Doctoral students at major research universities rarely pay tuition, particularly at a place as highly ranked as UChicago, and usually are given a large enough stipend to live off of (1). Relative to the amount of work, however, the pay is low and the number of faculty jobs on the other end of this is shrinking. Masters students on the other hand typically do not engage in their own independent research nor do they teach their own classes. They are basically treated like undergraduates with a harder course load. The tuitions for Masters degrees (for which few scholarships are available), on the other hand, are outrageously high.

(1) [https://grad.uchicago.edu/admissions/funding/doctoral](https...

I think grad students unionizing is a fantastic idea. They are in every way the critical grease that keeps the capitalistic university system running. They should be able to protect themselves and have a stronger impact in how the universities are run.

The only concern I have is the huge turnover. Unions are most effective and most rationale when the members are committed for life. The longest any of these students could be there is 15 years (5 masters, 10 PhD). This would be very extreme. Most are looking to be out in 2-6 years.

Are there any other examples of unions for occupations that have mandatory turnover or term limits?

As far as I'm aware, all reputable American colleges will do the following for graduate students who are teaching assistants: 1) waive tuition 2) pay for the majority of a health insurance plan 3) issue a modest living stipend that's enough to live on, albeit not very comfortably. I know this is the case for Purdue.

Just assuming that the university (out of its goodwill?) will do any of those things is kind of ludicrous. At my university, we had to fight tooth and nail (we had a union) to get the university to improve our health insurance and full waive our tuition (They did a tricky thing where they would waive all people with 50% TA-ships, and then they gave everyone a 49% one. Universities are not noble, altruistic actors. Far far from it)

1 - Less grad students.

2 - More undergrads doing the work of grad students.

3 - More adjuncts doing the work of grad students.

4 - Grad students being asked to do more.

The irony is this is happening at the great home of Price Theory!

Grad students are major drivers of funding and research for universities. Cutting them will reduce that funding further and make them look worse nationally as an institution.

Perhaps undergraduates SHOULD be welcome to do more of the work? I see no problem with offering cheap workstudies to help grad students and professors getting the little things done while they research and learn.

Adjunct professors might be a good thing-many tenured professors disdain teaching and it shows.

Grad students won't be asked to do more than they agree to because they have a union.

About 10 years ago the stipends were around 25-35k/year. Plenty to live off of in Richmond or Charlottesville.

I have a masters in Computer Science from UW-Madison and I had nothing to do with the PhD track. I just wanted more learning and the CS department was happy to provide it. There was no stigma associated with a masters degree there and it's definitely helped me in my career.

When I worked retail in high school and college, one of my employers was a union shop. It was nice in that there was less abusive and capricious scheduling behavior. I moved up to a level where I saw store P&L and the economics looked to be about the same — but it was more equitable and predictable for the employees.

Before striking, there's working to rule. The experiment can continue, but the extra hours spent grading papers or doing additional tutorials are not worked.

The entertainment industry unions are among the most longstanding and effective and there are no greater spreads in economic value than there are between a novice actor or screenwriter and a global movie star.

Depends what you are studying. Their CS department is notoriously shoddy (I know the Yale undergrads were up in arms about this a few years back).

I've got a kid going into math who wants a PhD. I'd love to see what that looks like for him at various good universities (maybe it's lower in the comments).

The typical cost to a professor's budget of employing a graduate student with tuition covered and a basic stipend is somewhere in the range of $50k to $150k. The graduate student gets paid to be trained by a domain expert, and the cost to the "employer" is well above the median income. Outside the rather unorthodox software field, graduate degrees typically result in title advances and higher salaries (this is 100% true in government positions).

Calling this arrangement slavery is ridiculous.

Bias disclosure: I was once a professor, and also once a graduate student.

I took some great classes as a grad student, but the NIH also paid my university a lot for "Disseration Research in Progress" courses, which met 0 times a week for 0 hours, and certainly did not cost the university much to organize....

My research advisor--like most faculty at med schools--was in a soft money position. His salary was--or at least was supposed to be--covered by the grants he brought in and the 68%ish overhead on those grants.

Second, there's theory, and there's reality. The reality of funding, even for soft-money faculty, is that schools tend to be (recognizing that not all fit the mold) a little bit flexible about how they calculate these things. Money comes in, salaries get paid, and the bean-counting happens at a slightly more fuzzy level of abstraction. The exact requirements on soft-money funding are typically negotiable, and in many cases, can be pooled across multiple researchers to create a bit of a backstop in the event of temporary funding drops. The tuition fees that your advisor's grants brought in will usually be split between the university and the departments in various (ungodly annoyingly complicated) ways, but it's fairly common that the department -- who pays the salary -- sees some fraction of indirect benefit from grad student tuition paid.

