I lived on 54 cent pancakes covered in free butter and honey, 9 cents per can baked beans (turns out I don't like baked beans, I like good sauce which this was not), and candy bars out of a broken and never fixed candy machine. I don't recommend it. I weighed 110 pounds by the time I left. All of my money went to dorm housing (paid to the school).
Later when I was a researcher I found out that the Provost takes 55% of grant money "for overhead like printer paper". If there is money involved, there are plenty of plenty of people willing to "take their cut" before it ever gets to the researcher or student.
If you can't afford to pay grad students enough to keep body and soul together, don't open the grad student slots.
Simpsons grad student sketch is different kind of funny for different people. For most people it's funny because it's exaggeration, for others it's funny because it's so close to reality. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qqrCoyVK80I
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On more serious note, grad student working for next to nothing serves similar function as unpaid internships in companies and politics. Some positions are designed to help young people coming from wealthy families without explicitly shutting anyone out.
If you have trust fund, career in politics, academia or high profile law and financial firms is much easier.
Except, in the case of big tech, Internships pay six figures.
There are other perks of being a grad student than just the pay though...
: sure, the internships aren’t typically a year long, but if you do the math for what’s paid for their duration it’s an incredible amount if it did last a year.
a) not everyone who figured out higher education is a racket wants to do 180 degree career turn
b) many people would like to make their future in something else than easy code monkeying money
If everyone goes to write NoSQL serverless CRUD for adtech, who will be left to do research or something actually materially productive in the economy?
For one thing most tech internships want you to contribute to the business. Unpaid internships that involve doing real work are illegal in many industries/locations.
In some places if you have an unpaid tech internship, everything you do has to be an artificial training exercise for the sole benefit of the students.
Only kids from wealthy families can afford to move to say DC or NY and spend a year there on an unpaid internship. So that becomes a selection criteria to exclude those from poor and middle classes from advancing in those domains.
The same is true for entry-level media jobs. Paying $40-$50k in NYC... you can be sure kids without generational wealth & parents financial assistance choose other paths.
This is definitely untrue. There are plenty of young people willing to save roughly no money for the early years of their 20s by trying to make it in the big city in a flashy career. I know several who don't get any financial support from their parents (and certainly don't have generational wealth). The most you can say is that people who have parents that _require_ financial support aren't able to take this path, but that's a significantly smaller group.
In college, a professor recommended me for an academic award from industry. It was $1000. So I go to the yearly awards dinner and a month later got a check for $800. Apparently the university takes a 20% as administrative cost!
That's actually low! Most of the Universities we've explored research grants with wanted 45-65% overhead for the university, then another 10-15 for Research organization, with the remainder sorted between the researchers / company. We found it was actually just cheaper to pay for the research ourselves and hire the students directly for part time work than go through the grant process.
I sat on a couple school boards for a while, all that was ever discussed was fund raising and how we should be contributing more. Very little focus on education. Sadly it's turned me off spending time with Schools and just targeting students / researchers directly.
To a large degree yes, but a lot of the work would have fared better with a larger pool of people to work on the problem. We have to be more selective in candidates and in turn, we spend more money out of pocket vs wider spread from the grant pool of cash. The original purpose of grants was to spur technology growth and acceleration, now they're just one more notch on the ole' funding universities piece.
We need an overhaul on bloat in state schools at a minimum, then we're good.
The other issue is patent / design ownership arguments, but that's for another day.
Imagine how this team[1] felt when the University of Florida screwed them over not only a $750K preliminary prize (that would have been applied towards funding the next year's research agenda) but a subsequent $2MM prize for taking 1st place in DARPA's Spectrum Collaboration Challenge.
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Can you provide more detail?
Usually grants/projects etc in research in Europe explicitly budget "overheads" as a separate budget line. The size ove the overhead varies between the different funding instruments, but are usually between 20% and 100% of the direct costs (mostly wages). Universities will have internal regimes that distribute the overheads between the central administration, for covering such things as office space, heating, shared services etc., and the research group in which the research takes place for covering computing, office supplies, local admin, travels, publication consumables etc.
So for example a 2 year project that has 120K allocated in direct cost salary, with a 75% overhead regime in a university with a 25% central overhead take would have an overall budget of 210K of which 120K would end up payed as salary to the researchers, 52.5K taken by central administration, and 37.5K taken by the research group.
While technically you could argue paying researchers more would also net the university more money, asthe overheads are calculated as a % on direct costs, in reality this does not hold as funding for research is very finite and funding agencies would not approve paying higher project grants.
Both universities and large businesses have been successfully lobbying for years for higher overhead % regimes in grant instruments, and since the budget for funding research has not changed in line with these evolutions, defaco shifting the windfalls of research grants from the researcher's wages to the administrations.
Why do you (and others) think that education and academia is somehow special and not the same as, say, acting (or any career) where people regularly earn no money and work bad 2nd jobs just to survive and do something they love or want as a career? In a free market system nobody is telling you to choose that career and a University and (typically) a non-profit doesn't have any particular incentive to not act in their own self interest in order to self perpetuate themselves.
Also I am sure the janitor at the University is paid decently and loves to work there. Reason is there are not as many people lined up for that job and basic economics takes over.
Unfortunately a PhD is sold as a key step for a well-paying and fulfilling career where you can make a difference. As we live in a society where education is fundamental to success and having a good life, a PhD is considered as the last and most exclusive step in a promising career path.
But then the disappointing part is that the system in place is designed to exploit newcomers and place them in an abuse relationship where they are forced to go through the ringer as indentured servants hoping that their ultimate goal is just around the corner.
You may quote simplistic cliches regarding economy and career choices, but the truth of the matter is that the grad school system is designed to be a monopoly where grad students have absolutely no power or influence over their career other than quitting, which ultimately results in total and definite exclusion from the industry, and thus are forced to endure years of indentured servitude. As a grad student you don't have the freedom to switch schools, negotiate your salary, or even be recognized as an employee.
This example demonstrates the absolute lack of power or influence that grad students have: if you disagree with your supervisor then say goodbye to your whole career.
