8 ms·

Oxford accused of relying on young academics employed on gig-economy terms

191 points by Michelangelo11 2y ago

atemerev 2y ago
So, you will be taught only by people who do not need to earn money to live. I.e., aristocrats. This is by design, I suppose.
Mistletoe 2y ago
This is the foundation of all academia currently. It’s a nice pyramid scheme while you’ve got it, I just finished witnessing my youngest brother go through it in grad school and his defense is on Tuesday.
- wslh 2y ago
  > It’s a nice pyramid scheme... Before I became aware of criticisms likening universities to pyramid schemes, I recall hearing a Stanford professor managing a large research team say something like: "For this project, we have around 150 PhD students exploring it further in many directions". I was astonished by the sheer scale of their capabilities, especially because I liked the subject and had hoped to explore it as a hobby with just a few like-minded friends.
  - CoastalCoder 2y ago
    I've had similar experiences on a with various ideas for compilers and for C++ debugging. Although I'm my case, the other people were mostly at FAANG companies, rather than academia.
  - AtlasBarfed 2y ago
    And who gets, uh, takes the credit when one of the PhD students "breaks through"?
- GordonAShumway 2y ago
  Yep! Ask any PhD candidate in America how they love those poverty level wages!
  - PrismCrystal 2y ago
    Academia can be criticized as unsustainable as the OP does because the number of graduate students exceeds the number of secure employment positions available after one defends one’s dissertation or does a postdoc. However, the American model of PhD students being impoverished while studying isn’t the only one. In several European countries, the norm is for PhD students to be university employees under contract that receive a pretty standard middle-class salary. In various other countries, decent middle-class funding may have to come from outside the university, but it’s a semi-automatic process for anyone whose research plan was solid enough to get accepted as a PhD student in the first place.
    - MrMcCall 2y ago
      Shouldn't they be paid a decent wage for the teaching, itself?
    - mustafa_pasi 2y ago
      Dude, I went through the European PhD system and it's not as glamorous as you depict it. First of all, you forgot to mention that the norm is to give contracts of 50% to 75% FTE. Secondly the hours worked and the vacation time is a complete forgery that you are basically forced to sign. Although the contract is nice on paper, in practice the norms and expectations are different. Thirdly, unlike in the US, in Europe you often don't have a graduate school (although it is a thing) so you are in a very vulnerable situation where you invest 3 to 5 years of the best years of your life and during those years your graduation is completely at the mercy of that supervisor.
      - PrismCrystal 2y ago
        There is no “European PhD system” in terms of funding, or the duties expected of a PhD student other than the production of the dissertation. Different countries around the world do it differently, and that is true even within Europe.
bloomingkales 2y ago
Higher education doesn’t want to shed its clergy status. It’s like they can’t figure out if education is truly a pure pursuit or just this crazy godly thing that is priceless but somehow has this exorbitant real world price that the clergy seems to value … They sell indulgences at this point, and I don’t think it’s a false analogy. Holier than thou institution where everyone must pay the price for their product or be doomed as a person. How do you question the price of something that’s equated to a gift from god or certainly using the same language - more or less.
- MrMcCall 2y ago
  Well put, and that's a good part of the reason they're going the way of the Catholic Church. That said, I'd call it an 'aristocracy' instead. But, tomato/tomahto, ya know?
  - graemep 2y ago
    Both British universities (I do not know about globally) and the Catholic Church have expanded rapidly in recent decades.
    - myroon5 2y ago
      probably American: https://www.statista.com/statistics/235406/undergraduate-enrollment-in-us-universities/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/235406/undergraduate-enr... https://www.qualityinfo.org/-/college-enrollment-among-recent-high-school-grads-declined-again-in-2023-1 https://www.qualityinfo.org/-/college-enrollment-among-recen... https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2013/03/13/strong-catholic-identity-at-a-four-decade-low-in-us/ https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2013/03/13/strong-catho... https://www.graphsaboutreligion.com/p/the-catholic-church-is-in-trouble https://www.graphsaboutreligion.com/p/the-catholic-church-is... The Catholic Church is similarly struggling in the UK: https://faithsurvey.co.uk/blog/church-attendance-in-england-scotland-and-wales-1980-2015/ https://faithsurvey.co.uk/blog/church-attendance-in-england-...
    - ta988 2y ago
      Like a star near the end of its life.
vr46 2y ago
I took a position at a prominent London university to teach one of their courses and I did it for the love of it, because it was less than two days contracting for an entire term of lecturing and marking. Forget that coming into college to teach was effectively an entire day of my time for a two hour lecture or seminar, I think I was paid by the hour. This practice goes on everywhere and the real losers are the students/customers.
cherryteastain 2y ago
