There is a big difference between a Master's level grad student and a PhD level grad student.

I got a Master's in CS, and I mainly took classes and wrote a single thesis that received no funding. I did this at a smaller state (e.g., public) university and I paid for it myself. I was a student. (Side note: I paid for this myself by working the entire time that I pursued my bachelor's and master's degrees, and graduated without any student loans.)

I am in my 4th year now (after completing the Master's) working on my PhD in CS at an R1 research (private) university where I receive a stipend. I do not pay any tuition. I have not taken a class in 2 years, and I will not take a class this year, either. I teach classes. I grade homework and tests. I perform research funded by grants (for organizations who reap the benefits of my research). In my mind, I am not a student; I am an employee (making less than market value). In practice, how is what I am currently doing any different than an employee?

As someone who has been a grad student on both levels, I disagree with your blanket statement. Perhaps some grad students do nothing but take classes, but that is decidedly not the case in any PhD STEM field. I have too many friends in other PhD STEM programs that relate the same experience.

>I am an employee (making less than market value).

Are you accounting for your tuition as part of your benefits for working for the university? I am not trying to be argumentative, I am genuinely curious. In Civil Engineering the grad students, both master's and PhD are under market value even when the tuition is accounted for.

NOTE: I'm not attacking you, although I will use strong language in my answer. I understand the question and the reason for asking it, but I'm answering honestly, with the emotion that this question evokes. Most of us hear the term "tuition credit" and roll our eyes, because it is as empty as a politician's promise.

The tuition "value" is an old salesman technique. "This car is worth this much, but for you we're going to cut that price in half... isn't that a great value?"

It's like saying, "You should thank me because I haven't punched you lately."

I think it's laughable. The way the funding works is this: My advisor writes a grant proposal to some agency. If it is approved, the university gets a 1/3 of the money off the top. The rest goes towards paying for the expenses (servers, software, tools, and my stipend). The school makes money because I'm here, and then they have the gall to say that I receive a tuition "credit" when I'm not taking classes in the first place. Rather, the school reaps the benefits of my labor in terms of immediate financial reward as well as claims of intellectual property over my developments and my publications.

So the university makes money (that they would not get if I were not there doing research). Then they tell me that they would have charged me $X to attend, but out of the goodness of their heart they are going to waive this tuition, and I should consider it as part of my compensation so that I feel better about being paid less than market value. You tell me: should I feel warm and fuzzy about this?

"Tuition credit" is an empty number that they make up. Implying that it is a benefit to me is, frankly, insulting to my intelligence.

The only reason that I am working towards a PhD is because I love teaching, and you have to have a doctorate before you can teach at the university level (although there are exceptions, they are growing exceedingly rare).

Thanks for the very frank response. I agree with you completely. My wife magically became an in-state student when it came time for the University to waive her tuition. funny how that works.

I believe Texas used to grant in state tuition to anyone with funded scholarships over a certain amount. I don't know about your wife's car but that could be the reason why she's in state?

In the last couple years of the PhD, the only class I take is dissertation credit, which is in essence just doing research for my advisor.

"Tuition" in this case is arguably just an administrative device by which the university siphons some money off of my advisor's grants in exchange for the right to employ me as a research assistant.

I guess the other side of the argument is that tuition represents the value of access to my advisor (which apparently fluctuates seasonally, cratering to zero during the summer...), and my advisor('s grant) pays me for my labor, and I (my advisor's grant...) pay(s) the university for access to for my advisor.

These "cost accounting" transactions where schools both charge you and pay you and then net it out are kind of silly. IMO only the net should matter.

If a school "costs" $70k/year but 95% of students get a $50k/year scholarship, are the students really making $50k/year of income? Of course not. The school costs $20k/year; $70 and $50 are both pure fiction.

We should be looking at who actually ends up writing the check and who ends up depositing it, not the stories they tell along the way.

When I was a grad student the only tuition benefits I got were (a) I was allowed to pay in-state tuition instead of out-of-state and (b) I didn't have to pay fees for things like the Athletic department; this ended up being about 25% cheaper than in-state undergrad. On paper, (a) was a huge benefit, but considering I lived there for seven years and paid state and local taxes the whole time, I'm not inclined to be too generous with that accounting.

It's hard to put a market price on something that no one pays for.

I don't think anyone said that graduate students are not students. They just said that if they're teaching and researching for universities, that they are employees, and have employee rights.

Is a university scholarship conditional on your performance? Are you producing anything that's of value to your university as a grad student? Even if you can't draw a clear line between post-grad and grad, that doesn't mean there isn't a line being crossed. A grad student will be working on a thesis for 6 months to a year, a Phd for 4 years! That distinction alone is worth making sure that these people are getting their times worth and their due rights during that time.

I see your point. I am sure that my views are heavily influenced by my experience which was good. I know that I was not supposed to work over 20 hours per week. It did not matter if that was all research or a combination of research and teaching a class. At those hours I was a part-time employee so there was not need for the university to extend any benefits to me. I also made sure that I only worked 20 hours a week. I did not feel any pressure to put in more hours than that.