So I agree with your statement as phrased: "directly to him or his salary", but there's a ton of indirect money flow in universities.

(Source: I've had the ... mis? fortune of serving on some of the finance committees in the past, and discuss this issue regularly with colleagues at other universities, including those at medical schools.)

But as a non-me source, here's Wisconsin's definition: https://www.education.wisc.edu/soe/about/leadership/committe...

"Other types of soft money may include generated program revenues and flexible internal monies such as those funding credit outreach timetable courses." -- your tuition was generated program revenue.

Even allowing for some slack, I'd suggest that a grad student is seeing a pre-tax equivalent of $25k - $100k, and probably skewed to the lower end of that, based on your numbers.

Given that the educational (and academic publishing) systems exist as gateways into a highly-limited cabal, the arrangement cannot reasonably be called free-market.

I'm in favour of unionisation.

There is a lot of work to be done, but there are many people who work 80 hrs/week to be paid < $100k / year.

I'd love to see the numbers on what the all in dollar value of benefits provided to the students is, as I think that would shift the opinion of quite a few people here.

Work experience is education. That's why you get paid more for past experience - it saves the company on a cost they would otherwise have invested in you. Doing a PhD is just another way of getting work experience, except you get paid a lot less.

I think it's reasonable to claim that PhD's are compensated a lot by virtue of the "cost" of educating them and other benefits. But this education is something you receive in a normal job too. And just like in a normal job, the employer gains a lot more out of the exchange. Grad students are typically worth a lot more to universities than they cost, otherwise there would be no sense in admitting so many. I'd wager the ratio of value to cost is perhaps greater in academia than it is in a lot of other industries.

Do you think there could possibly be enough slack to justify calling this arrangement "slavery", which was the crux of my point?

I assume your 10% figure here is purely rhetorical, since per my estimate and sibling comment's the cost of employing a graduate student is at least $50k. So your 10% estimate would imply the median cost of an employee is $500k, which is obviously not true.

I don't want to drive this further into nitpicking so I will conclude this exchange by conceding, again, that median income and median cost to employer are not the same thing. Have a good day.

A graduate who spent the 6 years getting experience in industry instead of doing their PhD can expect to be at a similar salary level as the person being hired out of the PhD. They also earned more through those 6 years and so they are on average better off overall.

The question is , however, if they can get more.

Some fairly large university systems have had grad student unions for a long time, including the University of California, so I don't think it's a matter of waiting for a critical mass of unionized universities to develop before change can be made.

I think the root cause is one that you mentioned in your post: "there are now a "glut" of PhD's that are far outpacing the very limited # of academic positions". As long as that is the case, academic labor will be cheap and easy to replace, and there will always be enough students willing to work in the conditions you mentioned for professors who could help them in their careers.

For humanities students, the department or division makes a lot of decisions that affect grad students, including the assignment of TA and RA positions, providing funding for conferences and other travel (e.g., to archives). Issues like fairly distributing TAships and keeping class sizes reasonable are things that a union could address. Their advisors were literally....advisors; some of my friends met with their advisor monthly or even less and their research was usually related to--but not an integral part of--their advisors' work.

In contrast, science PhD students (especially in biomedical fields) usually work for ONE professor and their work is usually a piece of that prof's overarching research plan. The prof (through grants) usually provides funds for salaries and research-related expenses, rather than the department. The department has very little effect on their lives; bad interactions with their advisor are the main source of misery. It's less clear to me how unions could solve this. They could prevent students from being dismissed for not working insane hours, but they can't force advisors to actually help students do and publish experiments, write them useful letters of recommendation, or things like that.

Professors have very little incentive to practice academic `birth control`.

http://academiaiskillingmyfriends.tumblr.com/

My example seems to make my question sound like having fixed gender roles in this context - it kind of is so. I mean I rarely come across examples of such relationships with reversed gender roles. In fact when it’s an older female faculty member and a younger male pupil it’s often portrayed as, directly or subtly, something perverse or an abuse of some sort and isn’t shown to be as open and accepted as its counterpart (my example). Maybe the historical patriarchy or so?

Anyway, this has always intrigued me. Partially because where I am from this is rarely heard of and is a not at all socially accepted. In fact it was a taboo till very recently (maybe it still is), where as in the west it seems to be at least socially accepted (I am not sure how the reaction is at much smaller like concerned families level) and very common (unless I read it wrong from the films).

(typed on mobile)

The current President of France met and fell in love with his wife when she was his teacher.

PS. Why the down-votes?