All UK universities do this. Not necessarily a bad thing unlike how the article portrays it. PhD students (and depending on the institution, postdocs) in the UK get a stipend that has no mandated teaching hours. Teaching allows PhD students to earn some extra income within the university. We certainly still have a compensation problem in academia. Bright STEM PhD grads don't want to earn £30-40k as a postdoc when earning £150k+ in big tech or finance isn't unusual. However, PhD students earning a little side income by marking lab reports or programming assessments isn't necessarily bad.
- helsinkiandrew 2y ago
  Was about to say the same. Haven't PhD students usually done tutorials and supervised labs to undergraduates for the extra cash. Certainly was the case in my electronics undergrad course a few decades ago. > in 2023-24 one in five tutorials (20%) were taught by hourly-paid tutors – typically PhD students or academics at the start of their career.
  - njjnjj 2y ago
    Depends on the university. 25 years ago now but a number of the PhD students I worked with had mummy and daddy paying for everything. One enterprising guy had a side business selling cocaine. Most were slumming it in house shares and taking on casual work. Only the blessed had teaching appointments. I was blessed until I realised it was a curse.
    - helsinkiandrew 2y ago
      I meant that most labs and tutorials were run by PhD students, not that most PhD students had jobs running labs and tutorials.
- burnt-resistor 2y ago
  Living conditions are worse for non-FTEs in America where there isn't the NHS and housing is more expensive. By contrast, Stanford's FTEs c. 2004 received such benefits as: - Choices from 9 health insurance plans - Vision, dental, mental healthcare, and long-term care - Employer-matched retirement contribution 1:1 up to 5% of salary, plus free 4% of salary - Access to then closed mutual funds like Fidelity Magellan - Secret discounts like on luxury vehicles - Credit union with 0% VISA debit foreign currency exchange rate - 50% discount on tuition after being an FTE for 10 years
motohagiography 2y ago
what do the people who make and manage money learn, and could clever people be taught this skill too? maybe instead of spending their afternoons on the golf course like wealth managers they could pursue research and teach. how difficult could it be?
- graemep 2y ago
  Because money does not come out of nowhere. A lot of people make money from zero sum games, or from things with a small positive sum socially (e.g. selling something for a little bit less than someone else).
  - motohagiography 2y ago
    not with that attitude. how much time does it take to manage a portfolio? people who work for charities do it, many of them part time. if professors were given responsibility to manage some portion of the endowment and paid as a percentage on the return they generated from it they could do a lot better. I was raised in this institutional class that had contempt for "trade" and it's a cover for meekness, envy, and a smallness that justifies some pretty terrible worldviews. I love brilliant people, but someone with the mind to be an academic is only ever poor becuause of their own fatuous snootery. they do it to themselves and they moralize their envy by blaming "systemic" factors while affecting an unworldly out of touchness that makes them repellent to anyone with responsibility. perhaps I have a bit of a chip from being outside of it, but having managed some personal success in spite of it, the problems of bureaucracy are the problems of children to me.
kleiba 2y ago
What do you mean "accused of"? This has been the official and government-wanted policy for years in some countries, so much so that there are specific laws that ensure young academics by default cannot expect a long-term career in academia.
- xhkkffbf 2y ago
  Yup. They deliberately overload the front of the pipeline. It can attract smart people from overseas and also save plenty of money. They usually openly argue that the university's job is training for the rest of the economy so it only makes sense that they don't have enough long-term positions for people.
burnt-resistor 2y ago
A reader may also be "shocked and appalled" that research universities like Stanford abused employees by keeping them "part-time" for years at a time to cheat them out of benefits received by FTEs.
- MrMcCall 2y ago
  Stanford has a business school, doesn't it?
  - burnt-resistor 2y ago
    Schwab. I worked across from it in the reclaimed basement of Toyon like some sort of hidden Brazil ductwork steampunk menagerie for workers. Their IT department was well-regarded because each department did their own thing, which was inherently efficient in flexibility, control, and service but not in cost of delivery. I was an obsessive control freak, wannabe computer science researcher, and LTT-like PC putter-togetherer masquerading as a Windows sysadmin playing with a $100k budget trying to get barcodes on every single cable, every single asset tagged, inventoried, and reporting basic info 24x7, having everything racked in a real datacenter rather than the housing draw NetBSD "server" desktop going brrrr behind my head, and adopting DR/BCP so that the organization could survive another semi-malicious Microsoft RCE worm or maybe a building fire (the datacenter had FM200).
    - MrMcCall 2y ago
      >> hidden Brazil ductwork steampunk menagerie As a huge fan of William Gibson, that's some lovely writing, my fellow greybeard. >> I was an obsessive control freak There are 'control freaks' and there are the rest of the sea of humanity. Michael Jordan, LeBron James, Einstein, Feynman, ... I like my place in the set of the control freaks of the world. The key is to not ever try to control other people, only our own circumstances, including our own selves.
      - m463 2y ago
