[uberman]

While I agree that PhD students don't get enough cash on a weekly basis to get buy, they are certainly compensated well above what is quoted in the article.

International PhD students by law cannot work more than 20 hours a week. Most institutions cap paid responsibilities at 20 hours a week. Most have 9 month appointments, most likely get the full cost of their tuition and fees waved. Most of the time waved costs such as tuition are not counted as compensation so are tax free. Most likely get healthcare.

A PhD student at U-FL has an effective compensation package well above 75k per year even though they only directly see 18k in pay.

[yxwvut]

There's not a line in this that makes any sense. Sure, maybe you're only TA'ing 20 hrs a week max, but you're also doing research work well beyond those 20 hrs regardless of whether your advisor has enough grant money to let you escape the TA time sink by putting you on the clock as an RA for work you were already going to do.

And it's a joke to pretend that you should owe tuition. That's nothing but a tax dodge for the university so they can pay you even less (pre-tax) for the same post-tax take-home.

[uberman]

Why should you be paid to attend your classes or to conduct your own research? That is like asking to be paid to go to the gym.

If your employer pays more that 5k of your tuition then you own tax on it so the US tax system clearly sees tuition as a benefit. You can call BS on the cost of tuition but that does not fundamentally change the fact that a waived charge is a benefit. The US tax system was a hairs breath away from making all tuition benefits even institutional grants at the undergraduate level taxable.

[oefrha]

> effective compensation well above 75k per year

What are you even talking about? Are you counting the bullshit known as “tuition” in the compensation? PhD candidates are really employees, not students.

Even a Princeton postdoc’s comp doesn’t reach 75k. A bit more than 50k actually in the physics department (might have risen a bit in the past few years, not sure).

[uberman]

Of course tuition should be counted as part of compensation just as health care should be counted. You can be mad at the cost of tuition or healthcare if you like, but that is a separate issue.

Waved tuition is a benefit and it was a hairs breath from being a taxable benefit in the USA several years ago. It is still the case that if your employer pays more than about 5k of your tuition then that is taxable so clearly tuition waved or paid by your employer is a benefit at least in the US.

There are compelling arguments and union movements supporting the notion that graduate and PhD students should be classed as employees and I certainly don't have a big issue with that. That is also a separate issue though.

[colinmhayes]

Universities aren't actually providing a service to the phd candidates though. The candidates are providing a service to the university. No one would get a phd if they had to pay tuition.

[uberman]

As a university employee with a spouse who is tenured faculty I can assure you that phd candidates are not a net positive work wise from an institutional perspective. The good part is that you can usually rely on a phd candidate to produce the work they have been assigned. Masters candidates, you have a 50/50 shot of being assigned someone who will produce anything of value.

All you need to do to verify this is to look at the large number of candidates that languish after even a little of their institutional support goes away. Look at the percentage of candidates who can't get even to, let alone through their proposal then add on all the candidates who make it through their proposal but can't make and progress to a defense.

Everyone pays to get a phd. Like many others you are confusing a salary with compensation and in this case opportunity cost. Take 3 or 4 years to get a phd and that can be half a million in opportunity cost alone. Institutions certainly charge tuition and fees but your compensation as a candidate exceeds those benefits. The excess is what a candidate sees as their paycheck.

I know you don't want this to be the reality and I am sympathetic. I once worked as a camp counselor for an entire summer only to find my paycheck at the end of 3 months was a total of $100. I technically got paid a lot more but apparently the camp charged us for food and lodging and $100 was the net. It was a rude shock to be sure, but as an adult you need to understand how things work and why they work that way.

[colinmhayes]

> Everyone pays to get a phd.

The question is only how much. Universities would be paying $0 if they could. Turns out they can't. If candidates tax bill goes up $10k universities would have to increase the stipend by that much. No one works for free. People pay for undergrad because it increases earning potential by huge amounts, a phd isn't really the same. Those candidates could easily get jobs if they wanted.

[oefrha]

I know for a fact that I wasn’t taking regular courses beyond my first year, even though I was still charged “tuition”.

[gs17]

I finished coursework and tuition (half of which was for "non-candidate research" "courses" that seem to only really exist to collect tuition on) is no longer being included. I would not say my compensation just went down by half.

