HGSU, but I think that any efforts to raise salaries should be careful to ensure that salary money isn't simply being redirected from STEM PhDs to humanities PhDs. Far too often, strict cross-department salary bands often end up doing exactly that, which is ironic given that most humanities PhDs typically come from more affluent backgrounds than STEM PhDs (at least at Harvard). It breaks trust with the STEM departments - and is a large part of the reason graduate student unions, including the HGSU, typically do not win the majority of the vote from STEM department graduate students.
- lapcat 3y ago
  > given that most humanities PhDs typically come from more affluent backgrounds than STEM PhDs Where do you get this from?
  - whimsicalism 3y ago
    https://www.piie.com/sites/default/files/documents/wp22-4.pdf https://www.piie.com/sites/default/files/documents/wp22-4.pd... See educational background of humanities PhDs, see also the proportion of international students from developing nations like China or India in each department. It’s also just been obviously true from my anecdotal interactions with many PhD students at Harvard.
    - lapcat 3y ago
      Offhand, there are several problems with this: 1) This is only looking at PhD recipients, not all grad students. (PhD completion rates can be low.) 2) It's questionable to proxy socioeconomic background from educational attainment of the parents, especially when we're talking about the humanities. I haven't read the document fully yet; does it even say whether or not humanities PhDs tend to come from humanities parents? I have a Masters in philosophy, which wouldn't even get me a job in a coffee shop. At best, a humanities PhD gets you a professorship, and humanities professors are not particularly affluent compared to people in say, business or tech. You're probably better off with a BS in CompSci than with any humanities degree. Not to mention that in general, STEM grad students tend to be vastly better funded in school than humanities grad students.
      - whimsicalism 3y ago
        > This is only looking at PhD recipients, not all grad students. Which was my original claim? > It's questionable to proxy socioeconomic background from educational attainment of the parents I agree it is not ironclad, but it jives with both my anecdotal experience and also most of the stats I can find. > Not to mention that in general, STEM grad students tend to be vastly better funded in school than humanities grad students Which is my precise point? And irrelevant to lethe familial background of PhDs
        lapcat 3y ago
        >> This is only looking at PhD recipients, not all grad students. > Which was my original claim? But the subject is grad student salaries, and grad students by definition do not yet have a PhD, or else they wouldn't be students anymore and wouldn't get grad student salaries. >> Not to mention that in general, STEM grad students tend to be vastly better funded in school than humanities grad students > Which is my precise point? And irrelevant to lethe familial background of PhDs I don't understand how you can now say familial background is irrelevant when you're the very one who attempted to make it relevant? Your argument seemed to be that "any efforts to raise salaries should be careful to ensure that salary money isn't simply being redirected from STEM PhDs to humanities PhDs" because "most humanities PhDs typically come from more affluent backgrounds than STEM PhDs".
        whimsicalism 3y ago
        I see. In the absence of evidence otherwise. I would assume the background of PhD graduates is roughly similar to PhD students, although that might not be true. > I don't understand how you can now say familial background is irrelevant I am saying that the funding of current PhD students is irrelevant to whether their family is wealthy, not that familial background is irrelevant.
        lapcat 3y ago
        > I am saying that the funding of current PhD students is irrelevant to whether their family is wealthy, not that familial background is irrelevant. I don't think it's correct to equate having a graduate degree with being "wealthy", especially depending on which degree it is specifically. In any case, graduate student salaries aren't means-tested at all, and the weird form of backdoor familial means-testing that you're suggesting, i.e., don't raise the funding for humanities students, seems quite bizarre and extremely imperfect. Unless you're claiming, absurdly, that there are no STEM grad students of affluent background, I don't see that this form of means-testing has any place in union negotiations. The document you cited just shows averages, but individual graduate students of all fields clearly have parents with every different kind of educational attainment. On a personal note, I was a grad student in the humanities, neither of my parents has a college degree, and they certainly weren't affluent. Moreover, they didn't pay a dime for my grad school. I would have loved if there were means testing, because I would have benefitted, but it didn't exist. So it's difficult to avoid taking this personally when humanities students are wrongly stereotyped.
  - noobermin 3y ago
    Coming from a poor background, you're likely to get a degree with something with a sure career path and one that will make money, assuming you're bright enough to pursue a PhD.
    - WWLink 3y ago
      In a way, that's a good way to gatekeep the humanities majors, isn't it? I noticed the same thing when I was in college though. Those of us trying to climb the ladder mostly took engineering or science things lol.
- gotoeleven 3y ago
  I also like unions except for their entirely foreseeable consequences.
  - renewiltord 3y ago
    The thing about unions is that everyone always says "they don't have to be that way; look at the Screen Actors' Guild" and then instead of that, you get something that flattens all pay and protects the incompetent. It looks a bit like it doesn't have to be that way, it just is.
    - whimsicalism 3y ago
      fwiw I don’t think the HGSU has really flattened pay (yet) and their most important contribution was getting independent arbitration for students that were being harassed by professors (rather than a committee of other professors), which seems valuable.
      - hiddencost 3y ago
        This is straight up ahistoric.
        whimsicalism 3y ago
        Maybe I am misinformed (I have been uninvolved since 2020), but substantive criticism is appreciated :)
- noobermin 3y ago
  Aren't STEM PhDs usually paid for from grants? Are things different at Harvard? I got my degree from a state school. If they're paid from grants there's no zero sum game like that unless you're just talking about money from TA'ing. Is there a general RA pool, and at that, one that isn't department centered but is across the whole graduate school?
  - whimsicalism 3y ago
    I do not think that Harvard PhDs are paid exclusively through grants, TA and RA money + stipend make up a substantial proportion of their pay and the grants usually cover tuition. I could be wrong however
  - emmelaich 3y ago