        (Brazil wasn't gibson btw) I thought Brazil was weird when I first saw it, but over the years I've overlaid it on reality sort of, and it has matched up quite well. For example, are you DeNiro in real life when you run an adblocker?
rwyinuse 2y ago
It seems that these days academia is mostly garbage for anyone who wants things like money, family or a healthy work-life balance.
- s1artibartfast 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- njjnjj 2y ago
  Throwaway account. Yes that is exactly what happened to me. Figured I'd do a PhD so took a research / part time teaching position after masters. Terrible money, demanding job, knee deep in politics. After about 12 months I said fuck it and went and got a job for 4x the money and a 35 hour week. No regrets.
  - kleiba 2y ago
    How did you get that job? I've read similar stories a couple of times here on HN yet I'm struggling to do the same. My main road block: not really having acquired the right skill set for industry after having focused for year to fine-tune my CV for academic positions. This is now kind of biting me in my rear side: I cannot do the rat wheel of academia any more, am not exactly young any more either, am sort of highly skilled in CS academia but not really suitable for a lot of CS industry positions.
    - njjnjj 2y ago
      I was on electrical engineering side of things. Honestly I looked for companies that had large quantities of engineering lay offs about a year beforehand and tried finding contacts and calling them directly. Turns out there were plenty of departments in the shit and needing hires. Landed a position at a defence company. CS I would have no idea about. I work for a company that does software now but tends not to hire any CS grads.
insane_dreamer 2y ago
is this news? this sounds like every university in the US, which uses underpaid adjuncts to do most of the teaching and underpaid phd candidates and postdocs to do most of the research not saying this is right -- adjuncts and postdocs absolutely need to be paid more commensurately with the value they provide -- but it has been the status quo for a long time; the bigger problem is that it used to be a temporary stepping stone to professorship, whereas now universities are perpetually and increasingly relying on this cheap labor to cut costs, making the path for academia an increasingly tortuous one. It's highly counter productive because who wants to go through all that instead if you can get a job in industry that values you much more? The result is that you don't get the best and brightest educating the next generation, except maybe at a few universities - Oxford, Stanford, Harvard, MIT, etc. - where the prestige itself is enough of a draw.
- stanford_labrat 2y ago
  this is all my opinion as a 3rd year phd candidate who is thoroughly disillusioned. in STEM science there are two types of labor: thinking of experiments to do, and actually doing experiments. doing experiments is high-skill, manual labor. you often work with dangerous materials for crazy hours (some experiments take 10 hours to just do and you have no choice but to work from start to finish) and do tasks that are physically and technically challenging. as such, the fair market wage for this labor is actually pretty high. when i was an employee at Stanford, I was making nearly 80k in salary alone and i had fantastic health, retirement, and vacation benefits. oh, and i had overtime as a union employee to boot. higher institutions realized that they could conveniently circumvent the rightfully high cost of labor to do experiments by hiring "graduate students" who they can pay poverty wages to do the manual scientific labor in exchange for a degree. as a student i am classified as a 20 hour per week worker, 20 hour per week student, and paid 37k a year. to be honest i wouldn't mind this if i actually were allowed to work 20 hours per week but this is not the case. the expectation, is that you will work 50-60 MINIMUM. and don't even get me started on postdocs. the PhD market has become so oversaturated due to the over-training of PhDs that to be competitive you must do an additional 5-8 years of "training" as a postdoc (again at poverty wages around 45-50k) before you get the opportunity to APPLY faculty positions. this has had some predictable but unfortunate consequences. for one, institutions no longer select for the best and brightest. their number 1 criteria for offers of admission is "ability to finish the phd" aka willingness to be subject to these labor conditions for 4-7 years. of course you do need a minimum level of intellectual ability to get there, but trust me when i say this, the bar is low. and academia has suffered because of it imo. prestigious institutions get by as you mentioned by having their pick of the smartest AND hard working.
dariosalvi78 2y ago
was doing exactly that a few years ago as Postdoc at Oxford. Yes, the pay is very low, but those who do that (PhD students and Postdocs) do it to get some valuable teaching experience more than for the money. The amount of hours they give for such temporary assignemnts is very little per individual, or at least that's what I saw among my colleagues.
HPsquared 2y ago
Universities are basically farms these days. They harvest funding from the research councils. Similar working practices and economic factors! Edit: I mean the research portion of course. The teaching part is more of a classic multi-level marketing scheme.
- blitzar 2y ago
  Teaching is a loss leader for universities, if they could get rid of it they would.
blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
I’ve never understood how universities charge so much and spend so much when all the teaching is done by grad students for low pay. Seems like this is a phenomenon in both North America and Europe.