[the_svd_doctor]

> PhD students by law cannot work more than 20 hours a week.

While most teaching (and research) assistanships might indeed be technically 20h/week, I can assure you most/all PhD students work >20h/week total.

You still need to do your research on the side. If you RA and your PhD research align, nice. If it doesn't, tough luck.

[uberman]

I don't intend to assert that PhDs don't do a lot more work that 20 hours. I know first hand they do. The work they typically are compensated for (TA/RA/FA) are typically capped at 20 hours a week. This also aligns with the legal limits for international students on F1 visas.

[dotnet00]

I suspect that even the people who wrote that rule knew it wouldn't actually mean anything practically. It's just a convenient excuse to exploit someone in a vulnerable situation.

[mbauman]

> PhD students by law cannot work more than 20 hours a week. Most have 9 month stipend appointments.

Wat. Citation needed.

[cvoss]

I can't speak to the "by law" part. But many universities, including two that I have experience with, consider the PhD stipend to be compensation for a part time job (RA/TA), accounting for 20 hours of the student's time, with the idea that the remaining 20 hours are to be devoted to taking classes. And during the summer, when a student may not be taking classes, a student may receive a full 40 hours' worth of compensation.

[andreyk]

If you think the main thing PhDs do aside from doing RA/TA is taking classes, you don't understand what a PhD involves that well...

[uberman]

I work at an elite tier 1 research university that is an international household name. My spouse is a tenured faculty member who runs a lab and several concurrent DoD funded grants.

I understand perfectly well what a phd candidate does and what they are compensated for as well as what their fully loaded costs are.

If you believe that the cost of a phd student is 18k a year, it is you who does not understand what working with a phd student involves. In fact, 18k probably does not even cover their health care costs. We can debate about what a phd candidate "should" be compensated for and if their current levels of compensation are fair but any argument needs to include the full picture.

[mbauman]

This is a silly take. The "true" cost of an employee is _always_ higher than their salary. Often by 50-100%.

Your argument here is like saying the minimum wage needn't be increased because the "true" cost of an employee is already $15/hr. They should be grateful for those administrative costs! And doubly so that we don't tax them!

TFA is literally about the take-home cash.

[uberman]

Minimum wage employees don't typically get healthcare that's the point

[cvoss]

Time spent performing thesis research is accounted as course credit hours (There's typically an 800 or 900 level course for exactly this.) After all, you must be "taking classes" every semester, with very limited exceptions, in order to even be enrolled in the program.

Moreover, in my field, RA work for an advisor should ideally coincide with your thesis work. So in that case, the main thing a PhD student does is two-for-one RA+thesis work. If it doesn't coincide, that's not a great situation to be in.

And I do understand what getting a PhD involves, as I have one.

[uberman]

Sorry, I posted faster than I was thinking.

F1 students are limited by law to 20 hours a week and where I work, stipend responsibilities are similarly capped at 20 hours though though that is not a legal cap, just one that aligns with the international cap.

[mbauman]

There are both TA assistantships and research assistantships. As a graduate student researcher, your stipend "responsibilities" include research output.

[uberman]

I'm not sure where you are going with this. Certainly you can have a TA/RA/FA appointment and sometimes a combination of the three. At the university I work at, you should not technically be assigned more than 20 hours a week over those responsibilities. This blanket policy means faculty don't have to account for the potential visa limits of the individual students they work with.

Note though that an RA is research of behalf of a faculty member. Your RA and compensation for it is for assisting with that research. It is not for conducting your own research even if you dovetail it it to a larger research/lab project. In fact, you almost certainly need to pay for the use of the lab and project data via authorship (sometimes first authorship).

I'm not debating that this is fair. Going back to my original post though I'm just calling out that the total compensation package for phd candidates far exceeds their take home pay.

[voxl]

Thinking in this way has always been very toxic. Some professors think this way and will accidentally state how PhD students are overpaid and underworked... Any sane analysis would note that PhDs are valid added to society, we want PhDs, and pipelines into industry for them. Using your analysis there would never be another PhD student.

[uberman]

Your reaction is understandable but you lack a larger perspective. I have never argued that society does not benefit from PhDs only that when talking about compensation one must include all the factors.

Would you accept a job offer before considering the benefits package? I would certainly not.