Dear graduate student teaching assistants who strike: stop fucking lying about how much you're paid!

The BBQ Pit
21

You’re half right.

I do concede that the tuition waiver has value. Furthermore, i concede that getting the tuition waiver does, indeed, mean that i’m getting a benefit that makes it worthwhile to do the degree.

But the fact that the university lists the tuition at $30,000 a year ($100K+ total) does not mean that the tuition is worth $30,000 a year ($100K+ total) to me. If it were worth that much to me, i’d be willing to pay it. The fact that i (and every single humanities grad student i know) would not have done the degree without the waiver suggests that, whatever nominal value the university places on tuition, it is actually worth less than that to me (and to everyone else i know).

I agree that is is wrong to simply say (using your numbers) “We get $15,000 a year” and imply that this is the only benefit that grad students receive. As Carmady suggests, arguing that “We get $15K a year to live on” would be more accurate. But i don’t think your formulation, which would require the students to say, “We make $45K a year,” as if the $30,000 waiver were somehow instantly convertible into whatever type of income you desired, represents the situation accurately, either.

The thing is, in economic terms, something is only worth what someone is willing to pay for it. At my university, every single PhD student (in the humanities, at least) gets a tuition waiver, because the university knows that people will not pay $30,000 a year for a humanities PhD. The university can put on its paperwork (and indeed they do) that the waiver is worth $30,000 (actually, it’s now about $38,000, having increased considerably faster than inflation), but that doesn’t mean that’s what it’s actually worth to the people who get it.

If i give you something, and tell you that i have valued the object at $30,000, is my valuation objectively true, even if you would not pay 30 grand for it?

22

You seem to be suggesting that economic gain is the only reason for obtaining a graduate degree, a mistaken premise.

I have (so far) not benefitted economically by obtaining a graduate degree. I would have done better financially to have entered the work force after college in the mid-90s. I enjoy the work I do, however, and I’m grateful for the opportunities I’ve had because of my field.

That’s not to say I would have made the same decisions had the economic realities been clearer, but that brings up another point: graduate students haven’t always had much time in the working world, and don’t necessarily have a deep grasp of what they are gaining or sacrificing by being where they are.

23

I did not receive a tuition waver (total tuition was about $3000 a year) while getting my MS. I made about $20,000 a year between being a teaching assistant for two years plus a summer on the research grant or eventually entirely on the research grant. So could I have plead poverty seeing as how I didn’t get a tuition waver and was only making about $15,000 a year as a TA?

24

IIRC, there are quite a few strips in PhDcomics dealing with this. And also, I think there is a strip about his school talks where he specifically mentions a certain university that encourages graduate students with family to apply for government programs designed for the poor (as they qualify).

I want to remind that even though the tuition itself is waived, doesn’t mean that other “university associated fees” aren’t. Because I’m out of state, I have to pay $25 per semester as an out of student… Then my credit tuition is waived, but that is silly (more later)… yet I have to pay all the student fees, technology fee, transportation fee, activity fee, health care fee (separate from my insurance), sports and recreation fee, etc. So I still have to pay about $2000 out of pocket per year to cover those fees.

The credit hours? That is a bit silly. How many actual classes one takes varies upon the program and the year… And what about research? In many places, those count as “credit”… But why should I pay the university credits for a “class” where I’m basically doing all the work? It is, after all, part of my job!

25

I never had any idea how much my tuition was. I just looked it up and this year it’s $32.5k. That money came straight out of the taxpayers’ pockets via the NSF and NIH via the grants they gave my advisor. The only time the university ate the costs was my first year when I took classes and taught a lab section. I think overhead was paid on tuition (not sure) and it definitely was on salary, so while $25k went into my pocket*, the University got $56k from the government. I’m not factoring in healthcare because I’m not really sure what numbers were involved.

This is the same for pretty much every single science graduate student there, +/- a bit due to differences in stipend. I’m not sure if the humanities students brought in much of anything. They got paid less and wanted to start a union. They were very belligerent and generally pissed everyone off.

*I’m in no way complaining about my stipend. I was rich!

26

I suspect TAs allow universities to get a lot more mileage out of professors for a lot less money. A professor with a TA can teach an intro class with 50 students. A professor at a research university would laugh if you asked him to take on the same student load without someone to do the grading. Ergo, more tuition-paying students are cycled through with the same number of profs + some inexpensive TAs.
ETA–I’m not complaining. I regarded my scholarship as basically a free PhD. But I would be interested to see the economics of running a grad program.

27

I don’t think they should include the tuition waivers, as it’s not really taxable income. I don’t know about other people in Ph.D. programs, but my tuition was considered a scholarship and not eligible for income tax. Thus, not legally income.
No one involved misunderstands what they mean when they complain about their wages (the people to whom these strikes most are relevant are other graduate students and universities), so why does it matter if they include the scholarships? It still allows other universities to see how little they can pay their students before they start worrying about strikes, and it allows grad students to compare their stipend packages to others. Including the tuition waiver may actually make things more confusing, as it bundles the living wage with the amount the university had chosen for the program’s tuitiion (which may as well have been plucked out of the air, for all it affects anyone but the university’s accounting office and someone writing a grant).

