I sympathize, olives. From 1989-95 I was a Ph.D. student in an interdisciplinary program, kind of like Maeglin’s from the sound of it, where I had full tuition waivers and health insurance, moderate RA/TA duties, but only a small stipend (small as in $7500 per year when I started).
I had held a pretty remunerative job for four years before grad school and banked about $10K that I used to supplement my income during grad school, and I also accumulated a few thousand dollars of debt before I finished. It was well worth it, and it was very fulfilling and rewarding, but no way was it by any stretch of the imagination a “cushy lifestyle”.
One word of comfort: Teaching tasks are by far the most time-consuming the first couple of times you do them. It’s always a tough job but after the first couple terms it does start to seem at least humanly possible.
I observe that my TAs live at a rather higher standard than I did in grad school. I didn’t go to concerts or movies, have cable TV, buy mixed drinks, eat dinner out, or go on vacation. I manged to get an assistantship for 2 of 6 years of grad study. It had no tuition waiver and paid $1000 a year. I had several part-time jobs and took out loans that I’ll still be paying when I’m 63. If grad students can get assistantships, more power to them, but also: Mine are making more money than I did by far, even with cost of living adjustments, and when I see them drinking an $11 martini and complaining that they’re underpaid, I can’t get very worked up on their behalf.
Personally I think it’s a pretty good deal and I’m not sure why students would be striking. I wish I had the luxury of applying for the Ph.D. directly, but my field requires a Masters degree before a Ph.D. So that’s $100k of debt I’ll have that my husband will never have (not to mention two extra years of school, blargh.) I think there are already some very strong incentives for doctoral study just based on the tuition waiver alone. We work our asses off, but we aren’t materially deprived. We can see a movie or whatever, if we can convince one another we have the time (which is not often.)
I’m aware there are people out there who have no choice but to do more with less. I was working full-time in high school, so I’m not a stranger of ‘‘you gotta do what you gotta do.’’ One of my classmates is a participant in the same rigorous program as I am, but she has two children and two full-time jobs. She is also surprisingly coherent in class. I’m really not sure how she makes that happen.
I still believe TAing should be considered apart from graduate study. It seems to me that grad schools like to pretend that TAing is some fantastic easy way to make money as part of your complete benefits package, but as the work really seems disproportionate to the purpose and the pay, I’m not convinced that is truly the case. My real issues around the TA job have to do with what is reasonably expected for one person to do. This might be a special hell reserved for only psychology students, or maybe he just got unlucky. Kimstu thanks for the encouragement. I’ll pass it along. This is his first semester of TA and I’m hoping he gets the hang of it soon.
olives - thank you for sharing your experiences. And I am sorry that your current situation is so trying.
What exactly do you mean by this? Was your husband REQUIRED to TA in order to pursue his studies? Could he not have taken out loans or found some other way to subsidize his studies? Maybe the two of you could have taken turns working full-time, while the other attended school. If his TA duties are so trying, doesn’t he have the option of quitting?
Please understand that I do not mean to be a jerk when I say this. But it isn’t absolutely required that someone - the school or anyone else - subsidize your family’s studies. You are choosing your course - more power to you. But if it is too costly or onerous, you could certainly change tack. I do not believe it is exactly unheard of for people to decide not to follow their dreams, in large part because doing so is more expensive than they feel they are able to expend, because it is excessively inconvenient or stressful at their current stage of life, or countless other reasons.
I truly respect your efforts to make the sacrifices necessary to pursue your choices.
I won’t attempt to speak for her husband, but teaching experience is an essential part of the graduate school experience if you plan to teach once you have your degree. In other words, there are professional as well as financial reasons for taking it on. And yes, the time allotted for T.A.ing is completely unreasonable, but it’s nothing compared to the unreasonable expectations you get later on!
Alternatively, you could re-negotiate with your employer for better conditions, which is what these TAs are doing, through unionization.
I agree with olivesmarch4th that separating teaching duties from the graduate programs themselves would be beneficial, and I can tell you that in the program I was in, our teaching requirement was required by the program and had nothing to do with our stipends, which were from an NIH training grant.
Universities sometimes use TAs to teach students instead of professors (several of my friends spent grad school teaching full courses they were responsible for, even though they were called TAs), so they can use less qualified people to work for less than a living wage to teach their undergrads. The undergrads paying full price for the privilege, while the TAs don’t have time to work on their thesis, even though it’s their primary reason for being there in the first place. In my opinion, the undergrads (who are paying to be taught by fully qualified individuals) AND the grad students (who, while teaching should be part of their training, should be left withenough time to do the work they signed up for) are getting ripped off, because the university doesn’t want to hire instructors.
I posted above that my tendencies tend to be pro-labor. But I do support some limits on the ability of public employees to strike - especially if they choose to do so at times when the beneficiaries of their services are most vulnerable.
I have not seen anything suggesting that these TAs’ contract was currently under negotiation. I would be shocked if the school would have agreed to a contract that expired in mid-semester just a couple of weeks before finals.
If they struck the day before the semester started or the day after it ended, I would fully support their doing so. But striking when they did impresses me as far less negotiating than attempted extortion. JMO.