I don't disagree that universities are horribly corrupt, extractive institutions squatting over responsibility for a system that creates an immense amount of value for society (academic research).
But the claim that "a PhD is a necessary step to _specific_ well-paying and fulfilling careers" isn't incompatible with the GP comment's claim that intrinsic motivation makes people shoulder these crappy conditions, just like (eg) actors. It's pretty well-known that PhDs are, on average, _terrible_ career moves from a self-interest and financial perspective. This is common knowledge among literally everybody I've ever met who has any exposure to academia. Hell, Piled Higher and Deeper has been around for more than _20 years_; my university's paper syndicated it.
Just like struggling actors, PhDs put up with low pay and bad conditions to take a shot at something they want to do, with the additional wrinkle that they're (nominally) increasing their human capital in a way that a failing actor isn't. Nothing about your comment rebuts the GP comment's claim that there's nothing unique about academia in this respect.
But you don’t have to work for the university while you do your PhD if you don’t want to. I didn’t - I worked for a company instead. Maybe if the university had paid more I’d have worked for it instead.
PhD in Europe is different than in the US. There's is very little industry-academia support in terms of working while doing your PhD.
From Princeton's policies, particularly the last sentence:
"Graduate study at Princeton, at both the doctoral and, in most cases, the master’s level, requires full-time commitment to study and research on the part of students. The Graduate School’s financial support structure, which extends throughout the length of the student’s program and ordinarily includes summers, is one indication of that requirement. Accordingly, the Graduate School considers employment beyond full fellowship, teaching or research support or its equivalent to be incompatible with full-time graduate study."[0]
It's even worse for international students. Under F1 visa, you can't work more than 20 hours on campus. However, all TA positions are deemed 20 hours of work. So you can't even work at the campus gym if you want.
You're talking about having a side job while doing a PhD. GP is talking about (as I understand it - not to put words in their mouth) having a job that will let you take some of the work you do there and turn it into a PhD. Which, admittedly, is not a very well-known or advertised route, but one that is a much better deal than the 'take internship-level pay for years for the privilege of being exploited or ignored'.
No, I am also talking about the same thing. But you correctly distinguish Europe vs. US. To make progress towards your PhD while working for company in the US, you typically need to be enrolled in a department approved "class" that is basically an internship. To be enrolled in these classes, you need to be a full-time student. Most departments outside of CS and EE don't allow for these courses. Obviously, this is going to be highly nuanced with regard to how each university/department implements it. For example, my department only allows summer internships and requires approval from Advisor and Director of Graduate Studies.
> However, all TA positions are deemed 20 hours of work. So you can't even work at the campus gym if you want.
This is not true at Princeton. Unless they are without funding, PhD students there commonly only work 10 hours per week (nominally) as TAs. The regular stipend is also generous compared to many other programs.
"This means that international students on a full AI or full AR appointment are not eligible for additional on-campus work, even if the Graduate School employment policy would otherwise allow it."
All things are true as long as they benefit the people in power in an institution. Contradictory things are simultaneously true. All justifications for the current system, which works well for the PTB are just obviously the case.
> But you don’t have to work for the university while you do your PhD if you don’t want to.
Your comment is unrealistic and even absurd to the majority of those going through the PhD threadmill.
It's like saying you can dunk a basketball if you'd want to. Sure, show me LeBron James and how easy it is for him, but for those of us who aren't benefitting from abnormal competitive advantages then it's not that realistic.
How many people are lucky enough to be able to not only work a full-time job that pays the bills and is close enough to grad school and also be able to be in a field where literally part-time amateurs can do all the required academic work to write papers, a whole dissertation and defend a decent thesis? And in the end do well enough to aspire to have a career in your field of research?
You have a better chance of dunking on LeBron James.
Yes, you do. I work as an engineer in a research group of a top 10 US graduate research university. I am exposed to many different groups. No group will take you if you are not working for them at ludicrously low pay. You can’t get a PhD if you’re not a part of a group. You either find one that will take you within a year or you leave.
There’s no shortage of folks being sold “key steps” to high paying jobs. Maybe their meter stick is different from yours, but taking that job as the night attendant at the hotel to move up the ranks or getting a salaried position as an assistant manager at Burger King as a path to a regional manager.
Lots of folks trying to sell you a path to success.
It's not like that. If you want to be hired as a staff scientist, you need a PhD. If you have an MS you can't be a staff scientist. If you have a BS you can't be a staff scientist. The most you'd get with those degrees is Research Assistant or Technician, then you will hit a ceiling in your career unless you step away from research and step more into business. This is true in academia, government labs, and the private sector, both in the U.S. and internationally.
It's like if you want to be a General, you are going to have to be a Private first. There is a progression in the sciences.
I think they got their analogy slightly wrong but it makes sense. If you want a career in research, a Bachelor's or Master's degree is like enlisting. You won't progress beyond a certain level. Whereas going to grad school for a PhD is like attending a military academy - which is the only path to becoming a general today. A military academy has the added benefit of a guaranteed officer job upon graduation. No such guarantees exist for a PhD.
> Whereas going to grad school for a PhD is like attending a military academy - which is the only path to becoming a general today.
What proportion of officers in the US Armed Forces graduates from the military academies? A third? I very much doubt graduating from one is required to become a general. Being a great political operator is but it’s not like only military academy graduates can do that.
> If you want to be hired as a staff scientist, you need a PhD. If you have an MS you can't be a staff scientist. If you have a BS you can't be a staff scientist.
That's not entirely true, though as I understand it is becoming more true; there are definitely places that will promote to positions for which the normal route is a post-graduate degree based on a lesser degree plus experience (including publications under the rubric of experience).
Now, university faculty positions, degree standards tend to be ironclad, though.
I face this unfortunate reality. I am simply not rich enough to get a PhD. I am certainly capable and willing. So instead I work as a tech in a research group of something that interests me for wage that is still too low for my capabilities.
> a PhD is sold as a key step for a well-paying and fulfilling career where you can make a difference
Yes, it is sold as such. But the appeal is fading fast.
Academia nowadays is something between a Beauty Pageant and the Hunger Games where people struggle with underpayment for years for maybe one day getting the famed tenured position.
