Grad students essentially work as slaves for the Uni's & professors with triple-duty in lab time for professor + teaching + self-research.
Their reward comes in notoriety & bi-lines on research that helps them become professors in their own right in higher ed.
The cost is minimized rights to IP they've been crucial in inventing, outrageously low wages, and an average of $100k (1) in debt.
The brutality is sold as a right of passage, but the reality is the incentives are completely out of whack - uni's have an inverse incentive to admit Phd / grad students to benefit from the wage-slave / revenue generating aspect.
And it shows in the data - there are now a "glut" of PhD's that are far outpacing the very limited # of academic positions.
The system needs fixing and if unionization exerts some pressure on correcting the macro problem I am all for it.
(1) https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2014/03/25/how-much-out...
(2) https://www.jamesgmartin.center/2016/10/academic-job-market-...
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?
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....
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.
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.
Professors have very little incentive to practice academic `birth control`.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That, of course, being the point.
EDIT: speaking from my limited experience with the unionization effort at Brown. My main point is that faculty are not the university.
I watched a lot of fellow grad students struggle, constantly worrying about grants and funding. Some just took loans, others rushing so they could get through before their fellowships ended.
Meanwhile you watch new buildings, dorms and student centers go up as undergrad tuition goes up. Most professors I know who are my age are all adjunct or part time, but it's their full time gig.
Adjuncts positions were meant for professionals in the field who wanted to teach a class or two. The position is really being abused to keep from paying hard working professors a full-time wage and keeping them from a tenure track.
So where the hell is all the money going. Yes there are cuts, but we still see new buildings and programs. I realize these are different budgets a lot of times, but it's still getting really ridiculous.
If universities want to do something real, they need to stop worrying about unions and start tackling the student debt situation. They draw students deeper into debt than they've ever been in history to fund their institutions. You can no longer work a part time job and pay for many state schools. And what if those kids graduate and decide they really hate engineering or business or whatever they got. Now they feel like slaves, working jobs they hate to pay off that debt.
We desperately need student debt forgiveness. It has to happen. The bubble needs to burst, the system needs to collapse and schools need to scrap and rebuild programs that are affordable, that work and that are significantly better and different than their shitty for profit counterparts, which they're becoming more like everyday.
Not allowed to vote if:
* Not currently onsite (field work or pre-grad research elsewhere for a year)
* If you were not onsite in the previous year (anyone who did field work last year)
* Anyone who took a year break from teaching was not allowed to vote even if returning to teaching this year
* Anyone in 1st or 2nd year not allowed to vote (despite most years left to live under this union)
Is there any citation for your claims?
From the cited list, it seems that anyone who got paid on a regular basis by the university over the past two years could vote.
Ah. Good to know. No further questions, your honour.
So no contradiction - that is only ppl who taught in the last one year. So it does not include those who took a year off or did field work.
Some wikipedia resulted in 600 (law)+ 400 ( medschool)+ 3140 (business)+noise term ~5000 grad students. I bet the rest of the gap is just low turnout
As for the news from UChicago, I congratulate my former colleagues, and yet I also know that it's not enough. I started a Ph.D. in the humanities at Illinois and left after 2.5 years. Our union was great, but no union is enough. We were fighting to prevent the administration from docking our meager $17k/year pay for frivolous BS reasons, and while I'm grateful for what the union did for us, in another way it was so shortsighted. Why were the stewards of civilization making $17k/year in the first place? Why couldn't we make far, far more, worthy of the years of specialized knowledge that we had developed at great cost?
The union could never answer these questions. Actually, most people thought I was crazy for even asking them. We spent all day denouncing capitalism, and yet we were enthralled to the myth of the Protestant work ethic, that compensation is somehow tied to our self-worth. And that misguided albeit well-meaning hypocrisy why I left academia and joined Silicon Valley.
Much more important though is that most unions make work predictable. Hours, duties, etc. However, most PhD research is highly unpredictable. If I want to set up the test while the conditions are good, I may want to work NOW; hearing that I'm out of hours and need to do it tomorrow is the last thing I need. If I got my test set up (in shared lab) and going great I may want to go as long as I can stand it -- it may be broken tomorrow.
At least last 2 years of grad school my #1 desire was to finish and go use my new PhD in real world for real money. If union imposed policies add 1-2 years to the process I would not want them.
Being in an engineering department, I never had an issue with having to teach a heavy load of classes. But, some of my friends in humanities departments had a teaching load of - 6+ hours of classroom time + discussions + grading long papers - for classes of 50+ students. Being part of the union allowed them to put pressure on their departments that they needed to hire other TAs so that they could focus on their research and not spend additional years writing their dissertation.
I don't think being part of a union is going to stop any motivated student from doing their own research. And part of joining the union is to ensure that their members do receive a good stipend and have their health insurance paid for while maintaining a reasonable teaching load.
When I saw it first I thought it was a joke and laughed, but the folks working there were serious and asked me to shut up lest I get them in trouble. Maybe this is an edge case, but this still worries me when I hear about unionizing -- formalization of duties is extremely inefficient in most research environments and is often a flip side of unionization.
Again, I admit that my fears might be overblown.
I thought unions were just groups of people who bargained with collective power. Why don't all researchers at these universities just use their abilities as leverage? Most people in universities are hired because they're one of a few thousand people in the world who are up to speed on a specific topic. That makes them very difficult to replace, one would think.