I am not asking directly to @logicchains (I can't edit that comment now so adding it here). I am really perplexed. I was not trolling or being offensive (hope I didn't turn out to be so) and it is one of the aspects of western culture I don't understand and tried to understand it from the people who live there or have been there since I noticed a comment on the same lines (or perceived so). Also I assumed there would be lots of (ex) grad students here. I was thinking is there intimidation, misleading, fear of losing career chances involved in such relationships (and a whole lot of things)?

I have noticed this quite a few times. Comment down-voted that were neither offensive, nor unconstructive (I would like to know if mine was either of these or something else and learn from my mistakes).

I have recently got the ability to down-vote (seeing the up and down arrows both) and I hardly down-vote (on other forums too I've the same habit). Am I doing it wrong? The saying that "don't down-vote just because you disagree or don't like something" is just for saying and in practice we should just down-vote based on whims and likes? Or is there a methodology to it?

Conincidentally, she also has a very rich father.

The political philosophies, namely socialism and communism, are a product of such thinking, but are not the same.

For instance, many feminists make heavy use of dialectics and are considered Marxist critique, but may not identify with e.g. communism.

These things are necessarily correlated and I'm not sure the necessity of drawing the line. Why not just use another term?

It seems to me we are making a rhetorical space for bourjois marxists. Why?

??? Academically they're interesting questions to ask? Have you ever taken a class on Marxist critical theory or Marxist feminism or ...

A "marxist" is someone who uses Marx's method of analyzing class and capitalism to talk about whatever they want. One specific example is a Marxist critical theorist I know who likes to discuss the way class and capitalism as Marx discussed them arise in philosophical interpretations of modern literature.

Marxism is a political philosophy - one that has a lot of negative connotation in the United States due to its ties to communism, but Marxism is just philosophy so of course we'd want a space where academics can talk philosophy.

See this comment for a better explanation https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15512846

Faculty members are not in control of their own situation. I'm sorry to sound a bit rude here, but you're being a bit oblivious. Faculty are under the rule of law of the administration. That is who their boss is and that is whose rules they follow. They don't get to choose the class hierarchy and power dynamics of their job same as you or I. If it were that easy to disrupt a power imbalance, then Marxism would be a lot more than just a theoretical framework. More importantly, academics are the very definition of the type of people who "get their head stuck in the clouds". They care about their work at the expense of every other aspect of their lives, expecting them to apply the same critical lens to their lives (which they are likely somewhat comfortable in) is very naive. Even Marx goes out of his way to emphasize that the means of production must be "seized" - there has to be great motivation to change the power dynamic. For professors, it can be hard to get them to care about anything that doesn't directly affect their research.

> When I was in school, talking about my student loan problems was looked down on as 'showing my class.'

The faculty have no control over your student loans. They are not the ones who charge you. And in my own experience, my professors were very enthusiastic about me talking about my issues with student loan debt. Are you sure it wasn't just in the wrong class / awkward timing? I brought this stuff up in a course on class dynamics and got plenty of positive feedback - where you say something is just as important as what you say after all.

You should redirect some of your frustration at the University's administration. Professors and faculty are getting screwed in a lot of the same ways as you, so why do you choose to get upset at them and their talk about "Marxism". They're academics whose heads are up in the clouds, what do you expect?

Yes, they are. They are in so much as a police officer. They too, can leave their positions any time they please. They can discuss and protest, by all means. Teaching and research can and might should be done elsewhere.

The growth of administration is dispicable but not authoritarian. I will argue the administration bloat is of the same sensibilities as the oversocialized culture of academic careerism. I say with much disappointment 'Flush them both!'

We would be insulting to conclude hypocrisy excusable because of a little "head in the clouds." I will defend with you the value of submersion, of passion and obsessiveness to inspire study and discovery. Anecdotally, I find this freedom abounds more outside of academia than within.

Nonetheless, I understand your reasoning; more generously in some disciplines than others. Political theorists may visit "the clouds" but if they hang out too long, they would be oblivious to the very specimin of their research!

I am young and cannot claim to have known these mythical "genuine marxists" who amandoned Academia some decades back, but conceptually they are relatable. I would have liked a shot at an academic career but lacked the quite obvious requirements: monetary entry fee, cultural decoration, marketing/social skills.

My work has involved many ties with Academia and I've even been published in some academic journals. I want to believe, but I just find Academia and its' self-obsessive traditions, processes, and increasingly oversocialized culture to be terribly distracting. The necessity of these things is a worthwhile debate, but with so many bright minds enmeshed, anything less than greatness would be near impossible. But, my observations and personal experiences suggest that the "clouds" in which the academics' tend to place their heads are so rarely a result of curiosity and exploration as you imply. They often more resemble a narrow path down which they will chase the next carrot.