My wife is currently working on a PhD and she is also only expected to work 20 hours a week. It is very much about the individual program and the department/field.

Wow, I've literally never heard of a PhD where you were only expected to work 20 hours/week. I'd say 50-60 is closer to the norm, especially once you're done with your coursework (usually a year or two into a 5-7 year long PhD).

If you don't mind, what field(s) are you two in?

I can only make sense of what he meant assuming it is 20h/week on top of the "study time" purely for the purpose of the PhD. But then that seems like a lot, I wonder what's in the 20h...

Yes, 20 hours of research time. Her studying time/course load is all on her own time.

In some countries (most universities in France AFAIK for example), "research time" is all of what makes your PhD. You don't have any course (it is changing a little, but seems quite superficially though).

That's because you're required to have a Master's to start a PhD in France, whereas in the US you get into a PhD program right after undergrad. So in the US, you end up taking some classes your first year or two, then you typically take the qualification exam, and then you start writing your dissertation.

I only get PAID for working 20 hours/week.

I am a traffic engineer and she is a hydraulics engineer. Both fields fall under Civil Engineering. Her degree is only a 3 year program (she already has a master's).

> I was able to be fully funded through the research that I performed

You performed work that benefited the institution, in exchange for goods and services. This is employment.

I get what you're saying, and you're not totally wrong. Most importantly, the research is part of your studies so it's not totally fair to label it as 100% employment. But it's also not 100% studies, since the university is getting material benefits from it.

You can argue that the employment angle is an accounting trick. Your research was part of your degree, and you didn't pay tuition and received a stipend. Most people's research is considered half-time employment, for which they are paid an amount roughly equal to the cost of tuition plus living expenses. These are two perspectives on situations that nearly identical on the ground, but are regulated differently. Tax regulations for most, but it sounds like you were also affected by labor regulations.

For my part, I was employed by my college as an undergrad as part of my financial aid package. It only counted for like 5% of my financial aid, because it was near-minimum-wage administrative office work. So I would argue that graduate students are not being treated differently from undergrads. The labor of graduate students has a higher value, and the mix of their financial aid packages reflect this, but the essential rules are the same.

> Graduate students are students.

Yes, they are. This case is not about that, as it is not in dispute.

> They are paying to be in school.

Indeed, they are. And, as such, the are, to that extent, customers of the school, and legally treated as such.

> They may be paying for it with money gained from the University but they are still students.

Here's where the issue is. Yes, they are still students. But, when they are paid by the university for work which benefits the university (such as work as teaching and research assistants), they are also employees.

> Should an undergrad that is on a university scholarship be considered an employee too?

An undergrad on a university (academic, sports are potentially a different issue and the subject of some active controversy right now) scholarship is generally not doing work that benefits the university. OTOH, an undergraduate paid by the university as a tutor (undergrads generally aren't employed as TAs) or research assistant (a role in which undergrads are not uncommonly employed on campus) is, uncontroversially, an employee.

> How are the economic realities of grad school any different from undergrad?

The only difference is that graduate school programs often bundle paid work of the type that would, uncontroversially, make anyone else an employee as part of the requirements of the program. This ruling simply says that bundling a requirement to do paid work on behalf of the university into the requirements of an academic program doesn't magically transform that work into a non-employment relationship.

> Graduate students are students. >> Yes, they are. This case is not about that, as it is not in dispute.

I do actually think this is disputable. As a late stage PhD candidate, I'm not sure that what I do for a living looks anything like "studying". I and my colleagues work on research problems with variable amounts of input from our advisors. We typically don't take classes after 2 years. I work 9-9 6 days a week on building experimental setups and tackling scientific questions that will be beneficial to both my employer (more papers + more grants = more overhead money for the University and more research funding for my advisor) and to my career. Yes, academia doesn't have a commercial output, but what I do isn't that dissimilar to what being a data/research scientist at a small company would do.

People (successfully) pursuing a PhD are almost by definition not "studying" anything; they're advancing the state of the art in their field. To me calling them students seems like a mechanism to depress salaries.

> They are paying to be in school. They may be paying for it with money gained from the University but they are still students.

Seems like some funny-business accounting to me, especially since AFAICT 90%+ Ph.D. students are fully funded.

It's like if you said instead of making 200k [made up number] from working for Facebook, I'm making 300k, but paying 100k for "experience".

> How are the economic realities of grad school any different from undergrad?

Because Ph.D. students almost always have school as their primary income, and undergrads (usually) pay for school and even if they don't pay, are usually supported by their parents or by other jobs. It's very very rare for an undergrad scholarship to pay you enough to live independently.

Also, undergrads don't have a "boss" pressuring them to produce more.

> If you can't afford to go to school, you have a few choices: debt, poverty, or don't go to school.