I don't think there's anything legally preventing a subset of employees from banding together and withholding work until just that subset gets what they want, if that's what you're asking. It's just not a terribly effective tactic, and obviously doesn't leave the benefits in place for future employees the way that a NLRB-sanctioned collective bargaining agreement does.
It's a similar situation, but there are even less professional jobs, less alternatives after graduation, and a n increased risk for injury.
If they don't have the protection, doing that could jeopardize any chance they have of going to the NFL (not that most of them make it anyways).
Football players, at least in D1, have also been determined to at least have some of the rights to concerted action protected under the NLRA:
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/02/02/nlrb-general-...
Of course, while that does protect them from their current employer (the school), I don't think it can protect them against the reluctance of a potential future employer (like the NFL).
I genuinely don't know what it's about. At my university, the work to do (5 years in my case) existed out of studying for exams, sometimes group projects to build something (not something usable outside of a presentation for points), and in the last year a thesis (not at all as publish-worthy as a phd paper). This spanned "bachelor" and "master" but those names were actually retrofitted to an older system.
The article and comments talk about labor by students in university.
My university was in Europe. Please enlighten me, do students do actual labor in US universities? I'd love to understand what this is about. Thanks!
The original idea was that a professor takes you under his or her wing to teach you and help you with your research and in exchange you help out the professor with what they are doing. Nowadays graduate students feel like they're just being treated as cheap labor without the professor/university holding up their end of the bargain.
So this bachelor and master was just combined in one single 5-year program in my case.
Research, being teaching assistant, and writing papers was done by those who went for a PhD at my university, that is, after those 5 years, those who chose to do a PhD after receiving your master diploma.
Do you think it says something about the quality of the university, when master students were not teaching/writing papers/doing research, but simply doing exams as usual...? (Ok there was the thesis in the last year, but that was really more like a larger final project)
Most top universities in the world are indeed not in Europe, but in my country at least is was considered a good one.
PhD students do that.
Most graduate students are not PhD students. Your typical Master's degree program does not include any gruntwork.
In the US, higher education usually progresses: * 4 years for a Bachelors (BA/BS) * 2-3+ years for a Masters (MA/MS) or professional degree (medicine, law, etc) * 3+ years for a PhD.
1. Regarding huge number of grads and few people voting - wiki and other aggregate sources of info will only tell you the total number of students listed as "enrolled" at the school. Not all of them taught in the previous five quarters. That actually reduces the number of grads eligible to vote drastically.
2. Regarding the comments linking union to money. It is by no means guaranteed that a union can increase the salaries paid to grad students. And in fact most grad students (at least at the PhD level) survive off the stipend not the TA/RA salary. As far as I understand the union has no bearing in the stipend amount. There is also the thing that UChicago is cash strapped. It doesn't have the liquid assets to increase anyone's salaries. (Look up the aggressive campaign to sell UChicago owned buildings in HP if you are curios).
3. A union, as an organization of people, by definition caters to the average contributor. In a factory where the workers provide similar enough service that 'an average' is still a meaningful concept, a union can do some good. In my opinion, in a union of all grad students across all departments, 'average demand' is meaningless. Each department can't even agree internally on what their students need, so I'm not sure how a union will find common ground among all the departments. On the one hand limiting the number of hours in a work day sounds good, no? But ask a science grad - they will likely complain that they no longer have time to finish their experiment in time. Giving students a choice in which class they want to TA sounds good, no? But ask a student in humanities - they will tell you that seventeen of them apply for the same spot that only one person can have so they would prefer assigned positions not chosen ones. Etc, etc, etc.
Grads today in the union will leave in a few years and not stay decades.
Unions i know work when lives in the same job are represented. And contracts last 4-6 yrs.
Not sure i see a chance for long term benefit.
just to set a level of the workers issue I am talking about, recently they cut in half the salary of a category, to double the number of people. from 3 to 6. while each teaches a class in full, to 20+ undergrads each. pay is now tuition plus enough to be 2 grand a year above CA poverty line.
What's next should be academia uniting to distribute funding internally, rather than stock with the farcical lotteries that are grant proposals.
Attaching funding to academic politics sounds like the death of innovation, but that may be an exaggeration.
Me too. One time the department admins decided it was too expensive to have the restrooms in the grad student offices cleaned more than once a week. We're talking about a men's room with a single toilet and a single urinal, shared by a dozens of people pulling verrry long days (some were just sleeping in their offices). The restroom was already pretty gross when it was being cleaned 3x/wk. Predictably, the change to 1x/week cleaning made things much, much worse. Honestly, it was a health hazard at that point. The administration didn't care. Faculty didn't care. Everyone could see that it was disgusting, but no amount of griping by the people who had to use those facilities had any effect.
Someone finally had the bright idea to contact the graduate student employee union steward, who was himself a graduate student in another department. He came down, took one look, and walked over to have a chat with department administration. I don't know what was said, but they resumed 3x/wk cleaning immediately.
I also found that the grad student union was pretty well run and did reasonable things at Berkeley. If they didn't go crazy-hard-left there of all places, it seems unlikely for some of the more far-fetched scenarios to play out elsewhere.
The biggest issue I recall them addressing was health insurance for spouses and dependents of grad students, namely defending that from being cut. I think they did good work.
This has been a common criticism I've heard, and would have potential ramifications on the long-term research pipeline if it were true + spread nationally.
The value of a degree will continue to lose ground against the cost. This is not good.