Nobody in graduate school has delusions of expecting a professorship. It is well known that professorships are hard to get and involve a lot of politics. Graduate students don’t have bright prospects and are given a bad financial situation, but do it all the same because that’s the only way to work on something gratifying or important. It seems insane to punish the most talented and passionate for pursuing their calling.
In the Netherlands every PhD will be paid fairly decently. That's how it should be. Nor excuse for rich universities like those in UK & US to exploit those dreaming of s research career.
Maybe the number of anthropology researchers we deem appropriate as a society is actually not that high.
Maybe if these people want to do anthropology research, they can, but at their own expense.
When I was looking into doing grad school, I had no illusions that if I went in without a grant that I'd be doing anything other than scraping by. I have no idea why anyone would expect anything else.
Even worse the UC system (and by extension UCSC) are state run institutions that get a hefty chunk of their operating budget from the state. They also prioritize foreign students over domestic as they pay higher tuition (nee fees as it was illegal in California for UC and CSU schools to charge tuition for a very long time). The state should not be in the business of exploiting cheap labor. Period.
It's fucking absurd how top heavy the state run universities (especially UC) are. I would hope that grad students at other UC campuses would strike in solidarity, but knowing that UC's got them by the short and curlies I doubt that'll happen.
US universities don’t offer half time PhD studentships and then expect full time work. This was common in Germany when I had grad student acquaintances ten years ago. I doubt things have changed.
>Also I am sure the janitor at the University is paid decently and loves to work there. Reason is there are not as many people lined up for that job and basic economics takes over.
Janitor and other unskilled labor jobs at public universities tend to pay crap but are highly sought after because they usually come with the union negotiated benefits package that makes them a better value (than local work in private industry for more money and less benefits) for many people.
Back when I was doing those kinds of jobs I wouldn't even think about wasting my time working for a public university but I was young and needed the money more than I needed healthcare and 40hr weeks.
That's a pretty simplistic view of society. Do we need not need novels or music either? Let's drink nothing but soylent and devote 80 hours per week to our STEM careers
First of all there is no such thing as a free market.
Universities advertise good careers if you go through them, and I am not sure these numbers are as balanced as they could be.
Second even if it were, there is a terrible imbalance of power between students, which are distributed actors with little to no individual power and little information or experience, vs a much bigger actor with more information and a lot of power in such a relationship.
The graduate students had union protection. They chose to disregard the contract the union had negotiated and membership had ratified in 2018 thus throwing away that union protection.
As far as I can tell according to the article, the union did not support the UCSC strike but it has done some things that support the wildcat strikers, including filing an unfair labor practices suit against the university and openly commenting on the mistreatment of the strikers.
This is not actually where overhead really goes to. A lot of overhead simply pays for departments that don't bring in money (eg humanities, some social sciences) and I think that's fine too. But let's not say that an experimental lab with ~10 people and ~2000sqft that pays >$1mm a year in overhead spends it on "office space, internet, electricity, utilities..." because that is disingenuous (btw those numbers reflect the reality of the lab i got my phd in). Most overhead comes from expensive experimental labs (hard science + engineering + medicine).
Expected that there is some overhead to keep lights on, sure. But should lab A who brought in a 1 million dollar grant pay 500k in overhead for internet and electricity while lab B in the next bay in the same room brought in a 50k grant and only needs to pay 25k? Overhead is baked into salary budgeting too, you might budget 60k for your technician in your grant, knowing they'd receive 40k, the 20k allegedly covering the employees various benefits (which said employee will find are withheld from their 40k paychecks anyway).
There are about 1800 UCSC graduate students [1]. From this 2014-15 UCSC budget report [2] there is a very near 2:1 masters:phd graduation ratio. Assuming there are 2 years of masters students and 6 of PhD at any one time, that makes PhD students 60% of “graduate students”. Let’s make this easy by saying 1000 PhD students (if anything I imagine it’s way less than this — as I understand, monetizing masters students has been an increasing trend in American universities). The UCSC grad student union says average pay for the year is about 22k [3] (edit: this appears to be a minimum, not average, wage).
The strikers want 1.4k more per month. With the current 9 month payment system, that’s about 13k more per PhD student per year. So 1k*13k = 13mil overall to put this problem to bed.
That seems...surprisingly little? Aggravating a big chunk of your on-the-ground workers and attracting all this bad press doesn’t seem worth it. Meanwhile, there appear to be a whole lot of UCSC administrators making comfortable six figures [4].
I get that a lot of people on HN probably see the current low wages as a natural function of supply and demand in different academic disciplines. But heck, just looking at this from the point of view of the university, which is allocating resources to fight this, the calculus is odd.
> I get that a lot of people on HN probably see the current low wages as a natural function of supply and demand in different academic disciplines. But heck, just looking at this from the point of view of the university, which is allocating resources to fight this, the calculus is odd.
Note that I'm not making any _moral or normative claims_ about not striking vs striking vs wildcat striking, nor about the interplay of rights and obligations between individual workers, unions, and employers. I'm speaking purely strategically here, in the same frame as your comment.
You're only looking at first-order dynamics here, while second-order ones are often in play. In this case, the 54 students weren't just striking, they were wildcat-striking: striking in defiance of not just the university they work for, but the union that represents them, who had already agreed to a contract with the university.
When the union has already agreed to, ratified, and entered into a contract, capitulating to a wildcat strike a couple of years later is a significant departure from even relatively pro-labor norms. Again, from a purely strategic perspective, the costs of this specific incident are potentially a lot less significant than the future costs of the university signaling that they're okay with contracts becoming meaningless if the other party changes their mind in the middle of the term.
This is all about what principle you are applying and whether it scales or not. It is a bit like restraining order. In some specific instances it might be safe to let the person in your house. However that kind of hurts the overall restraining order terms and sometime in future you can get into trouble.
Which just underlies the problem with unions: not only they are compulsory institutions that force you into their ranks whether you want it or not, but even those who join them don't get a fair representation and have to strike on their own.
Compulsory union membership has been illegal since the 1947 Taft-Hartey Act. Compulsory legal representation fees for public sector unions have been illegal since Janus v. AFSCME (2018).