So, you will be taught only by people who do not need to earn money to live. I.e., aristocrats. This is by design, I suppose.

Mistletoe 2y ago

This is the foundation of all academia currently. It’s a nice pyramid scheme while you’ve got it, I just finished witnessing my youngest brother go through it in grad school and his defense is on Tuesday.

wslh 2y ago
> It’s a nice pyramid scheme... Before I became aware of criticisms likening universities to pyramid schemes, I recall hearing a Stanford professor managing a large research team say something like: "For this project, we have around 150 PhD students exploring it further in many directions". I was astonished by the sheer scale of their capabilities, especially because I liked the subject and had hoped to explore it as a hobby with just a few like-minded friends.
- CoastalCoder 2y ago
  I've had similar experiences on a with various ideas for compilers and for C++ debugging. Although I'm my case, the other people were mostly at FAANG companies, rather than academia.
- AtlasBarfed 2y ago
  And who gets, uh, takes the credit when one of the PhD students "breaks through"?
GordonAShumway 2y ago
Yep! Ask any PhD candidate in America how they love those poverty level wages!
- PrismCrystal 2y ago
  Academia can be criticized as unsustainable as the OP does because the number of graduate students exceeds the number of secure employment positions available after one defends one’s dissertation or does a postdoc. However, the American model of PhD students being impoverished while studying isn’t the only one. In several European countries, the norm is for PhD students to be university employees under contract that receive a pretty standard middle-class salary. In various other countries, decent middle-class funding may have to come from outside the university, but it’s a semi-automatic process for anyone whose research plan was solid enough to get accepted as a PhD student in the first place.
  - MrMcCall 2y ago
    Shouldn't they be paid a decent wage for the teaching, itself?
  - mustafa_pasi 2y ago
    Dude, I went through the European PhD system and it's not as glamorous as you depict it. First of all, you forgot to mention that the norm is to give contracts of 50% to 75% FTE. Secondly the hours worked and the vacation time is a complete forgery that you are basically forced to sign. Although the contract is nice on paper, in practice the norms and expectations are different. Thirdly, unlike in the US, in Europe you often don't have a graduate school (although it is a thing) so you are in a very vulnerable situation where you invest 3 to 5 years of the best years of your life and during those years your graduation is completely at the mercy of that supervisor.
    - PrismCrystal 2y ago
      There is no “European PhD system” in terms of funding, or the duties expected of a PhD student other than the production of the dissertation. Different countries around the world do it differently, and that is true even within Europe.

