[_dps]

> Grad students essentially work as slaves for the Uni's & professors ...

The typical cost to a professor's budget of employing a graduate student with tuition covered and a basic stipend is somewhere in the range of $50k to $150k. The graduate student gets paid to be trained by a domain expert, and the cost to the "employer" is well above the median income. Outside the rather unorthodox software field, graduate degrees typically result in title advances and higher salaries (this is 100% true in government positions).

Calling this arrangement slavery is ridiculous.

Bias disclosure: I was once a professor, and also once a graduate student.

[mattkrause]

The tuition part is a little bit shady.

I took some great classes as a grad student, but the NIH also paid my university a lot for "Disseration Research in Progress" courses, which met 0 times a week for 0 hours, and certainly did not cost the university much to organize....

[dgacmu]

It's how your research advisor's salary gets paid.

[mattkrause]

No, it's not. That money definitely did not go directly to him or his salary.

My research advisor--like most faculty at med schools--was in a soft money position. His salary was--or at least was supposed to be--covered by the grants he brought in and the 68%ish overhead on those grants.

[dgacmu]

To be precise: Overhead does not pay salary. Overhead is only for a subset of indirect costs associated with the project as a whole (e.g., it takes place in a building, with staff and janitors and lights). PI salary must be specified as a direct cost on awards.

Second, there's theory, and there's reality. The reality of funding, even for soft-money faculty, is that schools tend to be (recognizing that not all fit the mold) a little bit flexible about how they calculate these things. Money comes in, salaries get paid, and the bean-counting happens at a slightly more fuzzy level of abstraction. The exact requirements on soft-money funding are typically negotiable, and in many cases, can be pooled across multiple researchers to create a bit of a backstop in the event of temporary funding drops. The tuition fees that your advisor's grants brought in will usually be split between the university and the departments in various (ungodly annoyingly complicated) ways, but it's fairly common that the department -- who pays the salary -- sees some fraction of indirect benefit from grad student tuition paid.

So I agree with your statement as phrased: "directly to him or his salary", but there's a ton of indirect money flow in universities.

(Source: I've had the ... mis? fortune of serving on some of the finance committees in the past, and discuss this issue regularly with colleagues at other universities, including those at medical schools.)

But as a non-me source, here's Wisconsin's definition: https://www.education.wisc.edu/soe/about/leadership/committe...

"Other types of soft money may include generated program revenues and flexible internal monies such as those funding credit outreach timetable courses." -- your tuition was generated program revenue.

[dredmorbius]

Fully-loaded costs is typically on the order of 2x income in cases I'm familiar with. The working hours for grad students are extensive. And yes, that's accounting for the education.

Even allowing for some slack, I'd suggest that a grad student is seeing a pre-tax equivalent of $25k - $100k, and probably skewed to the lower end of that, based on your numbers.

Given that the educational (and academic publishing) systems exist as gateways into a highly-limited cabal, the arrangement cannot reasonably be called free-market.

I'm in favour of unionisation.

[garrettdc]

No one anywhere else gets to count hours being educated as hours worked, so that isn't a fair comparison. Also, if you were to pay for the degree out of pocket, then you are looking at something in the realm of $40-50k / year. That would be $60-75k / year pre-tax. Add a stipend onto that that provides basic necessities of room, board, insurance, and money for necessities like clothes, and you easily reach into the realm of $100k total compensation for someone in this field.

There is a lot of work to be done, but there are many people who work 80 hrs/week to be paid < $100k / year.

I'd love to see the numbers on what the all in dollar value of benefits provided to the students is, as I think that would shift the opinion of quite a few people here.

[kiliantics]

> No one anywhere else gets to count hours being educated as hours worked

Work experience is education. That's why you get paid more for past experience - it saves the company on a cost they would otherwise have invested in you. Doing a PhD is just another way of getting work experience, except you get paid a lot less.

I think it's reasonable to claim that PhD's are compensated a lot by virtue of the "cost" of educating them and other benefits. But this education is something you receive in a normal job too. And just like in a normal job, the employer gains a lot more out of the exchange. Grad students are typically worth a lot more to universities than they cost, otherwise there would be no sense in admitting so many. I'd wager the ratio of value to cost is perhaps greater in academia than it is in a lot of other industries.

[jacalata]

Comparing cost to the employer against the median income is nonsensical. At least try and estimate "median cost to an employer".

[_dps]

There's slack, sure. But "nonsensical" is obviously false -- the two must be correlated else profit margins would be detached from labor costs, which we know is false at a macro level.

Do you think there could possibly be enough slack to justify calling this arrangement "slavery", which was the crux of my point?

[jacalata]

Yes, they're correlated. If that's the only understanding you have of the relationship, would you agree with my assertion that the cost of employing a grad student is about 10% of the median cost of an employee?

[_dps]

I think we're off on the wrong foot here. I agree with you that median cost to the employer and median income are not exactly the same thing. I asked if you thought that changed the substance of my argument, and you didn't reply.

I assume your 10% figure here is purely rhetorical, since per my estimate and sibling comment's the cost of employing a graduate student is at least $50k. So your 10% estimate would imply the median cost of an employee is $500k, which is obviously not true.

I don't want to drive this further into nitpicking so I will conclude this exchange by conceding, again, that median income and median cost to employer are not the same thing. Have a good day.

[jacalata]

I think your argument was a bad one which you attempted to shore up with an irrelevant and misleading rhetorical sleight of hand, comparing money grad students don't get to money other people do get and implying that because it was a high number that made them well off.

[kiliantics]

Usually a professor gets a grant with money specifically allocated for paying grad students. It's not like there's an opportunity cost involved since there's nowhere else that money can go.

A graduate who spent the 6 years getting experience in industry instead of doing their PhD can expect to be at a similar salary level as the person being hired out of the PhD. They also earned more through those 6 years and so they are on average better off overall.

[Fomite]

Out of curiosity, I looked up a recent grant of mine and you're spot on. Costs me about $65K a year to support a grad student on a grant.

[conanbatt]

If it really were slavery, there wouldnt be grad students doing this work. It is a preposterous argument to say the students are not getting a deal they want.

The question is , however, if they can get more.