There is no such thing as not being able to afford to get a Ph.D., unless you have external expenses like a mortgage or needing to support family members. Ph.D.s are funded. Talking about not being able to afford a Ph.D. is like talking about not being able to afford to work for Facebook.

>AFAICT 90%+ Ph.D. students are fully funded

For STEM (or at least a sizable subset thereof).

For the humanities and social sciences, it's significantly less prevalent. See, e.g. http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/01/phd-prog...

Most universities have limits on the number of hours undergraduates can work, and federal work study also limits the number of hours weekly. Graduate students have no such institutional protection. Nearly all undergrads are allowed to remain on their parents health insurance, or are provided health insurance by the university student health. Graduate students often have to purchase their own insurance and are too old to remain on parental plans. Treating graduate students and postdocs as students, rather than workers, also means that many of these people don't receive any kind of institutional retirement planning until they're 30+ years old.

An undergraduate going to school on a university scholarship isn't doing work (such as laboratory research or being a TA or teaching intro classes); these graduate students are.

When the undergrads at my alma mater were TAs or research assistants or whatever, they were absolutely considered part-time employees of the university, in addition to their student status. If they were doing full time work, forty hours of work a week, they would have been considered full time employees. Why should those employees not be subject to the same employment protections afforded to the non-student employees?

In the humanities, 75% of courses are taught by grad students and adjuncts. I think the split between them is about half and half.

An overwhelming percentage of the actual work of higher education is done by grad students and contingent faculty.

This varies by school. In my school, from what I saw, 0% of humanities courses were taught by grad students. I only had an adjunct professor once and it was for a CS class. He wasn't a grad student either.

In engineering, at least at the school I attended, very few classes were taught directly by TA/grad students. Again, just a difference in department/field.

It might actually depend on the school . . . and maybe even the grad program . . .

So what? So if I work at a McDonald's, do I lose my protections as an employee there simply by using some of my income to buy some hamburgers from them, too?

The fact that I'm a customer too doesn't stop me from being an employee simultaneously.

But could McDonald's pay you below minimum wage because the free hamburger you got at lunch was worth $1 an hour?

Well, in many states a restaurant doesn't have to pay minimum wage as long as tips make up the difference. And it certainly is legal to charge restaurant employees for food (it's common to give a discount, and/or offer some items for free).

Granted, McDonald's employees aren't tipped, and unless somebody eats an incredible amount, their food bill won't cut into their paycheck all that much, so McDonald's isn't able to really lower its labor cost all that much. But you could see something similar to the hypothetical at a much classier restaurant.

But by law at the classier restaurant, they have to pay minimum wage.

If minimum wage is $8 an hour and the server has a base wage of $4 an hour.. by law, if they had no tips - they would need to be compensated to go up to minimum wage.

No protection like this for PhD students

Yes, exactly my point. Therefore why should grad students be any different? Is there anything in the labor laws that specifically mentions scientific research and hamburgers and different rules for the two?

My take is that this means that graduate students who have "assistantships" are students and employees. And just like undergrads who have "work-study" jobs at the university, they should be eligible for the protections that come with labor law. An undergraduate scholarship is not comparable because it does not have a work requirement (or when they do have a requirement, it's a separately compensated thing, and the scholarship is not direct compensation for the work).

> Graduate students are students. They are paying to be in school. They may be paying for it with money gained from the University but they are still students. Should an undergrad that is on a university scholarship be considered an employee too?

It depends on what they're doing. If they're expected to help with the teaching, instead of doing their own research, they're absolutely employees.

If they're purely doing research, then I agree this shouldn't be covered by the unionization.

In the life sciences you're never really doing "your own research." The PI has the grant, usually tells you what to do, oversees your results, and puts his/her name in the final spot on the publication. Yet that is "purely doing research."

Graduate students are students. Instructors are employees. A graduate student who is teaching a course is both a student and an employee.

Seems simple enough to me.

This article only covers graduate students who also work for the university. I don't think that's normal for most graduate students.

Don't most graduate students fund themselves using TA/RA budget lines where they are employed by the university? It's the norm everywhere I've seen.

I didn't think so, but maybe I'm wrong. I would have thought that working as a TA or RA would be a big waste of time while you're trying to do good research and complete your PhD.

In many (most?) cases, the research that the RA is "assisting" on is actually their dissertation research. It would be pretty uncommon to work on a totally unrelated project during your RA time.

Also, many universities require a few semesters of TAing, even if the student is fully funded. It's certainly free labor for the school, but it did help me understand what I was doing....

In Computer Science grad students are often paid by the university to perform research e.g. research fellows (RF) or research assistants (RA). This research helps them complete their PhD but it helps the University in terms of grant funding and prestige/influence. It is often mutually beneficial but it is clearly work.

they aren't mutually exclusive. you can be a student (matriculated in classes, studying under the direction of professors) and an employee (teaching classes, assisting in research) at the same time.