bloomingkales 2y ago

Higher education doesn’t want to shed its clergy status. It’s like they can’t figure out if education is truly a pure pursuit or just this crazy godly thing that is priceless but somehow has this exorbitant real world price that the clergy seems to value … They sell indulgences at this point, and I don’t think it’s a false analogy. Holier than thou institution where everyone must pay the price for their product or be doomed as a person. How do you question the price of something that’s equated to a gift from god or certainly using the same language - more or less.

MrMcCall 2y ago
Well put, and that's a good part of the reason they're going the way of the Catholic Church. That said, I'd call it an 'aristocracy' instead. But, tomato/tomahto, ya know?
- graemep 2y ago
  Both British universities (I do not know about globally) and the Catholic Church have expanded rapidly in recent decades.
  - myroon5 2y ago
    probably American: https://www.statista.com/statistics/235406/undergraduate-enrollment-in-us-universities/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/235406/undergraduate-enr... https://www.qualityinfo.org/-/college-enrollment-among-recent-high-school-grads-declined-again-in-2023-1 https://www.qualityinfo.org/-/college-enrollment-among-recen... https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2013/03/13/strong-catholic-identity-at-a-four-decade-low-in-us/ https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2013/03/13/strong-catho... https://www.graphsaboutreligion.com/p/the-catholic-church-is-in-trouble https://www.graphsaboutreligion.com/p/the-catholic-church-is... The Catholic Church is similarly struggling in the UK: https://faithsurvey.co.uk/blog/church-attendance-in-england-scotland-and-wales-1980-2015/ https://faithsurvey.co.uk/blog/church-attendance-in-england-...
  - ta988 2y ago
    Like a star near the end of its life.

vr46 2y ago

I took a position at a prominent London university to teach one of their courses and I did it for the love of it, because it was less than two days contracting for an entire term of lecturing and marking. Forget that coming into college to teach was effectively an entire day of my time for a two hour lecture or seminar, I think I was paid by the hour. This practice goes on everywhere and the real losers are the students/customers.

cherryteastain 2y ago

All UK universities do this. Not necessarily a bad thing unlike how the article portrays it. PhD students (and depending on the institution, postdocs) in the UK get a stipend that has no mandated teaching hours. Teaching allows PhD students to earn some extra income within the university. We certainly still have a compensation problem in academia. Bright STEM PhD grads don't want to earn £30-40k as a postdoc when earning £150k+ in big tech or finance isn't unusual. However, PhD students earning a little side income by marking lab reports or programming assessments isn't necessarily bad.

helsinkiandrew 2y ago
Was about to say the same. Haven't PhD students usually done tutorials and supervised labs to undergraduates for the extra cash. Certainly was the case in my electronics undergrad course a few decades ago. > in 2023-24 one in five tutorials (20%) were taught by hourly-paid tutors – typically PhD students or academics at the start of their career.
- njjnjj 2y ago
  Depends on the university. 25 years ago now but a number of the PhD students I worked with had mummy and daddy paying for everything. One enterprising guy had a side business selling cocaine. Most were slumming it in house shares and taking on casual work. Only the blessed had teaching appointments. I was blessed until I realised it was a curse.
  - helsinkiandrew 2y ago
    I meant that most labs and tutorials were run by PhD students, not that most PhD students had jobs running labs and tutorials.
burnt-resistor 2y ago
Living conditions are worse for non-FTEs in America where there isn't the NHS and housing is more expensive. By contrast, Stanford's FTEs c. 2004 received such benefits as: - Choices from 9 health insurance plans - Vision, dental, mental healthcare, and long-term care - Employer-matched retirement contribution 1:1 up to 5% of salary, plus free 4% of salary - Access to then closed mutual funds like Fidelity Magellan - Secret discounts like on luxury vehicles - Credit union with 0% VISA debit foreign currency exchange rate - 50% discount on tuition after being an FTE for 10 years

motohagiography 2y ago

what do the people who make and manage money learn, and could clever people be taught this skill too? maybe instead of spending their afternoons on the golf course like wealth managers they could pursue research and teach. how difficult could it be?