Just like in a democracy, not everybody's interests can be fully satisfied in a union. So what? That doesn't necessarily mean we'd all be better off with autocracy or without any government whatsoever, not even the people getting the short end of the stick.
The fundamental problem in Santa Cruz, like many other universities in the state, is the cost of housing. UC Santa Cruz didn't build enough housing. Part of the problem is that most of UCSC's land is wildlife refuge, and part of the problem (like everywhere else in California) is the political and regulatory difficulty of building new housing. The cost of housing has been increasing far faster than UCSC's budget.
Unions still have many monopolistic legal rights. For example, one obvious question is why UCSC students can’t form their own union and get their own contract; the answer is that it would be illegal, because if there’s a duly authorized union employers can’t collectively bargain with any other group.
This is not entirely true. UCSC determines its own admission, they could have simply not increased the student body and their housing would have been sufficient.
I know the same thing is happening at UCSD, where the student body exploded in size and despite additional housing being built, it is insufficient and very expensive.
Don't make the perfect the enemy of the good. A union-negotiated contract that's better than the one you'd get without the union is, well, better. It might not be "fair" or flawless, but it's still better.
Unless it’s worse. The assumption that forming a union and entering into effectively hostile negotiations with the company will result in a better compensation is unfounded.
It varies by country and even in the US it varies by industry. A lot of European countries have a less adversarial relationship between organized labor and management and workers benefit greatly. Public sector unions in the US, and the teamsters, and Culinary in Las Vegas, etc. don't seem to leave their workers worse off either.
It's perfectly founded, because I have seen it happen. Back in the 80s was a Thatcher believer, still am really, but in the 90s I was a member of a moderate public sector union in the UK and saw it working from the inside. It was a real eye opener, the union had huge experience in health and safety (a significant issue in that organisation), the unintended side effects of various policies and procedures, all sorts of things and actually worked very well with management to represent legitimate concerns.
It doesn't always work, in some industries I can see the relationship is much more confrontational and damaging, but it doesn't have to be that way.
Says a guy who never bothered to learn labor history, but feels he must know better anyway because somebody pays him good money for something. HN in a nutshell.
I find it hard to believe anyone that knows anything about labor history in the US could assume that company/union relations can be assumed to go well.
> even those who join them don't get a fair representation and have to strike on their own.
Again without implying anything normative, what makes you claim that the students' representation by the union isn't "fair"? Simply because they want more than stipulated by the contract the union was able to negotiate? Is my (non-union) salary "unfair" because I'd much rather get paid 3x as much (or 30x, for that matter)?
>not only they are compulsory institutions that force you into their ranks whether you want it or not, but even those who join them don't get a fair representation and have to strike on their own.
That is very definition of 'Unions'. As an individual you have limited resources to take on a big adversary (employer) hence few people come together and pool in money. If this process is voluntary it is entirely up-to them to come up with the terms of engagement. Once you agree to those terms going back on those terms must be seen as dishonesty. If the union membership is forces them obviously union leaders have zero incentives to actually offer better terms to members.
The only way this can be resolved is by having some kind of "enlightened" union leadership. The superhumans who will instantly know what is the right thing to do and will have 100% freedom to do so. Sadly, such humans are very very rare.
Maybe. Unions like democracy are a compromise. Though, I always wonder why do so many people here (despite not being in a tech union or majorly working in industries without them most likely) push for it so much?
Can anyone give me their actual experience being in a union that's not in the tech industry?
But that's a lobbying organization - and yes, a very successful one at all levels of government. They're not involved in pay and contract negotiations at your local hospital.
Both articles indicate that unionization has flopped. The broader question is - what is the purpose of unionization in the software industry? You want more money? You want ping pong tables at work?
The problem from the university's perspective is that while $13M is a low-ish amount of money (by university standards), the university has no reason to believe it would "put the problem to bed." If the university backs down, the strikers will be able to dictate any terms they want in the future, and any such strikes (i.e. illegal ones) would certainly have many more participants. The disruption to university operations could be severe.
And this is why unions exist in the first place and make binding contracts - no one wants to make a deal with another party when the other will arbitrarily decide the deal isn't good anymore and act like fools contrary to the terms of the contract.
Grad students at UCSC didn't arbitrarily think the deal they struck isn't good enough anymore, they never thought it was good enough in the first place. 83% of UCSC grad students felt the minimums outlined in the agreement, which was a UC wide agreement and not between UCSC and the UCSC grad students by the way, were insufficient for the growing rents in Santa Cruz.
This 13m number isn't arbitrary. In fact that $1400 per month bump is designed to put UCSC grad students in line with net compensation received by grad students at UC Riverside.
I noticed your two links mention different unions striking; some further research might be important here. One of your links is not graduate students striking, but the union for skilled workers at UCSC. The other is a union-sanctioned strike during (I think) a contract negotiation year. Neither is representative of the assertion that graduate students strike every year.
Sure, not all strikes are officially in the name of the grad students, but (a) the unions act together, and (b) the grad students specifically have gone on strike 3 times since 2013.
Weren't they the ones who had to vote in the union in the first place? Seems like they should have figured out what they want from the union before giving it the power to negotiate a contract on their behalf.
Right, but they voted to give the union the power to negotiate on their behalf without any checks. It seems too late then to change your mind once they have that power. I guess I don't understand how union politics work, but it might make sense to allow a union, but require majority vote for any major decisions.
Haha. As a former grad student, let me tell you:
1. you're almost always eligible for subsidized power/water because your pay is that low (24k when I went)
2. some of these programs admit 10 ppl a year and no more. What you're getting paid isn't the first cut. Getting in is the first cut.
Working with the right professor to shape your research agenda and future as a result, is the second cut.
The UC System has been defunding their academic positions and putting billions of money into upper management positions for generations. [0]
"UAW local 2865, a labor union representing UC student workers and teaching assistants, recently estimated in over two decades about $1 billion dollars have been wasted in upper-level UC administrative costs. UC Berkeley Professor Charles Schwartz, who has conducted extensive research on this subject, estimated that the total cost of UC administrative bloat had been $600 million per year. He has also estimated that UCLA in particular squanders about $54 million per year, the most out of all the UC’s."