    Is some of the grant money taken for 'administration' though? Famously djb complained about this at uic though apparently it has improved. http://cr.yp.to/uic.html http://cr.yp.to/uic.html
    - noobermin 3y ago
      It is a standard practice and near robbery, yes. That doesn't explain the zero sum game suggested in the parent comment.
  - tnecniv 3y ago
    The issue is how departments are structured. Generally, every grad student is paid by a grant or fellowship of some sorts. However, how that actually works out varies a lot by discipline. In STEM, well, really hard science, engineering, and CS, you and your advisor are tightly coupled. PhD students do the bulk of the hard work, while the advisor acts as some combination of directing long-term research thrusts, managing the capabilities of the lab (both in terms of human and equipment), and a veteran with expertise that can chip in when they have time. How that balance shakes out depends on the advisor, field, and group members, but they often do some amount of each in order of appearance. Most PhD students I have known are thus funded through grants their advisor wrote with little to no involvement from students directly (the second most common source is those funded through a few programs like the NSF GRFP, but in the cases I know, their advisor had money lined up for them in the event they weren’t awarded the grant). The application and reward both break down funding in terms of students, equipment, discretionary funds, etc., and are often large enough to fund multiple students. Even if a professor didn’t write much of an article or do the bench work, their name goes on there for guiding the overall project and procuring the funds (and hopefully at least giving revisions on manuscript drafts). Very big schools (e.g., some in California) have high drop out rates because they admit more students than professors can fund and the weaker ones get cut because they can’t find an advisor to take them after their first year or two. Smaller schools tend to have professors more involved up front and admit students only if at least one professor is interested in them joining their group, so the filtering happens much earlier. In the humanities and, from what I’ve heard by friends in the social sciences the dynamic is very different. Your “advisor” and you interact very infrequently because there is no research group being run. They might give you some high level advice but that’s it unless you seek more out. Your money, then, needs to come from an external fellowship to which you applied or a departmental fellowship. I know at least one department whose students are all funded via the interest on a massive donation made decades ago for this explicit purpose (but only for students in that department, the money can’t be used elsewhere). For those students in that prestigious department, life is easy. For students at famous schools, the department often has more fellowship funding and they are more competitive when seeking external grants For students at less famous places, resources are scarce.
- politelemon 3y ago
  Sounds like they've successfully created "class divisions" to successfully distract from themselves. I had a quick search and they had a 400mn surplus last year.
  - whimsicalism 3y ago
    A surplus that goes to funding financial aid, future academic expenses, and ensuring the security of the university. They have also had to cut spending on students and faculty to ensure this surplus.
  - egberts1 3y ago
    Surplus is where the monthly interest income is being used for their budget, for that is the best way to ensure financial stability.
mutant_glofish 3y ago
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37099780 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37099780 Archived version: https://archive.is/KLjzg https://archive.is/KLjzg
somethoughts 3y ago
Actually that's pretty sketchy speaking off the cuff as a US tax payer. It's distasteful that Walmart likely has many employees on SNAP but at least they make up for it by paying corporate income taxes (although perhaps this is debatable as to what degree). But Harvard is a non-profit and therefore is not even paying its share into the system but benefitting fairly directly from the SNAP program.
- whimsicalism 3y ago
  But don’t we have interest in directly subsidizing research? This is just another avenue.
  - sinistersnare 3y ago
    I'd rather students can feed themselves with dignity than subsidize the education industry.
    - whimsicalism 3y ago
      But the salaries are subsidized too. “the education industry” -> You mean research industry?
  - kadoban 3y ago
    Subsidizing research? Yes. Doing it by making it economically favorable that many people doing that research live in poverty, while the rewards for that research go to the rich? No.
    - whimsicalism 3y ago
      It’s a subsidy either way, the stuff about the rewards going to the rich seem to be rhetoric that isn’t super relevant to the issue at hand.
      - kadoban 3y ago
sfblah 3y ago
I do think it's time to have a conversation about the maximum assets a non-profit can have under the control of a single group of individuals. I think a reasonable maximum is $1B, beyond which entities would be taxed.
- whimsicalism 3y ago
  Why? Also what do you mean by single group of individuals.
- yieldcrv 3y ago
  I’d prefer more people understood the tax code because the government offers many options to never boost its revenue and is literally telling people where to put their energy, spelled out in its tax literature
- emmelaich 3y ago
  Probably should be a limit to a single individuals remuneration too. If the board and the CEO collude, they can set the CEO's salary at the expected difference between revenue and expenses. Result: no profit!
  - yieldcrv 3y ago
    The CEO pays tax on that salary. The nation's nearly highest taxes in fact.
tzs 3y ago
I don't see anything about how many grad students might qualify for SNAP. Based on the requirements for SNAP I'd guess that it is a very low fraction. According to the Massachusetts SNAP eligibility site, a grad student earning the minimum Harvard grad student salary would have to be in a household of 3 people with neither of the other 2 working to qualify for SNAP. If your household has you and one other person working, and that other person is working half time earning Massachusetts minimum wage, you'd need to have 4 people in your household. The the other person who works is working full time you'd need to have 5 people in your household. If both people working are Harvard grad students they would need 6 people in their household to qualify.
- HDMI_Cable 3y ago
  > According to the Massachusetts SNAP eligibility site, a grad student earning the minimum Harvard grad student salary would have to be in a household of 3 people with neither of the other 2 working to qualify for SNAP. So a grad student with two kids? Or a spouse on mat leave + a newborn? Or two elderly parents? Pretty much any Harvard grad student that isn't single or cohabitating with a fully-employed person would fit under this criterion.

