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

The BBQ Pit
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Dinsdale, I am not working as a TA. When I worked as a TA, I paid full tuition (in my province, tutition is fairly low, but is not waived to TAs and RAs), with no discounts or waivers of any sort as further compensation. I worked as a TA and held a few other jobs to keep a roof over my head at the university, and to keep a roof over my parent’s heads at the other end of the province, while I pursued an academic career – the degree and the teaching assistantship was the first step.

However the numbers are calculated, it comes down to a need for disposable income at a reasonable level to live on, despite there only being so many hours in a day to earn that income while still tending to one’s own studies, and only so many dollars that can be obtained through loans. What is a reasonable wage?

Well, take my TA job in the early 80s. To earn about $18,000 per year, I taught classes of 200+ students each week for the entire year (no summer break). That worked out to $6,000 per term. A full time course load for my students was five courses per term, for which they paid about $2,500 per term in tuition plus incidentals. That means that they each paid about $500 for my course. In short, the university took in about $100,000 for every course I taught, and paid me $6,000. Since I taught English, the overhead was minimal. In short, the TAs were a profit centre for the university. Being paid a living wage (which it was at that time), was expected given the profit it was making for the university. What it comes down to, is that TAs deliver inexpensive instruction in lieu of very expensive instruction given by full time professors. Asking for a living wage is not too much to ask for, given the tremendous profits that universites make through the use of TAs.

As far as how many hours a week I worked goes, it was officially ten hours per week, and I was prohibited from taking employment beyond that (although I did anyway). I also ran a computer lab several hours each day. Between the lab and the teaching, it tended to be between twenty and thirty hours per week, plus what I could pick up outside of the university. That did not leave as much time I would have liked to attend to my own studies, for which I was paying full tuition.

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Well, take MY TA job in the early 80s.

For 2 semesters I assisted profs - grading, discussion sections, and such. Got a tuition waiver and a monthly stipend. Also worked at least 2 part-time jobs away from the school.
Next 2 years I taught my own classes. Also picked up 2 RA (research assistant) gigs for 2 diff profs. That gave me 2 more stipends - one monthly and one hourly. Kept one of my outside jobs. Also gave me all kinds of other privileges - I recall access to supplies, copiers and generous library privileges.
Completed law school at the same time, and NEVER considered myself ill-used or over worked.

My wife also had an RA job. Looking back I have no doubt we were living near or below the poverty line, but we were happy and well-fed.

The situation may be different for students at different schools, in different states/countries, and at different education levels. My experience is limited to the particular school my kids attend, at which the fucking lazy-ass spoiled brats went on strike today. Fuck them. Kick their asses to the curb, and replace them with someone who wants the job.

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BTW, although slightly off topic, it might be worth looking at what post-graduate instructors are paid if they are hired on a sessional basis. A lot of the colleges and universities here in Ontario have been keeping costs down by reducing hiring of permanent professors, and instead have been relying on sessional instructors to carry a lot of the teaching load. For example, one college at which I taught as a sessional instructor had me teaching a course load that was about three times the number of classroom hours of permanent professors for about a third of the pay, and without any benefits such as medical, dental, and pension.

I tend to think of TAs, RAs and post-graduate instuctors as the chicken pluckers of the university system. You can pay as much as you like to them in chicken guts and feathers, but regardless of the value of the non-monetary compensation, they still require a living wage.

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That’s where a living wage comes in.

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Well Dinsdale, it could be that the TAs at your kids’ school really are lazy-assed spoiled brats, or it could be that they are no different than you and I were in the 80s, and no different from the grad students I encounter in my town, working their asses off to get whatever work they can. If the latter, then good for them for putting pressure on their school to pay a living wage. If the former, then why in the world would you send your kids to a school where the people teaching them are lazy-assed spoiled brats? Get them out of there and into somewhere where else next semester where the TAs are good.

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Why? I got one (in grad school, not undergrad, although I was employed throughout by the college), but I certainly didn’t require it. If it hadn’t been available, I might have chosen a different path, or I might not have. Maybe I would have taken out loans, something that is quite common to fund one’s education. Schools offer all sorts of part-time TA-like jobs to students, both undergrads and grad students. Should they be forbidden from doing so unless that job provides a living wage? People are pounding on the door to get into these programs.

What is a living wage anyway? The students striking at UIUC cited the university’s own calculation of $16,086 to live in Champaign-Urbana. This number is bullshit. I lived there for a few years and paid ~$5k/year in housing costs for a huge apartment WITH cable and internet and a bus stop on the corner. It’s called having a roommate. I felt like I was splurging paying $40/week on groceries. Trust me, it wasn’t rice and beans. That’s another ~$2k/year. I don’t know what the students there pay in healthcare. I had private insurance that was another $2k/year. Housing, food, and healthcare cost me <$10k/year.