Golden parachutes are not decided on after the fact. They are agreed upon in advance when they are hired. The only reason companies offer them is to get the best people they can.
The person running your investments can make or break you. You're going to hire the best you can, and that's going to cost. And someone with a track record of making it rain is going to know this and know what they're worth.
If you want a golden parachute yourself, you're going to need to build a track record of success first showing you're worth it.
> The person running your investments can make or break you
How would one propose to distinguish* someone who will deliver growth for - say - 25 consecutive years from someone who delivers growth for 5 years yet blows up your endowment in year 6 ?
If you think that "25 years of not blowing up" is a sure-fire way to predict the risk of blowing up in year 26, I would recommend reading Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
I never said "sure-fire" or anything like it. Anyone who believes in "sure-fire" investments is a fool. The theory that people with lots of money to hire the best are fools doesn't seem credible to me.
Besides, Warren Buffet has a stellar track record much longer than 25 years. People paying him to manage their money has made him very, very rich and those people very happy with him.
>There are better things for a university to be doing than paying rainmakers
Dozens of university endowments are over a billion dollars, with significant returns when under good management. Ignoring the returns possible on that means the students and state has to pay more to continue the university. Endowments often consist of hundreds or more fund, usually set up by donors, to advance some part of the university, which very often is scholarships and other direct student benefits.
It's incredibly short-sighted to downplay them without understanding the benefits.
Good management is one thing. Rainmakers are another. I’m not sure why a university needs someone actively managing funds instead of using passive vehicles
"lot of people on HN probably see the current low wages as a natural function of supply and demand" - as a former grad student at one of UC's campuses - this is not as simple as you put it.
A lot of grad students are international students (like I was) and they simply can't work anywhere else due to their visa restrictions.
The whole grad school equation is foobar. Universities import foreign labor and they under pay given their monopoly where paid positions exist. They also rely on students obtaining external funding.
>Universities import foreign labor and they under pay given their monopoly
Given that there's hundreds of schools with thousands of grad programs to choose from, with none of them having more than a tiny percentage of the total market, this is not monopoly pricing.
It's simply supply and demand. People are willing to show up and work for the vast majority of these programs.
Indirect funds on grants need to be eliminated in my opinion. The GOP is a disaster at the moment in my opinion but introducing bills to eliminate them is one of the things they've done right. Indirect funds distort the purpose of grants and give perverse incentives to university administration and other funding sources.
I think you’re right, edited. As far as I can tell they’re using this number as a baseline for wage increases so the rest of the comment should still hold.
My question was more or less rhetorical, since institutions don't always rush to put a figure on all the elements of a package.
Anecdotal data point: the person at the top of the tree at my old university gets a private 200 year-old house inside campus (so long as they're in post). What's that worth?
Your second reference also points out UCSC's operating budget for 2016 is $722 million. Revenue and expenditures have likely increased 4 years later, but the $13 mil represents a 1.8% increase in operational cost. The UCSC administration would have to cut other programs' budgets in order to make the difference.
I'm an UCSC alumnus, and I served as a student rep on UCSC's Academic Senate's Committee on Planning and Budget (CPB). I've sided with the graduate students in this case. If you follow the subreddit r/UCSC, you will see the student body is largely divided on the issue. Now, subreddit posts are a small sample of the student body, it does affect the perception as well as the notoriety of UCSC being a liberal school full of hippies that always fight for worker's rights. It is harder to rebuild that kind of reputation in the school's brand. And it also negatively affects alumni fundraising.
It puts the UCSC administration between a rock and a hard place. I've worked with the administration in the past. They are intelligent and caring faculty members trying to walk a tight rope every year with UCOP/Regents increasingly demanding in delivering in business objectives (increase enrollment/revenue) on one side and their academic mission on the other. I do not envy them.
UCOP miscalculated this entire affair. UCSC grads going on strike has also encouraged UC Berkeley's and Davis's grads to strike in solidarity. The administration has never been able to handle student protests with the best optics, and unfortunately, student protests historically do not succeed in getting their demands met. It is.. a teachable moment, well steeped in irony.
Parity to the existing is what UCSC grad students want. This $1400 per month isn't arbitrary, it would bring minimum net compensation in line with what an arbitrary grad student at UC Riverside receives in net compensation.
If you give one group of workers a raise, how long before all the others demand the same? And then some want more? And then the first group come back because they realise they can get even more...
1 person who you give a good deal to might, just might, keep their mouths shut. A whole segment? No way.
There are even more questions if all of those 1000 PhD students receive pay(not the money they receive to support their research, which is not the same thing) from UC. But I assume that is not the case, that ALL PhD students are employed by UC... or is it? And why only 54 of those students feel that they are special?
I am confused and a bit curious, because that is not why I went to uni(not in US) and not how I had to deal with my studies. Also - can a foreign student apply for this free cheese and is UC diploma any good(also - outside UC, to have a real job)? And how UC is getting money? Any tax money involved(if that is the case, then why?) or only donations - from former students, who... work at UC?
I'm an undergrad at UCSC right now and have found the entire strike to be more detrimental to their cause. They've lost so much undergrad support after disrupting a STEM midterm and shutting down campus causing us to miss the classes we have paid for. I even lost my grades last quarter as my TA was fired ( of the 54 ) and he has refused to hand them over post firing. What it has done to the undergraduates is a little ridiculous and I felt for them in the beginning, but the strike has made me be a supporter against them unfortunately.
Congratulations, you have both fallen into the position that the University wants you to.
UCSC can easily marshal the resources to get your grades, get you graduated, etc. The fact that UCSC chooses not to in order to divide you from the strikers is intentional.
People don't go on strike because it's fun or popular. And strikes are not meant to be convenient.
What would the college have done if 54 TAs had quit...
It's much easier to fix one missing TA, be redoing the grading work if necessary, than for 54. And if a TA quits, I would expect the TA to release the grades as far as they have been determined at the point of quitting.
