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.
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.