This is not to say that folks there and elsewhere don’t have plenty to gripe about. I’m not so sure the university is up front about all the fees that get subtracted out of the pay. Plus, the sticking point for the current strike is no longer wage, but a guarantee that tuition wavers won’t be revoked. I think. It would be pretty shady to yank the waver on someone who is already a good chunk of the way through a program.

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To make a living. As I mentioned above, in the liberal arts, graduate school is more like the beginning of a career than like schooling in preparation for a career. Do I hope I will eventually become a full prof? Sure, but don’t entry level workers hope for promotions, as well?

And again - our program does not allow/strongly discourages graduate assistants from having employment outside the department. We cannot go get other part-time jobs.

Well, isn’t that the whole point of striking? Do demonstrate what would happen if you kicked them to the curb? I guarantee you, at my school at least, it would not be pretty.

And I agree - the only folks around a university who have it worse than the grad students are the sessional instructors.

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And yeah, in my program, at least, we’re not so worried about pay, but about consistent tuition wavers and access to decent insurance.

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Let’s think about this another way.

Tuition at some schools is obviously far more expensive than others. So we are saying here that in some measure, supposing identical stipends, an NYU student is better compensated than a Northern Nowhere State student.

Suppose we choose a sample of private sector employees. We can examine their cash inflows and outflows and their quality of life and, without knowing where they work or what they do, make a pretty good guess as to their compensation.

Choose a sample of PhD students. Can you examine their cash inflows and outflows and determine who is better compensated? Can you tell the NYU student from the NNS student?

Look, I spent a decade in the private sector before just going back for my PhD this year. My last role was as a statistician and consultant. I played every day in highly proprietary data that we monetized for, well, a lot of money. I was the recipient of this data and had access to proprietary tools worth huge sums. I could even in theory take what I learned and monetize it elsewhere. I got one hell of an education using these tools and data.

By no stretch of the imagination was this part of my compensation despite the fact that some people paid big money for it.

This is obviously not a strict analogue. But the fact that you receive something of value that has a price tag attached for someone else does not make this thing part of your “compensation”.

Good grief, I have taken a small fortune’s worth of statistical software training classes in the past several years. Naturally my company paid for this. When I apply for my next job in analytics, do you think I should include the $10k per year I expect in SAS classes in my salary history?

I really do not know why this is so difficult for some people, aside from their innate hostility towards academics.

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A TA needs money to live on, regardless of whatever benefits the job may carry.

If a TA has to chase about after further part time jobs in addition to the TA job, and in addition to the grad student’s own studies, then one has to wonder where the corners will be cut. From what I saw when going through, TAs who were tight on money obtained further jobs, but then started cutting down on the work they were actually doing for their TA jobs, such as not preparing for the classes they were teaching as thoroughly as they could have, and not taking the time to be insightful and helpful in their comments when grading papers. If TAs have a living wage, I expect that the quality of their teaching would be better than if they do not have a living wage and instead have to focus on various jobs in addition to being a TA.

By the same token, if a school wants to have their students taught by the best and brightest TAs, then the school will have to pay the best compensation, including a living wage, to those TAs relative to other schools. What quality can students expect of their school’s TAs if those TAs don’t even make a living wage when TAs at other schools do make a living wage? They can expect second rate TAs. Dinsdale, do you want your daughters taught by the best and the brightest, or do you want them taught by second rate TAs who are there in place of the best and the brightest because they don’t need a living wage thanks to their parents footing the bill?

Finally, I also think it is worth looking at how society benefits from paying TAs a living wage. Grad students are put to better use studying, or researching, or teaching, than flipping burgers. If they are not paid a living wage and have to take on jobs that are not beneficial to their development in their fields, then that is a waste of their time, and therefore a waste of the resources society put into getting them to where they are, and a waste of the benefits society can expect from them due to the delay in their career development, or due to the lack of focus in the later stages of their studies. Let’s get the engineers engineering, the teachers teaching, the lawyers – scrap that one – , the historians researching, rather than having them running about chasing low end jobs that waste the education that is paid for by both them and, more often than not, the public purse. It is a lot better for society if university graduates are using their education to advance their fields and to pay taxes, than to flip burgers.

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The program may discourage it, but if you’re a foreigner on a student visa, the government forbids it. You can only work for the university. So you can work as a TA/RA or you can work replacing books in their shelves at the university’s library, but you can’t flip burgers in the cafeteria’s MacD (because that one is not university-owned), and you can’t get both a job as a TA and one in the library.

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Most of all, universities really just want their PhD students to finish and not leave after a few years, rendering the exercise a complete waste for all parties involved. Universities don’t want doctoral students to get another job; they want them to finish their programs and produce some research. That’s why we are paid in the first place.

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Not that it should change anyone’s opinion, but a blurb in this a.m.'s Chicago Trib indicated that the biggest issue was tuition waivers. According to this brief article, TAs want a written guarantee that their current tuition waivers will continue.

Article also said the school was willing to up the pay - tho I’m sure some would still consider it inadequate.

