That’s already happened. I was one of the few students in either graduate program that I was in who was born in this country. CNN reported a few months ago that the number of foreign graduate students has dropped in the past few years as well. No longer are people from China and India so desperate for jobs here that they are willing to take on graduate study in the US. There are better prospects in their own country.
As a rule, no.
And I’m another whose school didn’t give a flip about me (although one professor did, and recommended me for an excellent semi-academic job). Exit interview was optional, no formal placement aid, no follow-up or monitoring.
That’s sort of my point, the college isn’t really doing them any favor, other than issuing the degree, which is essentially worthless. Student, to me, implies education and classes. In the sciences you finish taking classes after about 18 months. The remaining 6.5 years is to work. To run experiments. If graduate students all up and walked out tomorrow, science would stop until they could be replaced with employees.
That can’t be said for real students. If Yale undergrads walked out tomorrow, replacing them with employees would be rather silly.
Graduate students are not students. They are employees. They serve a purpose that would otherwise have to be filled by paying someone to do it. As such Yale and Columbia get a LOT more in return than they give. As I mentioined, the going rate for a research technician is over 40K per year. The rate for a graduate student (doing the exact same thing, but working twice the hours) is 20K per year. What do Yale and Columbia give up in order to save that money? The degree, which costs them virtually nothing (professors get paid not a dime more to teach those graduate classes, and it shows).
One of the reasons that I chose to come to WVU was because of the TA package they offered; full tuition waiver (though to be fair, even out of state is only $10k/year) and I make $472 stipend bi-monthly working for the Freshman Engineering office; in addition, I do have major medical insurance along with the ability to visit Student Health for the minor stuff in one of the rare fees I do have to pay. It’s not probably quite as large a stipend as other universities may pay, but it’s quite comfortable for Morgantown, and definitely gives me some pocket money to pursue homebrewing and craft beer as my hobbies.
Funding here is almost universal, at least in the CSEE department, maybe because unfortunately West Virginia University has a horrible image problem (“Where Greatness is Learned and Couches are Burned!”) and they’re doing their damndest to bring in a better class of graduate student here. Are there abuses here? Certainly there are some horrid professors taking advantage of their RAs (but I want to specify very few…most of the department are excellent teachers who genuinely care about students), most of whom are Indian and can be threatened with deportation if they don’t “fulfill their duties”. But all in all, most of the people here are genuinely happy here.
I’ve never heard anything about unionization down here, maybe because I’m up on the engineering campus and not down at the main campus; nonetheless, I don’t think I’d be in support of it, mostly because I get a higher than average stipend and they’ve already given me plenty, and in state law my duties are already well laid out in writing, so they really can’t do too much to me (what are they going to do…deport me to PA?)
Some specifics on the current strike:
It’s probably worth noting that no science or math grad students are taking part in the Yale strike. GESO (the striking “Graduate Employees and Students Organization”) isn’t on very good terms with math/science TAs.
In fact, the strikers represent a minority of PhD candidates in even the social sciences and humanities:
GESO refuses to release the numbers from its strike vote, except to say that 82 percent of members present voted to strike. Interestingly, that’s the same figure released by the Columbia group. Funny thing.
(In another interesting coincidence, GESO timed the start of its strike with Yale’s pre-frosh program. Stiking GESO members went on to do their best to disrupt several pre-frosh tours, chanting to drown out the tour guides while their members chatted up the admits and distributed GESO literature. Oh, and paper flowers–evidently they believe their struggle bears some semblance to the Vietnam-era peace movement.)
GESO also declined to publicize the strike vote meeting except by word-of-mouth (most GESO meetings are publicized through posters, etc.), making it easier to pack the vote with strike supporters. Its claims of widespread support just haven’t panned out . The small number of grad students actually striking, amongst GESO and non-GESO students alike, belies GESO’s claim to be at the vanguard of the PhD Proletariat.
I meant to add a word on the duties of Yale graduate students. Most social science/humanities grad students spend their first two years completing their coursework (they don’t teach any sections, though they do get the annual stipend). They spend the rest of their time at Yale working on their dissertations and TAing (generally two sections of about twenty students each week).
Also, the CNN article is misleading: the $18k stipend is only for grad students in the humanities and social sciences. Science grad students tend to receive significantly larger stipends (around $35k, if memory serves), largely because they do research.
That’s obviously a matter of opinion. If the degree is worthless, then I guess you wouldn’t have any reason to go to that college, so it’d be a moot point. Why would anyone go to college for no reason?
They give up the tuition that you would be paying if they didn’t waive it. Do you think colleges charge tuition just to be mean?
Hmmm…I’m looking at this again, and I’m confused. Is that 40K for a full-time job? And if so, you’re saying grad students work 80 hours per week just doing research?
NO grad students in the sciences get 35k! The stipend is usually between 15(chemistry) to 22 (biomedical).