1) A TA can get hit by a bus tomorrow. What do you do in that case? You can just do that here.
2) Waterboarding and torture have been demonstrated over and over to be ineffective. That mere idea that they might ever be a useful tool is pernicious and needs to be denounced even when said in jest.
And now you've just figured out why in labor disputes it's so important/valuable for everyone to be in the union.
(Also, don't forget about the employees in billing, grant handling, the professors bringing in big grants, etc)
Back in the day of unions, strikes were not about making a statement, they were literally bending the employer to the will of the workers with brute force. The workers- collectively- held the power. Unresolved strikes literally sunk companies. It feels like that's been forgotten somewhat.
At the risk of getting banned for this comment, fuck this. I was an undergrad as UCSC and I supported the strikes then, and I support the strike now. Yes the strike interferes with undergrad education, but that is the entire point. I never went to class when a strike was on, just like I would never cross a picket line. Professors deserve to be paid well, and grad students in teaching or TA positions deserve to be paid well too. With the absurd tuition the UC system charges, that is the least they can do.
But consider that GP is also paying "absurd tuition." Returning grades is the least UC can do.
Not everyone goes to school to become an activist. No one should begrudge you of your means and desire to skip class in solidarity with the oppressed grad students at probably the top public university system in the world, but not everyone has such privileges.
“I’m struggling for basic needs such as toilet paper, buying my son milk,” said Arjona, who pays about $1,700 a month in rent out of the $2,200 she receives
A cursory examination of Craigslist shows that you can easily rent a nice 4 bedroom house for $4000/month in Santa Cruz. Get a couple of roommates to split the rent and you're only paying $1000/month.
Perhaps Arjona should consider that she could have more money for living expenses if she was more economical with her housing choices. After all, she was the one who chose to sign a lease for $1700/month on a $2200/month salary, when cheaper options exist.
As somebody in Santa Cruz, good ducking luck actually getting that house.
Finding a place off Craig's list is nearly impossible.
Last time I tried to use that (5years ago), the only call-backs I got from about 20 calls were landlords that recognized my name and I had known from other contexts (I've lived here a while). I ended up getting a place through other personal connections. Most local rentals operate on a network of personal connections here, with locals offering friends or other locals a deal to get by in an expensive town. Students never get this treatment, and often don't even get shown rooms.
For a grad student arriving without an extensive network, a room for $1700 isn't too bad.
The university has abandoned these students, and so has the town.
Where are you seeing that she has roommates? It's not mentioned in the article I read, and I don't see any evidence that the units are shared at https://housing.ucsc.edu/family/. In fact, it says the rent for a 2br is $1700 a month, the same as what she says she's paying.
In any case, the mistake seems to be earlier in the decision-making process, when she decided to become a anthropology graduate student while having a child to care for and without the financial resources to complete the program.
I always find it interesting that people reject the idea that one should have to consider their children or their future children over certain decisions. Why shouldn't we insist that a parent or parent-to-be makes the best possible choices over their employment while considering the child they have or will have?
If for, an admittedly highly contrived, example if this individual had the option of making $50K/yr in a low cost of living area OR the graduate program that would result in subsistence wages in a high COL area, why would we not insist that it is at least in part their own doing? Why would we not consider this to be both a bad decision to opt for subsistence wages as well potentially morally reprehensible for the lifestyle she willingly imposes upon her child?
In an alternate question, what if a similar individual with a child making $50K/yr had the option to purchase a reliable car for $700/mo but instead purchased a luxury vehicle for $2K/mo, forcing her into a situation where she was living on subsistence wages with her child? Would we not criticize the choice?
It seems that today it is becoming a popular opinion that any choice for any additional education (unless its from outside traditional academia and then it's bad) should be viewed as ultimately holy and that criticizing those choices is beyond the pale. I suggest that this may come from the Gen Xers and Millenials of the world who were essentially dictated to that they _had to go to college_ to live a good life. The net result of this has been people attending college and then ending up so-called "underemployed" by the masses. However, perhaps many of these people never should have attended college. Perhaps we sold them a raw deal that we have glorified and encoded in bull shit credentialism that requires college degrees for jobs that I could have easily done as a graduated high school student. For many, especially our youth, this alternative view seems verboten and we are now insisting on making college EVEN MORE prevalent by making it free for all. However, the deal will still be a bad deal. We will then be sending even more individuals into a system that will give them no advantage, take 4yrs of their lives and spit them out just as useful to society as they were going in at great cost.
I only mentioned it as a major contributing factor to her having insufficient financial resources to complete the program. Plainly, she would be able to accept a cheaper housing situation if she did not have a child, and housing is her dominant expense. You yourself called that out, so I don't think it's out of bounds for me to mention it.
What I'd really say is that a single, low-income parent-or-other-person-who-won't-have-roommates should probably not move to Santa Cruz (or Beverly Hills, Monaco, Chelsea, Dumbo, the Chicago Loop, etc.). I get that this is a controversial viewpoint for some folks, but it just seems like fundamental personal finance to me.
Genuinely, yes! If you have a child, you need to consider your child's needs and best interests ahead of your own hopes and dreams and desires.
And if that child's needs are better met by taking a decent job in a lower COL area than by working for poverty wages at UCSC, then you should take that job. Your child is more important than your selfish dreams!
Nobody forced her to make these living arrangements that consume such a large percentage of her monthly salary. While it is regrettable, it's not the responsibility of the university to make sure that its students make good life choices.
Where did I say anything like that? I was just saying that $1700/month for rent is clearly above both the market rate for living with roommates, and above what she can reasonably afford given her salary.
Children living with unrelated adult roommates, or without their own bedroom (shared with siblings until age 10), is considered a strong indicator of poverty.
I expect a graduate student parent to be making significant material sacrifices to support a child (no big parties, no trip to Thailand in the summer) but they shouldn't be in poverty.
They are a student. As much as it sucks they have to support a child, this was a decision that they consciously made. We shouldn't have to throw around money to every grad student just because some small fraction of them are parents.
If you want to talk about programs specifically for supporting parents working towards their education, I'm all ears. But that is orthogonal to the current discussion.