Well, that “undergrads are paying to be taught by fully qualified individuals” is debatable. Not all universities are primarily educational institutions. If it’s no secret that undergraduate classes at Big State U are taught by TA’s, then that is what you’re paying for if you choose to go there.
In programs at universities of a certain type, the answer is typically yes. Teaching (and doing grunt work for professors in the department) are required by your fellowship. If you do not have a fellowship (save perhaps in the first year in for some departments that do not offer funding), then you are typically not admitted. Overproduction of PhDs has been enough of a problem that in competitive departments, if you don’t qualify for a fellowship, you don’t qualify for a degree.
My life was far “cushier” when I worked a high-stress job in financial services. I find grad school to be far less stressful, per se, but it is far more demanding and rigorous. Accuracy and rigor seem to matter more, paradoxically, when millions of dollars are not actually on the line. Go figure.
Most students tend not to be on campus during the summer, so forget about negotiating in the summer; that has to be left to the school term. Striking after the school term is of course nonsensical. Like it or not, negotiations and strikes will take place while the grad students are present and employed as TAs, which means during the school term. Calling a mid-term strike extortion is just as silly, given the greatly uneven bargaining position that TAs are in, given that universities can continue to have the couses taught by unassisted professors including sessional instructors, and given that universities don’t lose revenue during TA strikes. The only people who significantly lose out during a mid-term strike are the TAs themselves who have to find other work, and the students whom they are teaching, who don’t get the extra help they had expected when they or their parents paid their tuition. Needless to say, the students who are being taught are not parties to the negotiations, and have no power over the university given that they had already paid their tuition, so your kids not getting what they paid for can not be construed as extortion by the TAs against the university.
Now this is something I did not know. Thank you. In my ignorance I had assumed that getting accepted into a degree program was a separate matter, and had essentially lumped “fellowships” in with financial aid/work study/scholarships/etc.
I suspect there may well be different requirements at different schools, and even WRT different majors/degrees in a particular school. At the school and in the disciplines I have experience with, TAs were not limited to PhD candidates, and were not tied to “fellowships.”
Muffin - I am sure it comes as no surprise to you that we differ on this as well. But I appreciate hearing your views.
Seems a little odd to suggest a bargaining unit can only negotiate when it is the most “convenient” for them. And coincidental that they couldn’t walkout any time other than a couple of weeks before finals. Don’t get me wrong - I have no doubt the school (management) is being jerks as well. I basically tend to distrust EVERYBODY!
There is typically very little external assistance for most people, save in the form of research grants. Your fellowship is what keeps you in business. The McCracken program at NYU, for example, pays from about $21k-$24k per year and requires a considerable teaching load and many hours of grunt work per week for faculty. This can take the form of administrative duties, lab supervision, or even more dull things. These burdens can easily be 30 or more hours per week, depending on your class load and on the faculty you work for.
On top of this, of course, you are either taking classes, preparing for your comprehensive exams, or writing your dissertation.
This is definitely not how it works now, and I happen to be partly in political science, too. There are no TAs who do not receive fellowships, nor does anyone receive a fellowship who does not take a turn teaching Intro to American Government with ten thousand students.
In most Tier 1 research universities, at least in the humanities, the admission/fellowship/TA nexus is closed and unbreakable. You can’t get any one of those things without also getting the others. They won’t admit you unless they feel that you deserve a fellowship (tuition plus stipend), and you don’t get to TA unless you’re in the actual program as a candidate. While the university itself obviously imposes budgetary constraints on each department, the department members themselves determine not only who gets in (from grades, GRE, letters, etc.), but also who gets the funding, because the the two groups are inextricably linked.
Also, as Maeglin points out, the overproduction of PhDs means that the tendency has been in this direction for a while. There was a time when even top departments would offer positions without stipends, and even positions without full tuition remission, to students who were willing to pay. But the glut of PhDs (which has been a problem in the humanities since the early 1970s) led many departments to realize that they could not, in good conscience, take on a whole bunch of people who had no chance of getting a job in their field. As the people who didn’t qualify for fellowships also tended to be the weaker students, departments moved to a model whereby fewer students were admitted, and all admitted students would be funded with tuition waivers and a stipend.
There are probably still too many PhDs coming out of our universities in many disciplines, a fact that has been exacerbated by the recent economic crisis. In my own field, history, dozens of universities canceled searches for new faculty last year after the crisis hit and budgets were slashed. This was not just the case in cash-strapped public institutions, either; big guns like Ivy League universities and other top-flight private schools had their own problems, as the meltdown led to shrinking endowments. The president of my grad university sent out an email early this year saying that all new faculty hiring, other than for positions with endowed chairs, would be frozen until further notice.
The history department was in the middle of a job search in which the original 200-odd candidates had been whittled down to three, and those three had all been flown in for 2-day on-campus interviews. The committee was almost ready to make a decision on the new hire, when the university pulled the plug on the search due to the economic crisis. Hundreds of man-hours and thousands of dollars down the drain on the search.