A research technician is a 9 to 5 job, and earns around 40K. A graduate student is generally expected to work about 80 hours a week (I was told I could take “some time off on Sundays, if I was religious”) and, yes, after the first 18-24 months, it is all just doing research.
Sorry, and to clarify, in the first 18-24 months, you’re taking classes, but they aren’t a significant amount of your day. Maybe an hour or two a day (studying is on your own time) and the remaining ten hours a day is doing research during this period as well.
To give my 2 cents on the way to fix it, though it’s pie in the sky, is to make graduate school in the sciences more like every other graduate school (medical, law etc.). You would pay tuition, with the understanding that the PhD would take four years to earn. This would institute something of a barrier to entry, and thus stem the tide of people getting PhDs simply because they don’t know what else to do (I used the term “worthless” because there are simply so many PhDs out there, that if a decent job opens up, the receive literally thousands of applications. Well under 10% of graduate students will ever get that tenure track position that they are supposedly training for.). It would also serve to improve the teaching, as the tuition money could be used to pay professors additional salary to teach classes, thus providing an incentive to give a crap.
After four years, you have your PhD, and are free to shop it on the open market for postdoc positions. There would be fewer PhDs, and the postdoc postions would be allowed to be on the free market (rather than set by NIH grants, as they currently are); if a professor wants to hire a postdoc, he has to find the funds to do it, and if he wants a good postdoc, he has to find more funds (isn’t this the way ALL careers work?). But, the PhDs would be of higher quality due to the better education, and the fact that with the improved job outlook, better quality students would be attracted into the sciences.
Again, I know I come across disgruntled, and it just isn’t true. I left academia for industry, and have no intention of returning, so I have no incentive to see the situation change, other than a big picture desire to have science in the U.S. continue to be the best in the world.
Sorry, the $3 was a typo. It’s $$25,000 $$25,000.
25,000 Double Dollars? I’ll take it.
Well what you’re describing sounds pretty bad and I agree it needs to be fixed. The article in the OP seems to be talking about teaching assistants though, as opposed to research assistants. The teaching assistants aren’t working 80 hours a week, are they?
Another question, too - Is that 80 hours a week of only working for the university, or are you counting your own work towards your thesis? Because I can possibly see putting in that much work into your own studies, but I wouldn’t really count that as something I’m getting paid for.
p.s. - Forgive me if that’s a dumb question. I really have no idea how things work in the sciences. I was a music major.
Let me preface this by saying I’m not challenging your experience, either as a graduate being surveyed by his department, or someone being worked very hard for low pay.
I’m challenging how correct it is to use it as a benchmark for the experience of all graduate students.
I know for a fact that despite what your school did or didn’t do, some programs do indeed collect data on their graduates. Trust me.
And as for your working 80 hours a week thing, spending very little time on coursework before your reached candidacy, and so on… My graduate school experience was different, although I was on a campus that was already unionized, and was not in the sciences. Lest anyone read Fiveyear’s comments and blanch in horror, please realize that not every graduate program is run that way.
There are many problems with graduate education in the U.S. However, I am not sure that fiveyearlurker’s experience is an accurate yardstick of how serious or widespread they are, nor am I convinced that unioning graduate employees is the best way to solve them.
I agree with what you’ve said 110%. I wish I felt comfortable saying more on the subject. It truly is abuse, and the penalty for failure in the eyes of your betters is nothing less than potentially catastrophic for yourself, so you endure under what is little better, at times, than a state of constant anxiety. Then watch rent control in certain municipalities evaporate. Plus some other shitty things. I had days where getting hit by a truck didn’t seem so bad, considering what I thought were the alternatives. Being right in the end mattered squat.
And that’s all I’m gonna say about that.
We’re going to start calling you Publius Two-Times[sup]*[/sup].
Stranger
Re: Goodfellas
I can’t talk for teaching assistants, and I know little about them.
The figure 80 was probably on the high end, but not by much. If you’re doing 40 per week, you’re going to be culled from the herd rather quickly. I can’t say any grad students were doing 40 per week. Vacation days are also rather difficult to come by. I took a total of about three weeks over six years. And, that was probably about the norm. Wild guess? 60 hours average a week for a grad student or postdoc. 60 hours is what is listed as the number of hours worked by about a third of PhD scientists in the biological sciences in the article “Competition and Careers in Biosciences” in Science magazine in December of 2001 (I’d post a link, but it is not free). And, my experience says that grad students tend to try to get in 30 minutes before their boss and leave 30 minutes afterward!
And, yes, that counts working for the university and your thesis research, but these are really one and the same. In theory, the PI of the lab comes up with a research proposal and assigns it to the graduate student, who works on it, and gets to use it toward a thesis.
My dirty little secret in this thread is that I was at one of the above schools when they had a week long strike, oh, about two years ago. I myself did not strike, and I voted against unionization.
Also, unless something has changed in the past few months, it’s both teaching and research assistants that are attempting to unionize.