in the few labor disputes i’ve been around (not as a participant on either side, but either as a student or a resident of the college town) where graduate student TA’s have a job action to get raises from the university, the graduate students WITHOUT FAIL do not include the value of the tuition waivers they receive as part of what they claim their pay package to be for the services they provide, and focus exclusively on the paycheck they receive.
what. the. fuck?
you are being dishonest to everyone, you probably know exactly why you’re doing it, and i’d like you to stop.
you go to graduate school. the nominal tuition rates cost normally what you’d expect (20-40k) for all higher education. you get a teaching gig and subsequently you do not have to pay tuition.
to everyone else on this planet, the amount of money you aren’t having to pay to go to school to improve your job prospects for your career COUNTS AS INCOME (note: i am aware the IRS doesn’t consider it income, but that’s for other reasons)
so, now not only do you get free schooling to improve your future career, you also get extra money to pay for your rent, food, and entertainment.
so stop lying. just stop. you don’t make under a living wage, and you aren’t really cheap labor to the university.
It would be funny if the University offered them a 20% wage increase, and at the same time, removed the tuition waiver. When they turn it down, the University can then focus on how they offered a 20% raise, but it was not good enough.
This would force the graduate students into the position of having to publicly admit that the tuition waiver is a part of their total package of remuneration.
Both parties can then negotiate on the total package.
When I was a GA, I started out getting a MINOR tuition break and minimum wage. The next year they took away the tuition break and I just made minimum wage. I did it for the experience. (Wasn’t a teaching assistant.)
When I was in graduate school (UCLA, 1990s) we did not get a tuition waver.* That had been phased out earlier in the decade. I received approximately $12,000 / year to cover rent and the approx. $4400 / year tuition. My rent was $434 / month. You can decide for yourself whether that was a living wage, rank exploitation, or somewhere in between. I considered it apprenticeship and took out student loans to cover the difference.
I did think that the graduate student union and their wussy short-term strikes were idiotic, but it was not because of the money issue. (Disclaimer: my low pay was, in part, due to the program I was in and the way in which pay was structured. Colleagues of mine in the sciences were making twice what I was.)
*The UC system doesn’t have tuition, they have “registration fees.” There is such a thing as a fee waiver, and another such thing as a partial fee waiver. I did get a partial fee waiver some years, but for research assistant jobs, not teaching jobs.
I dunno. I’m currently a physics Grad-Student, and get a full tuition waiver along with my stipend.
But I’d be hard pressed to call that tution waiver part of my salary since I’m not sure what I get for it. I don’t take any classes, so its not for that. I have to pay a separate fee to use the campuses various facilities (parking, gym, etc) so it doesn’t cover that. My advisor pays a seperate chunk of money from our research grant to cover our use of research facilities, offices, etc, so the tuition isn’t paying for that.
My vague impression (only slightly researched, so take with a grain of salt) is that the main people getting screwed in the case of the hard sciences, anyways, is the tax-payer. Most research is funded by the federal gov’t through NSF and similar grants. As far as I can tell, the University takes something like 50% off the top of these for use of their facilities (in our case, basically that’s just office space and electricity to run a bank of computers, and maybe some HR resources like taking care of W2’s and issuing pay-checks). Then, the grant also has to pay money not just for Grad-stipends, but also to cover their tuition waivers, for which again, so far as I can tell, we receive nothing except the ability to associate ourselves with the University. So the tax-payer is in theory paying money to have specific scientific research done, but half of that money is instead going to support the University in general, so they can spend another couple million on a football coach and basket-weaving center.
The end result is that if the University decides to raise their tuition rates, I’d technically be getting “paid” more, since the value of the waiver would go up. But the practical result would be that I personally receive the same amount of money, and the cash available from the grant for me and my department to do research would go down.
Most of the time you are in grad school you are working on your dissertation, and not using university resources in the way an undergraduate does. In engineering, at least, you are often working on a grant which is also giving lots of overhead money to the university - an undergrad doesn’t do anything to contribute in this way. Even the classes you take after the first year or two of grad school are seminar type classes, which are often ways for a professor to examine an area.