I understand you to be defending those few who place their research practice above all else. I implore you to question what might be if they were not constrained by this path. Admittedly, I'm not offering any more a solution to this than I am to the problem of pay: Leave the path or speak up/protest. These rhetorical frameworks for distancing sake is a losing proposition, and has become commonplace. These practice of prioritizing the carrot path favors a survival of the shmooziest. This is bad for research, bad for education, bad for faculty, bad for business. We can probably agree the administration does not represent bygone Academia, but I assert instead it is a bureaucratic creep that will feed on academic careerism like a virus. I suggest it is a symptom, not a cause.

Sorry for the length. My battery is soon to die or I would try to edit.

My best guess is that the behavior is an unconscious projection due to underlying narcissistic tendencies of people who are put on an intellectual pedastal...

I suppose it could be camouflage for being an asshole but that just seems too exhausting to be sustainable. And if they don't genuinely hold those beliefs, then what do they actually believe?

1.) Overwork their students, stretch them thin doing everything.

2.) Have more graduate students.

They would always pick #2. Professors are notoriously short-handed. They are typically not the ones who are outright abusing the power. It's usually the administration tying the professor's hands in these matters.

As a graduate student, your boss is usually the administration more than the professor - especially w.r.t. things a union would care about (workplace safety, wages, benefits, overwork...). Professors do not like to overwork their students - it's just they don't care if you are overworked.

This is important to note. I have very little control over how much my students are paid, their benefits, their course load, etc.

And, for the record, I do care if my students are overworked. Burnt out students produce shitty science.

Good point and apologies for the slight. I suppose a better way of putting it is that faculty are often ignorant of their students' issues / difficulties due to their busy schedules.

It's like a competition between universities to see who can get the biggest war chest. Lacking any market concerns they're just looking for some variable to maximize just to keep themselves occupied. It seems largely orthogonal to any social purpose a university is supposed to have.

Spending down an endowment could provide lots of free tuition... for a few years. Universities (like the Church) think in centuries.

IIRC they managed it in 2007 and then...in 2008...well, that went away.

Perhaps ... the system is the result of organizational dynamics and some basic rules that some exploit and others get exploited by.

Apparently you are missing the irony in such critical theory, post-structuralism, marxism, etc. having been so vigorously theorized that it's application was overlooked! The "system" here is quite late to blame itself and the brazen approach to doing so is a bit humurous.

Are you seeking to divide academia into smaller parts; innocent ones and guilty others? Where have we seen that before?

Face it, the entire system probably needs an overhaul but isn't governed by some sort of "evil overmind". Small regulatory or incentive-based changes or movements like unionization will probably cause the system to re-adjust.

I guess it's just textbook components of neo-liberalism: priorities which lead to bloated administration and marketing initiatives.

I agree unionizing is a good solution. One would think the experts would have acted sooner; that's all. The trajectory has been obvious for a very long time.

To clarify, the shoemaker's customers in your analogy (the students) have been wearing worse shoes for much longer.

There is a sense that liberal academics assume, which purports that they carry the torch of revolution or something like this. The notion, however, lives only in the academic professorial abstract and fails to materialize outside of it. This torch is an academic torch, not a proletariat torch, not a working class torch. This is a bourjois torch.

Does this refer to political attitudes typically associated with faculty?

academia

And this to decisions made by university administrators?

If so, then no, I don't expect one to apply to the other.

By academia I mean the whole thing.

The faculty has maintained these these acclaimed leftist views for many decades, sat back and drank Kool-Aid while the administration took on the bloat. They were too busy climbing the ladder and forgot to critique it; no better than than the rest of the average neo-liberals.

Student debt swallowed at least 2 generations whole while the faculty did nothing. They didn't have to. But, they'll be the first to commend a proletariat revolution which remains a safe enough distance from their job. I cannot help notice the hypocrisy here.

What will this do? Raise the cost of grad students for schools, so perhaps they take less of them. But didn't the students know this was the situation before applying?

Also, how much TAing one does really varies a huge amount between fields. AFAIK students do much more teaching in the humanities than in STEM, and within STEM departments that teach lots of service courses (e.g., math) will tend to have more TAships than departments that do not.

Undergraduate student fees were actually paid to the state board of education, the university then got only a fraction of that back. The state provided less than a third of the budget to a state university.

This was actually less than the cost to educate an undergrad and so grad students work was used to subsidize undergrads who in turn subsidized other public schools in the state.

Grad students do deserve fair compensation for their work but if that happens it will exacerbate the problems caused by under funding public education. I hope I see the time when we solve these problems and I think this is a step in that direction.