28

Where in the world do grad students get to unionize? That’s insane.

29

Because back home, official unemployment (1) was 24% and, if I’d gone to graduate school, I would have had to pay for it as well as teach (no stipend unless I got a grant from a different source).

(1): people who had finished any kind of degree in the last 2 years not counted.
But the thing is, in many US schools you don’t even have the option of saying “I’m rich, I’ll just pay tuition and not teach,” as a rich classmate of mine found out. The inflated tuition is just a way to make it look as if the university is giving you something, when actually they never expect anybody to pay that money. Saying “tuition for graduate students is zero but they are all expected to teach or become RAs” wouldn’t sound like they give you something.

30

Do you think they should be prevented from doing so?

31

In the US, though I don’t think its terribly common.

32

Don’t you mean “an m.d.”, mr. cummings?

33

Not that I disagree with anything else you’ve written, but this is highly misleading. Maybe 1/10 of 1% of newly minted J.D.'s will be going into positions like this. Most new lawyers who go to work for someone else…

…unless and until the new lawyer starts generating clients of their own. Which, I would suggest, is analogous to an academic generating grant money on their own. And it’s only about 25% or so of new lawyers that would start at around $60K. Middling students would probably be in the $40K range, at least around here.

34

What are you talking about? Grad students who work as TAs can definitely unionize in the US. According to Wikipedia, there are 28 grad student unions in the US. TAs at both my undergrad and graduate institutions are unionized.

Sadly, although I am a grad student, I am not a TA (or GSI, as we call them here at Michigan). I am in a department with very, very few undergrads and it is extremely competitive to get those spots. Getting a GSI spot in another department is very difficult as they prefer to give the funding to people within the department. Massive amount of debt, here I come.

35

Your analogy is flawed, football tickers are a perk, tuition to be enrolled in a PhD is a requirement for the job. A better comparison would be if your employer sent you to a 3 week training class and put you up in a hotel and paid for your meals. None of that would be taxable.

36

But exactly zero percent of new academics can do this, at least in the humanities.

Not analogous at all, at least in the humanities. Humanities professors can get individual fellowships, but there is nothing like the number of large grants awarded in the sciences.

Humanities professors almost never even have the opportunity to bring in multi-million dollar grants, and to oversee large grant-funded projects in the way that faculty in the sciences, medicine, etc. do.

37

TAs at my kids’ college are discussing strike. I’m not the least bit sympathetic. If they don’t want the gig, they can go flip burgers.

My wife and I both worked as TAs/RAs at the same school my kids go to. Tuition waiver plus stipend made it an incredibly sweet gig. That we were able to get out of law school with no debt was HUGE.

I believe just after we left, they changed the rules that the tuition had to be declared as income. If that is the case, then it sure seems disingenuous not to include it as your income.

38

There’s so much absurdity in this thread. At this point in my degree, I am no longer taking classes, and yet I have to be continually registered. I should be considering my tuition waver as income even though I’m not getting any instruction for it?

A wise professor once told me that (in the humanities) one should consider grad school the beginning of one’s career, not the end of one’s schooling. This is my full-time job. We are, in fact, not supposed to accept employment outside of the department. Sure, I get the benefit of ending up with a degree, but I certainly don’t consider my tuition waver as income.

As to grad students unionizing - I sure wish we could here. Yes, we chose this path in life so we could “go flip burgers”, but I think it’s also appropriate to try to improve our lot. If we’re so unimportant that we should all choose different paths in life, no one should care if we strike, correct?

In our program, insurance is an issue, too. When we’re in classes, things are pretty great, I’ll be the first to tell you that. But once we pass our comprehensive exams, we’re (usually) no longer considered graduate assistants, we’re considered lecturers. The way it works out, if we pay for our own insurance, is that we would be paid $12,000/year. Before taxes.

I chose to go to grad school because I love my subject. I chose it knowing it wasn’t the most profitable career in the world. But I would still like to receive medical care if I need it (crazy Americans), have a roof overhead and be able to eat regularly.

39

They’re not lying about how much they’re paid. They’re paid about $15K a year. Their total compensation is more like $45K (theoretically, at least), but that is absolutely not the same thing as what they’re paid. Tuition is considered part of their benefits package, just the same as any health insurance or retirement plan your employer offers is considered part of your benefits package. Discussing these as separate pots of money is the normal and acceptable convention when talking about how much a job pays.

I mean, when someone asks you how much your job pays, you tell them a general salary range, right? You don’t total up how much your vacation and sick leave and insurance and 401k matching add up to, add that to your salary, and tell someone you make that much money. Nobody talks about their compensation using that convention; expecting grad students to do is every bit as disingenuous as you accuse them of being.

40

actually, people would probably talk about an item of non-monetary compensation that comprised 2/3 (with our made-up figures) of their entire payment for services rendered, unless they wanted to deliberately conceal that to bias the perspective.

college football coaches who are paid 3-4 million dollars a year “only make” something around 1m of that in “salary” - the rest is incentives, guaranteed retirement pensions, side deals, etc.

corporate CEOs are only “paid” 800k a year for their services - but they also collect stock options worth tens of millions of dollars. no one says that CEOs make/are paid only 800k.