Sorry to continue to multi-post, but this is from the same article that I quoted above:
The response of students to the inconsistency between scientific promise and career prospects depends on their information. NRC panels concerned with disgruntled young researchers invariably recommend that students receive greater information about career prospects 5. To see whether departments have been responsive, we contacted 10 leading biology departments. No department had job placement data available. Three said that they kept track of long-term outcome data for training grant reports, but that the data were confidential. In contrast, the professional schools (law, business, medicine) at some of the same institutions tracked careers of graduates and readily provided data on starting salaries and jobs.
Your thesis topic is assigned to you and you have absolutely no say in it?!!! Wow, I guess I really don’t know anything about how science departments are run. That sounds lame, but still, wouldn’t you agree that your thesis is part of your education and not a paid job?
Sounds like the line is blurred in science. In other fields, I think you teach a section or two of an undergrad class, and possibly do some office work for the department, and that’s what you’re compensated for. You ALSO do your own coursework and a thesis, for which you are not compensated. At least that’s my understanding of it. In music, you spend countless hours practicing your instrument and rehearsing, but I didn’t consider those hours towards what the department was requiring for my assistantship.
Also, I don’t know about what the article didn’t say, only that it mentioned striking t.a.'s and not research assistants. Could just be a poorly written article.
I do institutional research for a living. I know programs do this.
I don’t have time to dig through my professional files on this, but a quick internet search turned up examples from Duke, GA Tech, ASU, UC-Davis, and Princeton. Some of them specifically in biological or science fields; others do it school-wide.
You get a say in it in the sense that you get to pick your advisor, and as much say as you are allowed to get away with from there.
To some extent I agree with that. But, something else you may be missing is that PhD programs don’t work like med school where in June of your fourth year you get a degree. Your thesis is done when your advisor says it is done. There’s a committee, but ultimately it is your advisor’s call.
So, in other words, the very person who has every incentive in the world to make sure you stay as long as possible is the guy making the decision on how long you stay. I would say after five years, you’ve already learned damn near everything you are going to learn about your thesis topic, and are now just gathering data until your advisor has his name on enough papers and will let you leave. Usually this process involves making his life miserable enough that he doesn’t want to keep you around anymore; otherwise he would keep you forever.
Some departments (and universities) take their TTD statistics pretty seriously. At Michigan, you gotta get your butt out the door a certain number of years after enrolling or tell the University why. Now that doesn’t necessarily force an advisor’s hand, but it certainly suggests the U isn’t looking the other way while graduate students are jerked around interminably. There is a very real expectation about how long it should take, whichever party may be holding up the process. Granted, Michigan is just one institution out of hundreds.
I still think it’s interesting that the model for graduate science education, as you’re telling it, would seem to be the most objectionable, yet science grad students don’t seem to be behind the push to unionize on the campuses being discussed here.
Yes, adjuncts (I am one) can and do have unions. Some have separate units and others are wall-to-wall (joined with full-timers). I can’t speak much to the research and publications aspects. I have taught primarily at community colleges; and although a full timer will occasionally take a sabbatical leave, they are in the classroom with full time loads, required office hours,and committee work.
That said, where I am right now, there are over 900 part time faculty and about 350 or so full time faculty. In the English dept. alone, 73 are part time and 33 are full time. If a full time job is offered, thousands apply for it, a few dozen or so are interviewed, but of course only one gets it.
It didn’t take the admin’s long to figure out that it’s cheaper to hire hundreds of adjuncts than to hire a lot more full timers. Some pt’s are there so long that we call them perma-temps, and despite their longevity or evaluations, they are still at-will employees.
Still, I have it better on this campus than I would at the one I left behind. Our unit is very concerned with adjuncts’ issues. This is not the case on every campus.
I acknowledged this above. The union deserves some credit for some of the things that graduate student employees are offered, but I don’t know that they have had a hand in this TTD thing.
The clock stops if you have a child or other medical or family leave issues, and it’s possible the GEO had a hand in getting that, but it applies to ALL graduate students, not just graduate student employees.
If the GEO was more involved in Rackham’s TTD interest, tell me more because it wasn’t something I was aware of.
Yale chemistry students are paid $23k/yr + insurance (not including the prescription plan or dental). Next year it’s $24k/yr. This is bigger than most chemistry programs at the same level of prestige (Yale chemistry isn’t all that hot), which currently pay ~$20k/yr. The bio people get paid a little bit more.
