[shioyama]

This a thousand times.

> And while they are the primary workhorses of research, there are large swathes of their graduate student careers where they are not particularly (or often negatively) productive.

Um, hello. This happens in industry as well. It's called training, learning, whatever. It's an investment on the part of the company in the future of its workforce. Why should academia expect to only pay employees who are "fully educated" and require no non-productive time to learn things?

As someone who has been there, academica is so f*cked up and those in it seem completely out of touch with the reality outside of it.

[Fomite]

I pay my graduate students.

But the expectations are different. "Well, what do you want to work on?" and tailoring a four or five year program to meet those needs is something I'm very unlikely to do for a staff scientist, but something I discuss with every one of my graduate students.

[krastanov]

You have a point, but graduate students are actually paid a salary, unlike what you suggested.

[UncleMeat]

Rarely is this salary guaranteed. It often requires TAing to supplement research funding and graduate students are often required to be deeply involved (or even solely responsible) for sourcing their own research funding. Stipends are also often poverty wages or even lower when you consider that stipends are usually only for 3/4 of the year and you are usually expected to continue research during the summer.

I know some folks who did PhDs in non-engineering fields at state universities who had to TA every single semester, often TAing multiple classes, just to earn ~$20,000 per year.

[psi75]

This is true in computer science, but not in all sciences, and certainly not in the humanities. Getting a TA-ship is considered undesirable in CS, but getting a TA-ship as a history PhD is considered rare and special.

There are a lot of problems, though. Your funding isn't guaranteed; you can be basically kicked out of the program (because very few people can afford to self-fund) for reasons that have nothing to do with you or your performance, and if this happens in your 4th or 5th year, you're fucked.

The other ugly fact is that even if you're not paying tuition, your advisor is. This means there's less money to send you to conferences or fund his lab, and it means he's under tighter financial constraints than he really should be. Your advisor gets his budget docked $80,000, and only $20,000 goes to you (the rest, to tuition). That's a bit ridiculous, especially because you're no longer taking many classes or using university resources except to do work on their behalf. There's no good reason you can't be paid $50,000 and your advisor has $30,000 more to fund his lab.

[tpoacher]

not the case in many countries (the UK being one of them)