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I think the TA situation is one that’s really difficult to generalize. In the program I was in, we had a perfectly livable stipend, a TAing requirement of only one semester, and guaranteed funding and health insurance. It was a sweet gig, and we’d have been crazy to strike. I was in a biomedical sciences program, so we had plenty of funding.
However, I have friends that were in other disciplines in programs across the country, and I was acquainted with the policies of other departments of the university I attended, and some of them were terrible. Students in an urban area, forbidden from taking other employment, trying to live on 10K a year, and lacking both health insurance and time to work on their thesis research. This was mostly for humanities students, though my friend who’s getting her Ph.D. in math has a fairly heavy teaching load. I understand why these students unionize.

Universities need more TAs than there are jobs for when they graduate, so they’re taking more students than they probably should, and paying them as little as they can get away with. It might have been worth it for these students if they had decent prospects for a good job after graduating, but that’s not even the case. I don’t blame them at all for trying to improve their living and working conditions by striking. I’m sure some of them are spoiled brats, but I think others just want to live on real food (not ramen) and not have to take out loans to afford a place to live (even with roommates) when they’re working full time for the privilege.

/edit: I believe you that a lot of the problem is uncertainty. My program guaranteed funding, but a lot of them don’t, and often the students have very little control over their funding source and level from semester to semester.

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Ditto.

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Could everyone who gives their experiences also give the field they are in? My wife, who was in biology, went to Dartmouth where support was guaranteed for all students, though some teaching was required. In Computer Science I went to Illinois and then Louisiana, both of which always gave tuition waivers with assistantships. In Illinois when I was there the CS department policy was to give RAs and TAs the same percentage wage the state gave faculty, which was more than fair. There was a unionization movement in some departments, but no one in CS was the slightest bit interested.

My daughter was in an Economics Ph.D. program where she got a waiver, and then moved into a Psychology program where she did also - but this was a fellowship, so it was a bit different.

My impression has been that many Ph.D. students in the liberal arts write their dissertations while holding down a real job, leading to the ABD phenomenon. ABDs are very rare in engineering and CS.

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My undergrad was PolSci.
While in law school and pursuing a masters in Pol Sci I assisted in the teaching of 2 PolSci Calsses, and then taught 2 different SpCom courses. And I was research assistant for one professor in the Sociology dept, and for a law prof.
All of my experience was at UIUC.

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I am in kind of an unusual interdisciplinary program basically in the humanities, though my own research is quantitative. It is a very small program (three of us per cohort) and we are taken care of. Our tuition is fully waived, we have insurance, and for what it is, the pay fairly generous. I am a little older and still have business interests, but it is by no means a burger-flipping job that will keep my from writing my dissertation.

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The grant is for a specific amount and the indirects are in addition to that, so 50% indirects would be an additional 1/3 to cover indirect cost activities due to the research being done in an higher ed institution: Operations and Maintenance, General and Departmental Admin, Sponsored Research Admin (essential for compliance), Library, and Student Admin and Services. “Other Institutional Activity” like intercollegiate athletics and basket-weaving are not included in the calculation.

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My husband is a Ph.D. student in clinical psychology. He is currently a TA for a statistics course with 75 students. He is an incredibly hard-working guy and very dedicated. He has a nervous breakdown approximately once a week–and by nervous breakdown I mean he weeps openly. The amount of hours he is required to put in for this TA job by far exceeds the number of hours scheduled by the university. He has no time to write his Master’s thesis or perform his other responsibilities because of the life-draining Sisyphean task of teaching this class, grading tests, and holding office hours. Without question he is being exploited by the university.

I don’t deny that the tuition waver is a fantastic thing. I have plans to pursue a Ph.D. myself and without the tuition waver I don’t think I could do it in good conscience. But the reality is that the living wage provided by the university is about $15k and we need about $30k to live. I am a full-time Master’s student with an additional required 24-hour-weekly internship (for which I do not get paid.) The idea of either of us taking on a second job right now is hysterically funny. I haven’t even seen him in a week and I’m not going to see him again until next Tuesday.

I recently was reading a comment in the New York Times about how people go to graduate school to avoid the real world and live the ‘‘cushy graduate school lifestyle’’ and I wanted to punch whoever said that in the face. What bullshit. I work three times harder now than I did when I had a full-time job (and I thought I was busting my ass then.) My husband does the work of 4 men.

I think there should be a clear distinction between the position of TA and the position of graduate student. The tuition waver should be a benefit in good faith that the student’s research will bring prestige to the school–after all, why the hell else would you admit a grad student into the program? The student’s position as TA should be treated like any other job, and negotiations about that job should not include their benefits of graduate study such as the tuition waiver. Therefore I think it’s perfectly acceptable to say you make $15k as a TA.

What is far more important, though, is my husband actually having the time to do the goddamn work he was admitted into the program to do. It’s fucking unreal what they expect out of him. I have never seen him more miserable than he is as a TA. It makes me wonder if the $100k more of debt would have been worth it.