[levbrie]

Many of the comments so far revolve around whether graduate students are students or not, as if being a student and an employee are somehow mutually exclusive or the fact that graduate students also take classes mean they must be equivalent to undergrads and ought to be given the same treatment. Clearly this is not the case. Acquiring the specialized knowledge that a PhD entails requires tremendous sacrifice (and, in the case of PhDs hoping to become professors, it often ends in tremendous disappointment). Universities have two primary functions - conducting research and teaching. This is the job of the university. Undergraduates don't have the specialized knowledge required to teach or to contribute substantially to research. Graduate students, however, do both of these jobs. Indeed, they are absolutely essential to the functioning of the university. And while the average time to completion for science and engineering doctorates hovers around 5 years, it's not uncommon to find humanities PhDs who take 8 years or more to complete their dissertations. This isn't because they're lazy. This is because the competition for academic posts is brutal, the expertise expected of them is vast, and, more to the point, because they're busy working. Universities are subjecting students to increasingly unjustifiable tuitions and pocketing massive profits couched as expanded endowments. Pretending like graduate students are just really smart, really old, really slow-to-catch-on interns and not a part of their extremely lucrative business operations just adds insult to injury.

[sldivzklhc]

>Undergraduates don't have the specialized knowledge required to teach or to contribute substantially to research. Graduate students, however, do both of these jobs.

I don't think grad/undergrad is the right distinction here. I was employed by my undergrad-only liberal arts alma-mater as a teaching assistant and research assistant. And the college employed many of my classmates in other positions. We weren't exploited like many graduated students are, but another institution could have treated us worse.

[levbrie]

To this point and the point below about undergrads and specialized knowledge: yes, you're absolutely right. I should not have said that undergrads don't have the specialized knowledge to teach. Plenty of undergrads make great TAs, and teaching assistants are a critical part of the learning process at most universities. What I should have said is that courses are not taught by (the role of the teacher is held by) undergraduates but by professors and graduate students, who are responsible for the planning, content, and instruction, and for the TAs that assist them. The only point I'm trying to make is that graduate students are given substantial full-time-equivalent jobs and that there place and role in the university ought to reflect this.

[Chronic9q]

> college employed many of my classmates in other positions

And how many classmates were not employed? Far more. So yes, the grad/undergrad distinction is valid. Undergrads are often assigned boring research jobs and are paid less.

[cjslep]

> Undergrads are often assigned boring research jobs and are paid less.

I agree paid less, but disagree about "boring" research jobs. It probably depends on your school and your major. Nuclear Engineering at NC State got me to research molecular dynamics GPU techniques (this was around 2010) to simulate rare events (such as radiation-resistant material interactions) in order to get real-world simulation times to the order of milliseconds, which is a whopping 1000x speedup from the usual microseconds. I got access to the school's supercomputers just like any other physics grad.

My work later moved to the CASL (Consortium for Advanced Simulation of LWRs[0]) umbrella, and I was not the only one. None of the topics were boring, and the general impression I got from the department head was that undergrads were as capable but just requiring slightly more guidance.

It was a great funnel for getting undergrads to continue their research to grad school and ultimately to a PhD. I did not continue, but still have several friends that are pursuing their PhDs.

[0] http://www.casl.gov/

[maverick_iceman]

In University of Washington it is fairly common for advanced undergrads to be employed as TAs/RAs. They are considered Academic Student Employees just like grad students and are represented by the union.

[sackofmugs]

Agreed. My friends who were at Brown University about 50 years ago were undergraduate TAs in computer science. It was a prestigious position, and they still exist in every course there.