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I don't think universities deliberately take advantage of either students or professors. I think the people who run them are for the most part genuinely ideali

by pg 18y ago

I don't think universities deliberately take advantage of either students or professors. I think the people who run them are for the most part genuinely idealistic. The problem is that universities (through lack of competition and inelasticity of demand) got to be terribly inefficient, and thus gradually and unintentionally ended up in a position where they were taking advantage of people.

timr 18y ago
I agree that it's not a conscious process, but I don't know if it's a matter of efficiency -- a lot of high-value work gets done cheaply at Universities. There's plenty of competition for grant money, too. The inelasticity seems to be on the labor side of the equation -- no matter how badly students and post-docs are treated, they keep coming back for more. My intuition is that stricter limits on fellowships (i.e. at most X years of government funding; more like the UK system), would provide less perverse incentives for everyone. But any politician to propose such a move would be pilloried for opposing science.
RK 18y ago
I was once told directly by some faculty when I was in grad school that programs in the natural sciences will often intend for a 30-50% dropout rate for grad students, because they need lots of TA's for large first year undergrad classes, but don't have funds/means to graduate all of those students as PhD's. This wasn't along the lines of plan for such a dropout rate, but actively desire it. It was a pretty disheartening thing to hear. I think most faculty would like to be able to graduate all of the students, but they also see it as an additional way of weeding out the bottom half of the class. I also discussed this with some other professors in chemical engineering (a much smaller program, with very few TA's) and they told me that their dropout rate was essentially zero.
- madcaptenor 18y ago
  From what I understand, this sort of thing is common in departments as diverse as English, math, and various foreign languages; the reason is that those departments tend to teach a lot of low-level courses, so they need a lot of TAs. (I'm a PhD student in a math department, and my department doesn't do what you describe, but some of the departments I considered were like that which is why I didn't ultimately choose them.)
  - time_management 18y ago
    What math department? I was in math grad school for a year at UW-Madison.
- pg 18y ago
  That's pretty shocking. What school?
puzzle-out 18y ago
I've just finished a phd in the humanities at oxford (full-funded, took four years to the day), and overall enjoyed the experience (I also used the flexibility of my schedule to get involved in start-ups and recently sold my first one in a modest trade sale). What astounds me about the US system is the amount of time it takes to do a phd - the article said 9 years is not uncommon. Regardless of whether there is or is not demand for humanities phds outside or inside academia, I think 9 years is too long - I mean your going to be a student in your 30s.
- pg 18y ago
  A lot of the reason people take a long time in humanities PhD programs is that they wait in grad school till a job opens up.

by pg 18y ago

timr 18y ago

I agree that it's not a conscious process, but I don't know if it's a matter of efficiency -- a lot of high-value work gets done cheaply at Universities. There's plenty of competition for grant money, too. The inelasticity seems to be on the labor side of the equation -- no matter how badly students and post-docs are treated, they keep coming back for more. My intuition is that stricter limits on fellowships (i.e. at most X years of government funding; more like the UK system), would provide less perverse incentives for everyone. But any politician to propose such a move would be pilloried for opposing science.

RK 18y ago

I was once told directly by some faculty when I was in grad school that programs in the natural sciences will often intend for a 30-50% dropout rate for grad students, because they need lots of TA's for large first year undergrad classes, but don't have funds/means to graduate all of those students as PhD's. This wasn't along the lines of plan for such a dropout rate, but actively desire it. It was a pretty disheartening thing to hear. I think most faculty would like to be able to graduate all of the students, but they also see it as an additional way of weeding out the bottom half of the class. I also discussed this with some other professors in chemical engineering (a much smaller program, with very few TA's) and they told me that their dropout rate was essentially zero.

madcaptenor 18y ago
From what I understand, this sort of thing is common in departments as diverse as English, math, and various foreign languages; the reason is that those departments tend to teach a lot of low-level courses, so they need a lot of TAs. (I'm a PhD student in a math department, and my department doesn't do what you describe, but some of the departments I considered were like that which is why I didn't ultimately choose them.)
- time_management 18y ago
  What math department? I was in math grad school for a year at UW-Madison.
pg 18y ago
That's pretty shocking. What school?

puzzle-out 18y ago

I've just finished a phd in the humanities at oxford (full-funded, took four years to the day), and overall enjoyed the experience (I also used the flexibility of my schedule to get involved in start-ups and recently sold my first one in a modest trade sale). What astounds me about the US system is the amount of time it takes to do a phd - the article said 9 years is not uncommon. Regardless of whether there is or is not demand for humanities phds outside or inside academia, I think 9 years is too long - I mean your going to be a student in your 30s.

pg 18y ago
A lot of the reason people take a long time in humanities PhD programs is that they wait in grad school till a job opens up.