graemep 2y ago
Because money does not come out of nowhere. A lot of people make money from zero sum games, or from things with a small positive sum socially (e.g. selling something for a little bit less than someone else).
- motohagiography 2y ago
  not with that attitude. how much time does it take to manage a portfolio? people who work for charities do it, many of them part time. if professors were given responsibility to manage some portion of the endowment and paid as a percentage on the return they generated from it they could do a lot better. I was raised in this institutional class that had contempt for "trade" and it's a cover for meekness, envy, and a smallness that justifies some pretty terrible worldviews. I love brilliant people, but someone with the mind to be an academic is only ever poor becuause of their own fatuous snootery. they do it to themselves and they moralize their envy by blaming "systemic" factors while affecting an unworldly out of touchness that makes them repellent to anyone with responsibility. perhaps I have a bit of a chip from being outside of it, but having managed some personal success in spite of it, the problems of bureaucracy are the problems of children to me.

kleiba 2y ago

What do you mean "accused of"? This has been the official and government-wanted policy for years in some countries, so much so that there are specific laws that ensure young academics by default cannot expect a long-term career in academia.

xhkkffbf 2y ago
Yup. They deliberately overload the front of the pipeline. It can attract smart people from overseas and also save plenty of money. They usually openly argue that the university's job is training for the rest of the economy so it only makes sense that they don't have enough long-term positions for people.

burnt-resistor 2y ago

A reader may also be "shocked and appalled" that research universities like Stanford abused employees by keeping them "part-time" for years at a time to cheat them out of benefits received by FTEs.

MrMcCall 2y ago
Stanford has a business school, doesn't it?
- burnt-resistor 2y ago
  Schwab. I worked across from it in the reclaimed basement of Toyon like some sort of hidden Brazil ductwork steampunk menagerie for workers. Their IT department was well-regarded because each department did their own thing, which was inherently efficient in flexibility, control, and service but not in cost of delivery. I was an obsessive control freak, wannabe computer science researcher, and LTT-like PC putter-togetherer masquerading as a Windows sysadmin playing with a $100k budget trying to get barcodes on every single cable, every single asset tagged, inventoried, and reporting basic info 24x7, having everything racked in a real datacenter rather than the housing draw NetBSD "server" desktop going brrrr behind my head, and adopting DR/BCP so that the organization could survive another semi-malicious Microsoft RCE worm or maybe a building fire (the datacenter had FM200).
  - MrMcCall 2y ago
    >> hidden Brazil ductwork steampunk menagerie As a huge fan of William Gibson, that's some lovely writing, my fellow greybeard. >> I was an obsessive control freak There are 'control freaks' and there are the rest of the sea of humanity. Michael Jordan, LeBron James, Einstein, Feynman, ... I like my place in the set of the control freaks of the world. The key is to not ever try to control other people, only our own circumstances, including our own selves.
    - m463 2y ago
      (Brazil wasn't gibson btw) I thought Brazil was weird when I first saw it, but over the years I've overlaid it on reality sort of, and it has matched up quite well. For example, are you DeNiro in real life when you run an adblocker?

rwyinuse 2y ago

It seems that these days academia is mostly garbage for anyone who wants things like money, family or a healthy work-life balance.