On top of this, many Ph.D students could be making a ton more money in industry, so are underpaid even when the tuition waiver is added.
Basically, tuition for a grad student is funny money, and counting it as real money is silly. And it doesn’t buy the groceries.
Exactly. In the humanities at least (my area of experience), the amount of the tuition waiver does not reflect the actual value to the student of the nominal amount of the waiver.
When i started grad school, i got my tuition waived, as well as a stipend. The tuition waiver was officially listed at about $30,000, and the stipend was $12,500. But to consider that $30,000 as income in the sense being discussed by the OP would be ridiculous because, at least in my department, and in most of the humanities, grad students simply would not even enter the courses in the first place without tuition waivers.
After a four-year degree getting straight A’s as an undergrad, and another 5-8 years getting an MA and PhD, graduates in my field can look forward to a starting salary of around $60,000, and a ceiling not far north of $100,000. That lawyer who recently lost his first job for setting a fire in NYC was about to start on $150,000, first year out of law school.
I’m not complaining about the salary discrepancy; simply noting that it is one of the realities of certain professions. Accruing a 6-figure tuition debt might be considered standard practice in a degree like law or medicine, where your likelihood of being able to pay off that sort of money is pretty good. But if you ask a history or a philosophy or an English lit grad student to come up with $30,000 a year for their PhD you’re simply not going to get anyone willing to do it.
Hell, my university even recognized that attracting grad students in the humanities was difficult if you didn’t also give a stipend, even if you DID pay their tuition. My department experimented, for a couple of years, with admitting most students on a Tuition+Stipend package, but also admitting a few students on a Tuition-only package. They stopped the practice because they found that the sort of students they wanted (i.e., good students) could go elsewhere for a Tuition+Stipend package, and the students who were willing to accept Tuition-only packages turned out to be not up to the standard the department wanted to maintain.
Also, grad students provide value to a university beyond the work they do as TAs or RAs. They are the ongoing face of the university’s research commitment. They get their PhDs and go out into the world to teach at other universities, to write books, to invent stuff, and to generally contribute to the scholarly community, and they do all this with the words “PhD (Awesome University)” after their names.
As for grad students striking over the conditions of their employment, i’ve certainly seen cases where that would be justified, although i’ve never felt that way about my own situation. Attending a relatively small private university, with a high ratio of grad students to undergrads, the TA load i had to bear was incredibly light by many standards. We received 4 years of full funding (since extended to 5), and in return had to TA for a total of 2 years (4 semesters), with never more than 30 students per semester.
By contrast, though, i knew people who were pursuing their PhDs at good public universities, and who got lower stipends while having to TA every semester, with student loads more than twice the size of mine. I sometimes wonder how they got any of their own work done at all.
Some universities have graduate students teaching classes for significantly less than a professor would cost to teach the same class, even factoring in tuition waivers. Teaching large classes does interfere with their own research. They are, essentially, used as cheap labor.
Even ignoring that, your argument still falls flat. Whatever tuition waivers are received should be counted separately, not lumped in with the money that can actually be used for necessities like food and shelter.
i need to clarify: the job actions i’m talking about here that i have been present for, iirc, the TAs get full tuition waivers. and engineers are not usually included in the labor union because the dynamics of their education/degree/etc. are not really the same as most other departments.
If you guys get no value out of your degree, which is basically what you effectively say when you say that the tuition waiver is valueless to me, then why the hell do you voluntarily subject yourselves to 6 years of subsistence-level wages (according to you) when you could be making bank in the real world with your B.A.
oh yeah, it’s because your degree does have value. either monetary or intrinsic, it doesn’t matter. by getting a tuition waiver, you don’t have to pay for the value you’re deriving from it. the “cost” of that value is 6 years of tuition payments. if you don’t like it, don’t purchase the commodity, but don’t claim that the tuition you don’t have to pay to get that degree is something that can be hand waved away.
lecturers are employed at many universities to teach the courses that you teach, for about the same that you make when tuition is factored in. my econ 101 prof. was a lecturer who got paid 50-60k a year. and i didn’t go to community college.
but the notion that to a university you are a perfect substitute for an actual professor’s labor is hilarious. if i didn’t think that you were serious.
why, exactly? just because it fits your argument?
newsflash. if i work at a company and they give me free season tickets to the local sports team as part of the agreement that i have to come work for them, that’s income that i have to pay taxes on.