35 points by hammock 3y ago

I am very pro-union and specifically the HGSU, but I think that any efforts to raise salaries should be careful to ensure that salary money isn't simply being redirected from STEM PhDs to humanities PhDs. Far too often, strict cross-department salary bands often end up doing exactly that, which is ironic given that most humanities PhDs typically come from more affluent backgrounds than STEM PhDs (at least at Harvard). It breaks trust with the STEM departments - and is a large part of the reason graduate student unions, including the HGSU, typically do not win the majority of the vote from STEM department graduate students.

lapcat 3y ago
> given that most humanities PhDs typically come from more affluent backgrounds than STEM PhDs Where do you get this from?
- whimsicalism 3y ago
  https://www.piie.com/sites/default/files/documents/wp22-4.pdf https://www.piie.com/sites/default/files/documents/wp22-4.pd... See educational background of humanities PhDs, see also the proportion of international students from developing nations like China or India in each department. It’s also just been obviously true from my anecdotal interactions with many PhD students at Harvard.
  - lapcat 3y ago
    Offhand, there are several problems with this: 1) This is only looking at PhD recipients, not all grad students. (PhD completion rates can be low.) 2) It's questionable to proxy socioeconomic background from educational attainment of the parents, especially when we're talking about the humanities. I haven't read the document fully yet; does it even say whether or not humanities PhDs tend to come from humanities parents? I have a Masters in philosophy, which wouldn't even get me a job in a coffee shop. At best, a humanities PhD gets you a professorship, and humanities professors are not particularly affluent compared to people in say, business or tech. You're probably better off with a BS in CompSci than with any humanities degree. Not to mention that in general, STEM grad students tend to be vastly better funded in school than humanities grad students.
    - whimsicalism 3y ago
      > This is only looking at PhD recipients, not all grad students. Which was my original claim? > It's questionable to proxy socioeconomic background from educational attainment of the parents I agree it is not ironclad, but it jives with both my anecdotal experience and also most of the stats I can find. > Not to mention that in general, STEM grad students tend to be vastly better funded in school than humanities grad students Which is my precise point? And irrelevant to lethe familial background of PhDs
      - lapcat 3y ago
        >> This is only looking at PhD recipients, not all grad students. > Which was my original claim? But the subject is grad student salaries, and grad students by definition do not yet have a PhD, or else they wouldn't be students anymore and wouldn't get grad student salaries. >> Not to mention that in general, STEM grad students tend to be vastly better funded in school than humanities grad students > Which is my precise point? And irrelevant to lethe familial background of PhDs I don't understand how you can now say familial background is irrelevant when you're the very one who attempted to make it relevant? Your argument seemed to be that "any efforts to raise salaries should be careful to ensure that salary money isn't simply being redirected from STEM PhDs to humanities PhDs" because "most humanities PhDs typically come from more affluent backgrounds than STEM PhDs".
        whimsicalism 3y ago
        I see. In the absence of evidence otherwise. I would assume the background of PhD graduates is roughly similar to PhD students, although that might not be true. > I don't understand how you can now say familial background is irrelevant I am saying that the funding of current PhD students is irrelevant to whether their family is wealthy, not that familial background is irrelevant.
        lapcat 3y ago
        > I am saying that the funding of current PhD students is irrelevant to whether their family is wealthy, not that familial background is irrelevant. I don't think it's correct to equate having a graduate degree with being "wealthy", especially depending on which degree it is specifically. In any case, graduate student salaries aren't means-tested at all, and the weird form of backdoor familial means-testing that you're suggesting, i.e., don't raise the funding for humanities students, seems quite bizarre and extremely imperfect. Unless you're claiming, absurdly, that there are no STEM grad students of affluent background, I don't see that this form of means-testing has any place in union negotiations. The document you cited just shows averages, but individual graduate students of all fields clearly have parents with every different kind of educational attainment. On a personal note, I was a grad student in the humanities, neither of my parents has a college degree, and they certainly weren't affluent. Moreover, they didn't pay a dime for my grad school. I would have loved if there were means testing, because I would have benefitted, but it didn't exist. So it's difficult to avoid taking this personally when humanities students are wrongly stereotyped.
- noobermin 3y ago
  Coming from a poor background, you're likely to get a degree with something with a sure career path and one that will make money, assuming you're bright enough to pursue a PhD.