s1artibartfast 2y ago
[flagged]
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
njjnjj 2y ago
Throwaway account. Yes that is exactly what happened to me. Figured I'd do a PhD so took a research / part time teaching position after masters. Terrible money, demanding job, knee deep in politics. After about 12 months I said fuck it and went and got a job for 4x the money and a 35 hour week. No regrets.
- kleiba 2y ago
  How did you get that job? I've read similar stories a couple of times here on HN yet I'm struggling to do the same. My main road block: not really having acquired the right skill set for industry after having focused for year to fine-tune my CV for academic positions. This is now kind of biting me in my rear side: I cannot do the rat wheel of academia any more, am not exactly young any more either, am sort of highly skilled in CS academia but not really suitable for a lot of CS industry positions.
  - njjnjj 2y ago
    I was on electrical engineering side of things. Honestly I looked for companies that had large quantities of engineering lay offs about a year beforehand and tried finding contacts and calling them directly. Turns out there were plenty of departments in the shit and needing hires. Landed a position at a defence company. CS I would have no idea about. I work for a company that does software now but tends not to hire any CS grads.

insane_dreamer 2y ago

is this news? this sounds like every university in the US, which uses underpaid adjuncts to do most of the teaching and underpaid phd candidates and postdocs to do most of the research not saying this is right -- adjuncts and postdocs absolutely need to be paid more commensurately with the value they provide -- but it has been the status quo for a long time; the bigger problem is that it used to be a temporary stepping stone to professorship, whereas now universities are perpetually and increasingly relying on this cheap labor to cut costs, making the path for academia an increasingly tortuous one. It's highly counter productive because who wants to go through all that instead if you can get a job in industry that values you much more? The result is that you don't get the best and brightest educating the next generation, except maybe at a few universities - Oxford, Stanford, Harvard, MIT, etc. - where the prestige itself is enough of a draw.

stanford_labrat 2y ago
this is all my opinion as a 3rd year phd candidate who is thoroughly disillusioned. in STEM science there are two types of labor: thinking of experiments to do, and actually doing experiments. doing experiments is high-skill, manual labor. you often work with dangerous materials for crazy hours (some experiments take 10 hours to just do and you have no choice but to work from start to finish) and do tasks that are physically and technically challenging. as such, the fair market wage for this labor is actually pretty high. when i was an employee at Stanford, I was making nearly 80k in salary alone and i had fantastic health, retirement, and vacation benefits. oh, and i had overtime as a union employee to boot. higher institutions realized that they could conveniently circumvent the rightfully high cost of labor to do experiments by hiring "graduate students" who they can pay poverty wages to do the manual scientific labor in exchange for a degree. as a student i am classified as a 20 hour per week worker, 20 hour per week student, and paid 37k a year. to be honest i wouldn't mind this if i actually were allowed to work 20 hours per week but this is not the case. the expectation, is that you will work 50-60 MINIMUM. and don't even get me started on postdocs. the PhD market has become so oversaturated due to the over-training of PhDs that to be competitive you must do an additional 5-8 years of "training" as a postdoc (again at poverty wages around 45-50k) before you get the opportunity to APPLY faculty positions. this has had some predictable but unfortunate consequences. for one, institutions no longer select for the best and brightest. their number 1 criteria for offers of admission is "ability to finish the phd" aka willingness to be subject to these labor conditions for 4-7 years. of course you do need a minimum level of intellectual ability to get there, but trust me when i say this, the bar is low. and academia has suffered because of it imo. prestigious institutions get by as you mentioned by having their pick of the smartest AND hard working.

dariosalvi78 2y ago

was doing exactly that a few years ago as Postdoc at Oxford. Yes, the pay is very low, but those who do that (PhD students and Postdocs) do it to get some valuable teaching experience more than for the money. The amount of hours they give for such temporary assignemnts is very little per individual, or at least that's what I saw among my colleagues.

HPsquared 2y ago

Universities are basically farms these days. They harvest funding from the research councils. Similar working practices and economic factors! Edit: I mean the research portion of course. The teaching part is more of a classic multi-level marketing scheme.

blitzar 2y ago
Teaching is a loss leader for universities, if they could get rid of it they would.

blackeyeblitzar 2y ago

I’ve never understood how universities charge so much and spend so much when all the teaching is done by grad students for low pay. Seems like this is a phenomenon in both North America and Europe.