No, can’t give you more details. I was never active in the union or in discussions during negotiations, and I’m certainly no expert on the origin of that policy. It’s entirely possible that it’s purely a decree from on high that the administration thought was in the grad school’s best interest. All I really meant, though, was that the U wasn’t entirely free to look the other way if grad students were getting jerked around, as the union is apt to become peeved over such things.
I chose my research topic. No, I did not have complete freedom, as it had to be approved by my boss, but I wouldn’t have chosen to work for him if I wasn’t interested in one of his many research interests.
I don’t think this one has been mentioned. Note that science grad students are a source of revenue for the universities. The work that they do is paid for (equipment, materials, stipend, etc.) by grants. The universities take a 60-70% cut from each grant as “overhead”.
Someone (I think Fiveyearlurker, but I can’t find the post) said that even if you’re smarter and you perform better than your fellow student, you’ll get paid the same. This is not necessarily true. I was offered extra money at several of the schools I got into. One can also apply for outside grants, which people like me have no hopes of actually getting.
Depending on how the school classifies its students, their stipends may be ineligible for non-tax collections (social security, mediwhatsit, etc.) This gives a nice (if small) boost to the listed pays.
Many universities in large cities own housing that they offer at a subsidized price to grad students. The quality and availability can vary. My friend at Columbia could not afford to live in NYC if she didn’t have a university apartment. When I visited UC Irvine, I was told that they have a 2 year wait list for their housing.
One of the complaints of the GESO (the yale union) is that Yale should be interested in getting more women into science, and that they should do this by offering free or affordable childcare.
They also demand more minority tenured faculty.
They feel that the woman in charge of university housing is racist.
Many students feel bullied and harassed by GESO members trying to get them to join.
This is all from various letters/editorials/etc. in the Yale Daily News.
Many chemistry grad students work for a bit, then take the huge pay cut to go to grad school. Obviously there is something in it for them. Without the Ph.D., they are pretty much stuck with a bench job if they wan’t to be directly involved with the research. The Ph.D. allows for a more managerial possition. The thing I find odd about this is that grad school doesn’t really offer an opportunity much different from what a company could offer. It seems to me that they could train people to be Ph.D. equivalents (w/o the letters after their name.) I’m guessing that they either feel it’s not worth the money (“go ahead and let the universities do it”) or there is too much internal friction (“I had to get a Ph.D., so you do too.”)
As for the actual debate at hand, I don’t feel the need to join a graduate student union. I am concerned that it will further tip the relation of grad students and university from student/school to employer/employee. It already seems to me like there is too little focus on education. That said, I think that students should be able to unionize if they want to. I just don’t really want any part of it at the moment. I do not favor a closed-shop system as described by an earlier poster.
That got changed about three weeks ago for postdocs, who are now ineligible for these exemptions, though I’m not sure what the effect on graduate students is.
As for some graduate students getting additional money, that’s news to me. I had never heard of that (not doubting you, just saying I don’t know how prevalent that is). From what I’ve seen about being awarded grants, if you are awarded an additional stipend by applying for a grant (which are typically not for graduate students, but postdocs), many (most?) institutions will subtract that amount from your stipend, netting you zero.
I haven’t looked into outside funding too much, but I know an NSF grant will give you a $30k/yr stipend . From here:
I don’t know about smaller grants, but it would make sense for institutions to encourage people to get them, as it reflects nicely on the school.
As for the extra money, yeah, it’s there. I’m not getting any now, but one school offered me $10k extra the first year and $5k extra thereafter (from a base pay of $20k) and promised that I’d only have to teach the minimum required (2 semesters). Another offered me a “prestigious fellowship” of $500 extra for the 1st year, w/base pay <$20k/yr :rolleyes:. There are people getting extra money ($3k/yr I think) at my school, but they keep their mouths shut about it.
Or you could just go to industry where the salary they started us at is about twice the average postdoc stipend (and I have a dental plan!).
For all my bluster in this thread, I think that universities are slowly getting the picture and things are creakily changing at a pace commensurate with the giant university bureaucracy. Not that they are doing this out of the goodness of their hearts, but I think they are seeing the decline in the quality of the students. I always heard PIs complaining about getting three hundred applications for postdoc positions and none of them being qualified. Even if unionization doesn’t go through (as I hope it doesn’t), graduate students have earned the right to unionize if they so choose, and it may serve as a wake up call to pick up the pace on changing the system quite a bit.
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(and I have a dental plan!).