Most grad 'students' work and should be paid as employees. They're not 'studying'. I really believe a grad student should be an employee and treated as such. They're doing the research which is directly tied to the university's ranking. The ranking and name of a university is tied to the applications they receive. They're the ones doing the grading and proctoring. They're not simply taking classes and graduating. They're writing papers and grants, meeting their deadlines for papers by not sleeping and then going to teach a session or grading all day. All while getting paid to work 'part time'.
Regarding being a parent, the alternative is singling them out, make the ones with children pass through hoops in order to receive extra financial support.
On a university, the funding will probably be limited. So now it's not only grad students that are parents but the grad students that are parents that did it early/qualified.
There's already a big discrepancy, even inside a single university, between how much each student earns based on their department/advisor/research.
If they are so rent-burdened, they should consider living with a roommate, or perhaps 2 or 3 roommates. Then they would be more easily able to afford basic necessities.
I can’t speak to GP’s situation, but TFA makes clear that the university grad student housing available at UCSC in this specific real-world case is in fact not sufficient for the graduate students to afford such a living situation on their stipends.
And what do you know, the rents are still high. At what point do we realize that an administrator making 600k a year off the backs of people toiling long hours in labs to bring in grant money for the school and coming home to live in tenement conditions isn't the fault of the students, but the administrators making half a million dollars a year? Quite a hill to die on.
An administrator is paid that much because that is how much value they provide to the university system. A graduate student provides minimal value, in fact barely above replacement level. That’s why they are a student.
Are you a grad student? And you never took an economics course? This is pretty basic material.
That's a truism. It depends on the administrator, and in general executives and administrators aren't paid on the value they bring, but based on a sort of signalling game with the oversight board that determines their compensation. If pay was really based on value to the system, Chancellors that are fired or denoted under scandal wouldn't keep their pay.
I've seen graduate students bring in millions of dollars of federal grant money from the NIH, NSF, and the DOE that would have been awarded to other institutions had that grant student not written their proposal. I've seen schools take half of this grant money for overhead and use it to pay for administrative bloat under the pretext of 'keeping the lights on.'
I would be completely on the grad students' side if they weren't withholding materials necessary to produce the grades. That, though, sounds a lot like extortion, and it's hard to have any sympathy whatsoever with someone doing that.
It'd be one thing for me to walk off my job. It'd be another thing entirely for me to run off with the only copy of business-critical data.
IANAL, but I wonder if there might not end up being criminal charges in some cases.
What happened with your grades in those classes? I read the university systems release and this article and couldn’t glean the details. Is that course’s grades still just up in the air?
For many classes, grades were withheld and then released as the TAs did not want to lose their jobs. My TA was not one of them. For a class that needs tests graded, this isn't as much of an issue, but in my case, the class is a Distributed Systems course and the projects we built are quite extensive. My professor reached out to me and other high scorers in the course requesting us to recreate the grading infrastructure as he believes our true grades will never be received from our fired TA. I took the course as a letter grade class, but currently it is marked as a Pass/No Pass which conveniently is not allowed for major courses. It will be a fun time talking to the advising people on campus.
> My professor reached out to me and other high scorers in the course requesting us to recreate the grading infrastructure as he believes our true grades will never be received from our fired TA.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but he's asking you to work on grading infrastructure?
I did turn the offer down because I didn't feel comfortable with it. I may not be 100% for this strike, but I would not want to be apart of that. I really appreciate your responses here as it is illuminating many things I hadn't originally considered. The TA's clearly have way too many responsibilities for the pay they receive. I just feel like undergraduates are really getting screwed when there has to be other methods... Of course, I have never considered them so what good is it for me to say that lol.
now is not the time to back down. teaching is hard. teaching and doing research is even harder. this whole problem would be solved by everyone grad and undergrads walking out for a few weeks. Throw in a hunger strike in there too. Only a big disruption at this point will get things done. Now is not the time to back down. The School admins will not understand any other language unfortunately.
Teaching needs a large pay-bump. If you only hire the lowest common denominators you're going to get the lowest result. I've seen so many teachers move on to other jobs just because it doesn't have the pay needed for basic living.
Stop calling things like this socialism, futures depend on good education.
I don't think it is that simple. Associated materials that I am paying for? Additionally, as another commenter mentioned there is an administration aspect no doubt about how crazy it is TAs even have this power in the first place.
_Mad_ is not the word I'd use in this situation. Ive been here long enough to just roll with the punches through every strike. I am just trying to talk about it, but it seems its easy to assume how others are acting.
The aggressive rhetoric this topic brings out like "open up your brain a bit" really is helping no one, including the strike and its cause.
Striking when it's convenient is worthless. Perhaps if the students weren't so entitled, they'd understand that solidarity is important and that grades should be handled. Furthermore, you have to realize the university is punishing you to turn you against the grad students... and it appears they have succeeded. If I were an ugrad there, I'd be right there with the grad students.
I was an ugrad at another UC where 2/3 of my classes were cancelled because lecturers got jobs at startups in the dotcom times, and they made a habit of not scheduling upper-div major classes frequently enough to stay full-time for the year. haha.
I agree that striking when its convenient is worthless, but at the same time, I have various emails from my direct TAs and the COLA organization as a whole mentioning the intent is to not harm undergrads, but here we are... Additionally, I'm not sure where youre getting the students are "entitled". I work and take loans out in order to go to this school, takes classes, and receive my grades. Am I entitled for wanting what I pay for?
The administration is not withholding grades, the graduates are. I understand that they're doing it as a result of the administration, but why are we (undergraduates) sitting in the middle taking heat from both sides?
I'm happy you would be out there striking as thats your right, but to call me entitled is a tad bit much no?
The response on the UCSC subreddit is similar - youre either entitled or a bootlicker if you don't join the cause. I am unsure how that is supposed to make me support the cause?
This situation is also a consequence of poor management at UCSC. Every other university I'm familiar with makes faculty responsible for submitting grades. It's inconceivable to me, as someone in the UC system, why TAs would be responsible for grades. TAs should be teaching assistants, not adjunct faculty.