  - WWLink 3y ago
    In a way, that's a good way to gatekeep the humanities majors, isn't it? I noticed the same thing when I was in college though. Those of us trying to climb the ladder mostly took engineering or science things lol.
gotoeleven 3y ago
I also like unions except for their entirely foreseeable consequences.
- renewiltord 3y ago
  The thing about unions is that everyone always says "they don't have to be that way; look at the Screen Actors' Guild" and then instead of that, you get something that flattens all pay and protects the incompetent. It looks a bit like it doesn't have to be that way, it just is.
  - whimsicalism 3y ago
    fwiw I don’t think the HGSU has really flattened pay (yet) and their most important contribution was getting independent arbitration for students that were being harassed by professors (rather than a committee of other professors), which seems valuable.
    - hiddencost 3y ago
      This is straight up ahistoric.
      - whimsicalism 3y ago
        Maybe I am misinformed (I have been uninvolved since 2020), but substantive criticism is appreciated :)
noobermin 3y ago
Aren't STEM PhDs usually paid for from grants? Are things different at Harvard? I got my degree from a state school. If they're paid from grants there's no zero sum game like that unless you're just talking about money from TA'ing. Is there a general RA pool, and at that, one that isn't department centered but is across the whole graduate school?
- whimsicalism 3y ago
  I do not think that Harvard PhDs are paid exclusively through grants, TA and RA money + stipend make up a substantial proportion of their pay and the grants usually cover tuition. I could be wrong however
- emmelaich 3y ago
  Is some of the grant money taken for 'administration' though? Famously djb complained about this at uic though apparently it has improved. http://cr.yp.to/uic.html http://cr.yp.to/uic.html
  - noobermin 3y ago
    It is a standard practice and near robbery, yes. That doesn't explain the zero sum game suggested in the parent comment.
- tnecniv 3y ago
  The issue is how departments are structured. Generally, every grad student is paid by a grant or fellowship of some sorts. However, how that actually works out varies a lot by discipline. In STEM, well, really hard science, engineering, and CS, you and your advisor are tightly coupled. PhD students do the bulk of the hard work, while the advisor acts as some combination of directing long-term research thrusts, managing the capabilities of the lab (both in terms of human and equipment), and a veteran with expertise that can chip in when they have time. How that balance shakes out depends on the advisor, field, and group members, but they often do some amount of each in order of appearance. Most PhD students I have known are thus funded through grants their advisor wrote with little to no involvement from students directly (the second most common source is those funded through a few programs like the NSF GRFP, but in the cases I know, their advisor had money lined up for them in the event they weren’t awarded the grant). The application and reward both break down funding in terms of students, equipment, discretionary funds, etc., and are often large enough to fund multiple students. Even if a professor didn’t write much of an article or do the bench work, their name goes on there for guiding the overall project and procuring the funds (and hopefully at least giving revisions on manuscript drafts). Very big schools (e.g., some in California) have high drop out rates because they admit more students than professors can fund and the weaker ones get cut because they can’t find an advisor to take them after their first year or two. Smaller schools tend to have professors more involved up front and admit students only if at least one professor is interested in them joining their group, so the filtering happens much earlier. In the humanities and, from what I’ve heard by friends in the social sciences the dynamic is very different. Your “advisor” and you interact very infrequently because there is no research group being run. They might give you some high level advice but that’s it unless you seek more out. Your money, then, needs to come from an external fellowship to which you applied or a departmental fellowship. I know at least one department whose students are all funded via the interest on a massive donation made decades ago for this explicit purpose (but only for students in that department, the money can’t be used elsewhere). For those students in that prestigious department, life is easy. For students at famous schools, the department often has more fellowship funding and they are more competitive when seeking external grants For students at less famous places, resources are scarce.
politelemon 3y ago
Sounds like they've successfully created "class divisions" to successfully distract from themselves. I had a quick search and they had a 400mn surplus last year.
- whimsicalism 3y ago
  A surplus that goes to funding financial aid, future academic expenses, and ensuring the security of the university. They have also had to cut spending on students and faculty to ensure this surplus.
- egberts1 3y ago
  Surplus is where the monthly interest income is being used for their budget, for that is the best way to ensure financial stability.

