[jjoonathan]

Yes. The professor / grad student relationship is essentially manager / employee, in that the professor acquires resources (grants), sets direction, manages, and politicks for the group while the grad students create the actual deliverables (perform experiments, write papers, help with grants and rec letters, train new members of the lab, etc).

Professor / undergrad is a very different relationship since the undergrad is not creating deliverables that will help further the professor / research group's goals.

[_m8fo]

If this is what you believe, then I've already covered it in my original post -- PhD students should be treated as employees.

PhD "students" can be either employees or students, not both. Currently they're "both".

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Also, I'm not sure your post really refutes the notion that a PhD student is paying for access to a professor. A PhD student could receive a degree without access to the institution, so in both cases, undergrad or grad, the institution itself is what's being paid for.

[jjoonathan]

We agree that (PhD students like employees) => (PhD students should be paid like employees), but you also asserted ~(PhD students like employees) which I disagree with.

[_m8fo]

I don't have any opinion on whether or not PhD students are employees or not, however, what I do want is consistency. So if PhD students are indeed students, yet receive a massive tax break in the form of "free tuition" (contrast this to imaginary undergraduate working for a college, who receives income from the college from a job and has to pay post-tax income for tuition) then undergraduates should have the same benefit (that is, tuition reduction from pre-tax income, if they work for the school that they go to).

That's it.