That research and undergraduate education are combined together is the real problem here.

The problem isn’t pairing the two but generations of overhead growth combined with a decline in the federal funding which used to support researchers, both of which mean compensation has fallen behind in real value.

And this skill has very little overlap with teaching undergraduate students.

And on the other end, a fairly small percentage of students end up doing any research in college.

In an ideal world, researchers would research, and people who specialize in teaching would teach.

You do NOT have to be some cutting edge leader in your field to teach undergrads. Simple skills, like being an engaged and interesting speaking are way way way more important than how many papers you've published.

Some of my worst teachers were teaching specialists.

And the most influential person in my undergraduate career? A researcher.

My point is the research and teaching are orthogonal skills.

It is certainly possible for someone to be both a good researcher and a good teacher.

I am just saying that I don't care how good of a researcher they are. The only thing I care about is how good of a teacher they are.

So let's judge the teachers based SOLELY on their teaching skills, and not have writing papers have anything at all to do with whether they are hired as a teacher.

Really more than students unionizing its adjunct faculty that are being severely exploited. Whereas PhDs at least get a degree for their troubles, adjuncts just get straight up robbed, and too many of them are living on public assistance and non-guaranteed contracts.

This is one thing I hope the unionization movement will genuinely change. There's not much room to move the needle on pay, but having students have a means of addressing abuse besides "Throw myself on the mercy of the department and hope they don't shred my career" would be a huge step.

Interestingly, one of the grad student union's arguments in a place I was at was, essentially, "You're flooding the university with cheap adjuncts, and it's devaluing our career path", which I thought was, at the very least, an interesting take.

First, the USNews article you cite says the average is $57k. The $100k number is the 75th percentile number.

Second, the article you cite is pretty freely mixing "graduate students" and "graduate and professional degrees", to the extent that it's not clear whether the average numbers it cites are just for the former, or for the latter. It obviously makes a big difference, because while law school and medical school have their own problems they don't have the (very real) problems you describe PhD programs as having.

So I looked at the actual report your linked article is citing. The $57k number is the _median_ (not average!) debt across all graduate and professional students. Same for the $100k number: 75th percentile across all graduate and professional students. See page 1 of the report.

Page 3 of the report cites some "typical" (I assume they mean "median", but they don't define it) numbers for various graduate degree debts, including law and medicine, but conveniently leaves out the number for "PhDs". Those make up about 23% of all graduate degrees, according to the chart on that page, by the way, so your typical "graduate or professional student" is not a PhD candidate, but is aiming for an MD, JD, or Master's degree, all of which have _quite_ different funding models from PhDs.

All the tables on page 12 and following conveniently exclude PhDs as well.

So this report tells us pretty much nothing about PhD debt. The law and medicine numbers inflate everything involved, obviously, and most of the rest are masters degrees of various sorts. All PhDs could have a debt of 0 and still get the reported median and 75th percentile numbers.

OK, so how this works in practice (or at least did 10 years ago) at the universtity of Chicago, while I wad doing my PhD there.... Grad students in the _sciences_ generally did not take on debt at all: their tuition was covered, and they were paid a stipend that was enough to live on reasonably, in return for the teaching and whatnot that they did. Grad students in the _humanities_ were an entirely different story. So even within the PhD bucket it really depended on the field of study. The number of students who took on debt and had "lab time" of any sort was quite close to 0, if not exactly 0.

Now there are real problems in PhD programs, including in the sciences, and grad students and especially postdocs _are_ underpaid in various ways. But you're not having science PhDs with $100k in grad school debt, typically.

Improving conditions might let them recruit better grad students, which has obvious knock-on effects for the university, even if they retain fewer of them. In general, it is not the case that one researcher yields one interchangeable unit of knowledge. We might be better off (in terms of happiness and productivity) with N calmly productive researchers than 2N miserable researchers desperately flinging stuff at the walls.

Unions, and the like, just move around the real problem, which is that we have too many people in academia, and that those people should move to industry.

It is also a free market — you get paid how much you are worth.

Disclaimer: dropped out of PhD program many many years ago for this and other reasons. Don’t regret it for a second.

I do wish that 24-year-old me had either enough wisdom (or perhaps, say, an ethical advisor) to skip getting into massive debt.

I don't agree that folks get paid what they are worth, but that's probably a deeper disagreement than warrants discussion on this forum.

It's a shame that you need to be rich to continue your education past a point, but it just doesn't make sense to keep going.

The only thing that the US is producing these days is student debt.

the end result is the many US colleges will have to reign in costs and this could put a lot of pressure on all positions.