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On more serious note, grad student working for next to nothing serves similar function as unpaid internships in companies and politics. Some positions are designed to help young people coming from wealthy families without explicitly shutting anyone out.

If you have trust fund, career in politics, academia or high profile law and financial firms is much easier.

: sure, the internships aren’t typically a year long, but if you do the math for what’s paid for their duration it’s an incredible amount if it did last a year.

a) not everyone who figured out higher education is a racket wants to do 180 degree career turn

b) many people would like to make their future in something else than easy code monkeying money

If everyone goes to write NoSQL serverless CRUD for adtech, who will be left to do research or something actually materially productive in the economy?

In some places if you have an unpaid tech internship, everything you do has to be an artificial training exercise for the sole benefit of the students.

I'm having trouble parsing that

I sat on a couple school boards for a while, all that was ever discussed was fund raising and how we should be contributing more. Very little focus on education. Sadly it's turned me off spending time with Schools and just targeting students / researchers directly.

Sounds like a win-win, yeah? So, sorta happy ending...

We need an overhaul on bloat in state schools at a minimum, then we're good.

The other issue is patent / design ownership arguments, but that's for another day.

[1] https://www.alligator.org/news/uf-engineering-team-wins-mill...

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So for example a 2 year project that has 120K allocated in direct cost salary, with a 75% overhead regime in a university with a 25% central overhead take would have an overall budget of 210K of which 120K would end up payed as salary to the researchers, 52.5K taken by central administration, and 37.5K taken by the research group.

While technically you could argue paying researchers more would also net the university more money, asthe overheads are calculated as a % on direct costs, in reality this does not hold as funding for research is very finite and funding agencies would not approve paying higher project grants.

Both universities and large businesses have been successfully lobbying for years for higher overhead % regimes in grant instruments, and since the budget for funding research has not changed in line with these evolutions, defaco shifting the windfalls of research grants from the researcher's wages to the administrations.

Also I am sure the janitor at the University is paid decently and loves to work there. Reason is there are not as many people lined up for that job and basic economics takes over.

But then the disappointing part is that the system in place is designed to exploit newcomers and place them in an abuse relationship where they are forced to go through the ringer as indentured servants hoping that their ultimate goal is just around the corner.

You may quote simplistic cliches regarding economy and career choices, but the truth of the matter is that the grad school system is designed to be a monopoly where grad students have absolutely no power or influence over their career other than quitting, which ultimately results in total and definite exclusion from the industry, and thus are forced to endure years of indentured servitude. As a grad student you don't have the freedom to switch schools, negotiate your salary, or even be recognized as an employee.

This example demonstrates the absolute lack of power or influence that grad students have: if you disagree with your supervisor then say goodbye to your whole career.

But the claim that "a PhD is a necessary step to _specific_ well-paying and fulfilling careers" isn't incompatible with the GP comment's claim that intrinsic motivation makes people shoulder these crappy conditions, just like (eg) actors. It's pretty well-known that PhDs are, on average, _terrible_ career moves from a self-interest and financial perspective. This is common knowledge among literally everybody I've ever met who has any exposure to academia. Hell, Piled Higher and Deeper has been around for more than _20 years_; my university's paper syndicated it.

Just like struggling actors, PhDs put up with low pay and bad conditions to take a shot at something they want to do, with the additional wrinkle that they're (nominally) increasing their human capital in a way that a failing actor isn't. Nothing about your comment rebuts the GP comment's claim that there's nothing unique about academia in this respect.

From Princeton's policies, particularly the last sentence:

"Graduate study at Princeton, at both the doctoral and, in most cases, the master’s level, requires full-time commitment to study and research on the part of students. The Graduate School’s financial support structure, which extends throughout the length of the student’s program and ordinarily includes summers, is one indication of that requirement. Accordingly, the Graduate School considers employment beyond full fellowship, teaching or research support or its equivalent to be incompatible with full-time graduate study."[0]

It's even worse for international students. Under F1 visa, you can't work more than 20 hours on campus. However, all TA positions are deemed 20 hours of work. So you can't even work at the campus gym if you want.

[0] - https://gradschool.princeton.edu/policies/employment

This is not true at Princeton. Unless they are without funding, PhD students there commonly only work 10 hours per week (nominally) as TAs. The regular stipend is also generous compared to many other programs.

"This means that international students on a full AI or full AR appointment are not eligible for additional on-campus work, even if the Graduate School employment policy would otherwise allow it."

How can they say this, and then also ask their graduate students to teach? They're contradicting themselves.

Your comment is unrealistic and even absurd to the majority of those going through the PhD threadmill.

It's like saying you can dunk a basketball if you'd want to. Sure, show me LeBron James and how easy it is for him, but for those of us who aren't benefitting from abnormal competitive advantages then it's not that realistic.

How many people are lucky enough to be able to not only work a full-time job that pays the bills and is close enough to grad school and also be able to be in a field where literally part-time amateurs can do all the required academic work to write papers, a whole dissertation and defend a decent thesis? And in the end do well enough to aspire to have a career in your field of research?

You have a better chance of dunking on LeBron James.

"Let them eat cake."

Research is already a full time job.

Lots of folks trying to sell you a path to success.

It's like if you want to be a General, you are going to have to be a Private first. There is a progression in the sciences.

That's not how the military works at all. A Private is an enlisted rank, and their career path typically tops out at a level like Warrant Officer.

If you want to be a General, you're going to have to start as a Lieutenant (the lowest commissioned officer).

What proportion of officers in the US Armed Forces graduates from the military academies? A third? I very much doubt graduating from one is required to become a general. Being a great political operator is but it’s not like only military academy graduates can do that.

That's not entirely true, though as I understand it is becoming more true; there are definitely places that will promote to positions for which the normal route is a post-graduate degree based on a lesser degree plus experience (including publications under the rubric of experience).

Now, university faculty positions, degree standards tend to be ironclad, though.

There’s a way that academics come off which I don’t think they intend to - which is somehow their path is special and their trials are unique.

They’re not.

Yes, it is sold as such. But the appeal is fading fast.

Academia nowadays is something between a Beauty Pageant and the Hunger Games where people struggle with underpayment for years for maybe one day getting the famed tenured position.

Maybe if these people want to do anthropology research, they can, but at their own expense.

When I was looking into doing grad school, I had no illusions that if I went in without a grant that I'd be doing anything other than scraping by. I have no idea why anyone would expect anything else.

It's fucking absurd how top heavy the state run universities (especially UC) are. I would hope that grad students at other UC campuses would strike in solidarity, but knowing that UC's got them by the short and curlies I doubt that'll happen.

Janitor and other unskilled labor jobs at public universities tend to pay crap but are highly sought after because they usually come with the union negotiated benefits package that makes them a better value (than local work in private industry for more money and less benefits) for many people.

Back when I was doing those kinds of jobs I wouldn't even think about wasting my time working for a public university but I was young and needed the money more than I needed healthcare and 40hr weeks.

I was describing society as it is now and explaining why researchers get more scholarships than actors do.

Universities advertise good careers if you go through them, and I am not sure these numbers are as balanced as they could be.

Second even if it were, there is a terrible imbalance of power between students, which are distributed actors with little to no individual power and little information or experience, vs a much bigger actor with more information and a lot of power in such a relationship.

(From a comment in the other thread about this subject on how this particular market was skewed: https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/how-why-gove... )

And janitor is in all likelihood a decent job with union protection (good for them).