I didn’t say that, and in fact I think the current shift of higher education towards more grad students and lecturers teaching classes instead of actual professors is a bad thing.
What I am saying is that grad students have significant value to a school, and the school may want to provide more support in order to be competitive with other schools. If not, then they will have fewer or worse graduate students apply or stay.
Further, it is perfectly legitimate to release information about the actual paycheck if the point you are trying to make is specifically about your ability to pay for things like food and housing.
It would be dishonest to release information about the paycheck only and then directly compare it to the paycheck of (say) a lecturer teaching the same class. But you have not shown that that is what is happening.
Except, at least in the hard sciences, it’s obviously not worth it to most individuals to pay tuition to get a higher degree, otherwise the University would just charge the cost of the tuition to the student, as is done in Medicine and Law. If a school stopped waiving tuition payments, it would stop getting Grad students, who on average (at least here) are worth more to the school in grant money then they absorb in costs.
Think of it this way, the University is saying I have to pay 40k to get a degree there. Since basically after the first year I’ll just be teaching for them, doing research for less then minimum wage via my stipend for one of their professors and working on a grant that they skim hundreds of thousands of dollars off, I (and everyone else) says thanks but no thanks. So the University says OK, we’ll charge you 40k, but then pay it for you. Sounds good to me, but the 40k that the University charges me, then pays to themselves on my behalf seems less like a paycheck, and more like an accounting trick.
and universities impart significant value to their grad students by conferring a degree at no direct cost to the student. the nonrecognition of this is what i take umbrage with.
and no, it wouldn’t be dishonest if you make the quid-pro-quo known, which is exactly what my problem is with. i’m not suggesting that grad students in these job actions don’t deserve/merit/need a raise “just because they’re actually making that plus the value of their tuition waiver”. there’s a market for their services and they have every right to unionize to exert market power.
rather i don’t appreciate this “woe be unto us” approach that is taken when they try to conceal the fact that they are paid, in kind and in currency, an amount far greater than poverty wages.
I never said that we get no value from the degree. I also accept that there are non-monetary aspects of an academic career that many PhD candidate consider important.
What i said was that, if these universities charged humanities grad students full fees, instead of providing tuition waivers, then virtually no-one would do it, because then the cost of the degree would not be worth the benefit.
Here it is, in very simple language:
6 years of subsistence level wages IS worth it, to those of us in the humanities.
What is NOT worth it is 6 years of subsistence-level wages PLUS a debt load of over $100,000 upon graduation.
Do you understand the difference between those things?
yes. you seem to have just suggested that you’re receiving 100k in “a benefit” that makes your obtaining your PhD economically rational for you. that benefit being the tuition you don’t have to incur.
and obtaining an M.D. is extremely valuable - and they need to take out loans to eat while they’re in school.
i do not have a problem with them negotiating - maybe they are underpaid, maybe they’re not, i’ve got no horse in that race.
but they should be, if they’re honest, negotiating from the position of “we make 45k a year [making a number up, 30k waiver, 15k stipend] and we feel that this unvervalues and underpays our labor and what we give to the university.”
instead, they play to the cheap seats and argue “we make 15k a year, and we feel that this undevalues and underpays our labor and what we give to the university.”
Or they could say “We get 15k a year (gross) to live on.”
That is a perfectly legitimate point to make. What would not be legitimate is saying “We get paid 15k a year, while a lecturer teaching the same class gets 50k, that isn’t right!”