mutant_glofish 3y ago

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37099780 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37099780 Archived version: https://archive.is/KLjzg https://archive.is/KLjzg

somethoughts 3y ago

Actually that's pretty sketchy speaking off the cuff as a US tax payer. It's distasteful that Walmart likely has many employees on SNAP but at least they make up for it by paying corporate income taxes (although perhaps this is debatable as to what degree). But Harvard is a non-profit and therefore is not even paying its share into the system but benefitting fairly directly from the SNAP program.

whimsicalism 3y ago
But don’t we have interest in directly subsidizing research? This is just another avenue.
- sinistersnare 3y ago
  I'd rather students can feed themselves with dignity than subsidize the education industry.
  - whimsicalism 3y ago
    But the salaries are subsidized too. “the education industry” -> You mean research industry?
- kadoban 3y ago
  Subsidizing research? Yes. Doing it by making it economically favorable that many people doing that research live in poverty, while the rewards for that research go to the rich? No.
  - whimsicalism 3y ago
    It’s a subsidy either way, the stuff about the rewards going to the rich seem to be rhetoric that isn’t super relevant to the issue at hand.
    - kadoban 3y ago

sfblah 3y ago

I do think it's time to have a conversation about the maximum assets a non-profit can have under the control of a single group of individuals. I think a reasonable maximum is $1B, beyond which entities would be taxed.

whimsicalism 3y ago
Why? Also what do you mean by single group of individuals.
yieldcrv 3y ago
I’d prefer more people understood the tax code because the government offers many options to never boost its revenue and is literally telling people where to put their energy, spelled out in its tax literature
emmelaich 3y ago
Probably should be a limit to a single individuals remuneration too. If the board and the CEO collude, they can set the CEO's salary at the expected difference between revenue and expenses. Result: no profit!
- yieldcrv 3y ago
  The CEO pays tax on that salary. The nation's nearly highest taxes in fact.

tzs 3y ago

I don't see anything about how many grad students might qualify for SNAP. Based on the requirements for SNAP I'd guess that it is a very low fraction. According to the Massachusetts SNAP eligibility site, a grad student earning the minimum Harvard grad student salary would have to be in a household of 3 people with neither of the other 2 working to qualify for SNAP. If your household has you and one other person working, and that other person is working half time earning Massachusetts minimum wage, you'd need to have 4 people in your household. The the other person who works is working full time you'd need to have 5 people in your household. If both people working are Harvard grad students they would need 6 people in their household to qualify.

HDMI_Cable 3y ago
> According to the Massachusetts SNAP eligibility site, a grad student earning the minimum Harvard grad student salary would have to be in a household of 3 people with neither of the other 2 working to qualify for SNAP. So a grad student with two kids? Or a spouse on mat leave + a newborn? Or two elderly parents? Pretty much any Harvard grad student that isn't single or cohabitating with a fully-employed person would fit under this criterion.