On a more general note, there is another problem with applying a simple economic model to grad school. As i said earlier, while the university places a nominal value of $30,000 per year on tuition, there is almost no-one who would actually pay that, and if you can’t get someone to pay $X for something, then it’s really not worth $X.
But, even more than that, there’s the fact that the vendor/customer relationship is different in this case than in most others. The reason is that the university wants more from its customers than just their money. They might actually be able to find a few people willing to pay $30K a year, but the problem is that a willingness to pay is not the only criterion here; you have to be willing to pay, AND academically good enough to be in the program.
This is very different from, say, someone selling a $30,000 car. If you’re selling a car, you really don’t give a fuck what the customer does with it. You take their money, you give them the car, transaction over. You have no particular investment in whether the customer drives the car responsibly, or is a good ambassador for your brand of car. The reputation of your car really depends on the car itself, and not on the individuals who are your customers.
For a university, though, a central part of the “product” is the people they turn out. You can’t simply accept into your PhD program any schlub with $30K a year to blow, because that schlub carries with him or her the reputation of your university as an institution of research and learning. If all the PhD grads from Big Private U. get a reputation for being useless academics, that will affect who wants to go there. In return for its tuition waivers and stipends, the university doesn’t get only some basic TA or RA work; it gets something even more important yet less tangible: the perpetuation of its brand, of its standards, and of its quality.
So, while it might not be completely accurate to say that grad students get only their stipends, and we should make some allowance for the value of the tuition waiver itself, it is also not completely accurate to say that the university gets only TA/RA work, and we need to make allowance for the value of the grad students to the future value of the university itself, as its products and its ambassadors. And if you think this value is negligible, take a look at what a big deal university PR departments make whenever one of their alums wins an important award, is posted to an important position, writes a well-reviewed book, etc.
What is expected of TAs nowadays? When I did it, I taught a few relatively small recitation sessions which were supplemental to the lectures to the full class which the professor did, I graded papers, and I hung around helping the kids with their programming assignments. I don’t remember it as being particularly onerous, or something which interfered with my research very much. When I switched schools I did spend one term teaching 3 classes, which was ridiculous, but I got paid far more than TA wages, was considered junior faculty, and didn’t even pretend to be doing research.
olivesmarch4th, is your husband teaching 75 students, that is, is the class all his, or is he assisting a professor in teaching?
The last time I had T.A.s, they were given 10 hours / week to teaching. None of what they had to do was all that bad, but it was easily over 10 hours / week. When I was a graduate student, two other T.A.s and I had to design and team-teach a course on our own. Our advisor was paid for it but did nothing other than attend one of our lectures each and enter the final grades we handed him into the computer system. He was paid several thousand dollars for that 3½ hours’ worth of work, while we were pulling down $1200 / month for considerably more labor.
On another note, regarding the strikes, when I was at UCLA the UAW was aggressively trying to unionize the T.A.s. As far as I can see, it had more to do with trying to expand their base and pocket a few more union dues than it did with the underprivileged T.A., and they were playing off both the pro-labor sympathies and ignorance of the graduate students. They came to our department with their platform, but since we were an interdisciplinary program who would have been harmed rather than helped by it, we voted unanimously against joining the union.
Thank you and others who have dispelled my ignorance on this point. I don’t know if UofI is not a “Tier 1 research university”, or simply if things have changed this much over the past 25 years, but none of what you state was the case when I was there.
As I said, I - and many others - was a TA, and a graduate student, and not a fellow. The subject simply never came up. I never sought a fellowship, nor was it suggested/required that I do so. I will take your word that things are quite different at most schools today. I personally do not know if that is the case at UofI.
Spoke with one of my kids yesterday. She is studying molecular biology and my son aero engineering. Said they were not too affected as it seemed the TAs most involved were in the humanities. Just one not-too-terribly aware student’s impression.
In many universities, humanities grad students receive stipends that are considerably lower than those of students in the sciences. Fellowships for the latter are often funded, in part or wholly, by large research grants from the government or private industry. Despite all the right-wing bloviating about how much public money gets spent by the National Endowment for the Humanities and other similar agencies, the fact is that outside money for the humanities pales in comparison with that available for the sciences, medicine, engineering, etc.
There are fellowships and grants available to humanities professors, but often the amount is simply enough to allow that professor take time off from teaching to work on a book, and maybe hire a research assistant for a while. Science grants can run for multiple years, and sometimes fund whole cadres of employees.
All of this means that, in determining grad student stipends, humanities departments are generally at the mercy of whatever the university allocates to them. About four years ago, my own grad department tried a fund-raising appeal of its own, because it was losing potential grad students to other schools that were offering higher stipends.
As i mentioned earlier in the thread, i was never dissatisfied with my situation. While not huge, our stipends were enough to live on, especially in a cheap city like Baltimore. But the stipends in places like New York or Berkeley or Boston or Washington were not that much higher (if any), and the cost of living in those places is astronomical. Also, as i said, my workload was very light, largely due to the large grad/undergrad ratio at our school; i knew people at public schools (University of Maryland, U. Texas Austin) who got less than me, and had much higher teaching loads. High enough that, during a semester when they were teaching, they really couldn’t get any of their won work done, which sort of defeats the purpose of being in grad school.