It clearly has the resources to provide you with your grades, it's not like the specific grad students are the only ones being able to grade random undergrad work. It appears it's failing to provide the service you pay it for.
You're absolutely right in that they have the resources to get these graded. Another comment I posted down below describes my grade situation and how I've been asked to help grade (for pay). I imagine in six months time I'll have my grades, but the wait is absolutely wrong. Other students are attempting to graduate, but their requirements are not met because of withheld grades by their TAs. Can they afford another quarter or two while the UC gathers new graders? Who knows.
The university is preventing people from graduating, not the TAs. The university could have professors grade their own exams. The university could hire undergraduates like you to grade exams. The university could also let anyone graduate that they want, the university is the body that enforces these requirements, not the TAs. They could send a memo tomorrow saying they would aggregate your other grades, or let you graduate provisionally, or waive whatever requirement the university itself has put in place, but they aren't because by not doing so they turn undergraduates like you against graduates. And from the looks of your comments they have succeeded.
And this is exactly what my professor has done in response to the graduate student strikes: she is some grading assignments herself and has dropped ones that she no longer has time for. I will probably receive my grades on time, and if I don’t I’m going to be a lot more annoyed at the university for not working something out than I will be at my TA (who has already submitted grades for assignments due before the strike).
I really hope you pay close attention to the comments by assdf replying to this. The graduate students clearly got desperate because of how crazy the financial situation got. It's sad to see how few people really recognize that. I hope you're lucky in life and never end up trapped the way they were!
I did not mean to come across this way or call you any names - can you point where I did so I won't repeat it?
My skin is plenty thick, and this back and forth isn't meant to be whining. I'm just curious about your approach to this and it is fun to hear others perspectives, especially on such a polarizing topic.
I'm a little perplexed on this reply to be honest. How is this constructive? I'm open to hearing how you think I can improve and help me understand how my attitude is reactive or poor.
Thank you! Been a lurker for a long time now at the suggestion of a coworker. I felt like a could contribute a different perspective in this thread so I made the account. Appreciate the work you do moderating!
Eh, sounds like the grad students are doing the punishing. Their cause is noble, I'm sure, right up until it interferes with my education (and thus my career path).
They need to find a way to exert leverage on the people who can satisfy their demands -- meaning the University -- and not on people who are basically innocent customers.
Is it Ok to strike when that will hurt innocents? I think we can all agree that having nurses strike and abandon care of their patients is unfair to those patients. This fight should be between UCSC and the graduates, not holding innocent undergrads hostage in the middle.
The only reason why undergraduates are 'held hostage' is due the policies of the university. The reason why grades are not posted is due to the university. The reason why people aren't able to graduate is due to policies stipulated by the university.
In most other universities, professors submit grades and are free to grade their own exams. TAs are there to just get through the stack of exams a little faster than the professor working on that same stack themselves. The TAs don't hold any sacred power in this scenario, they aren't needed at all actually, they just add an extra sets of hands to check or cross out answers on a piece of paper. That's it. There is no bylaw stating your grades must be submitted by a graduate student and no other, but if there were, it is the university that is enforcing the bylaw.
This narrative that grades can only be submitted by the TAs does not seem right, it seems like a narrative designed to put a wedge in the student body by spreading around a fundamental misunderstanding on how grading and graduation occurs at a university.
You wrote a lot but I am struggling to see your point. The TAs tried holding student grades hostage as leverage in their strike. Now some are withholding those grades for work they reviewed out of spite after being fired. They are hurting innocent students and potentially wrecking/derailing careers and lives. This latter part is a fact. The difference is that sone people here think this is an acceptable price to pay for the TAs to make more money. The rest of us think that’s a BS position.
Systematically it sounds insane that the TAs are wholly responsible for grading but they don't get to teach the class, and they don't get paid enough to live. How can you expect a TA to grade appropriately if they are starving? I would blame management for shitty TAs resulting in shitty work, than the TAs for breaking under unlivable conditions.
I think this is a wake-up call for these grad students of how the real world works.
> Instead of firing TAs who are standing up for a decent standard of living for themselves, UC must sit down at the bargaining table and negotiate a cost of living increase.
Sitting at the negotiations table where you hold none of the cards means you are not getting the pay increase you are asking for. Striking is for workers who know they hold some cards and the other party is not listening.
Striking without any card means you are going to get fired; which just happened here.
I also think it is a good introduction to the real world, but for a different reason: it shows that workers are treated as disposable goods that employers can and will throw away whenever they become too much of a hassle or ask for compensation that reflects the value they bring to the organization. Universities are no different to businesses in this respect; the success of colleges depends on the grunt work of grad students and professors not on the tenure track. Universities will openly deny sane living conditions to these people, and fire them for asking for enough to pay their rents. The way workers in this country are treated is god-awful, and I'm saddened by the people in this thread who are cheering the firing of these students.
The strike occured during a period of operation under an agreed-upon contract
Re-opening the contract for negotiation would have lead to renegotiating for 90,000 other employees during a school year
The workers were withholding student grades, harming others who have taken out a significant bet against their own futures that they would get good grades and eventually jobs to repay that financial aid
There are a number of ways this could have played out, and was basically the second-to-worst case scenario. I am sympathetic to those working under an oppressive union and university, but there really wasn't going to be a different outcome given the path they took.
A representative for the union that represents more than 19,000 academic workers across the University of California system said she was surprised by the university's decision.
"We are shocked by UC's callousness, and by the violence that so many protesters experienced as they peacefully made the case for a cost of living increase," said Kavitha Iyengar, president of UAW Local 2865, in a statement. "Instead of firing TAs who are standing up for a decent standard of living for themselves, UC must sit down at the bargaining table and negotiate a cost of living increase."
Last week, the university filed an unfair labor practice charge against the union, claiming the union has failed to stop the wildcat strike by the graduate students as it is required to do by the collective bargaining agreement.
The union responded by filing its own unfair labor practice charge, alleging the university has refused to meet with the union to negotiate a cost of living adjustment.
Direct from the article. Care to back up your statement?
I thought the same thing as they. From the article:
"The strike, which is not authorized by the union that represents the graduate student employees, is in violation of the current bargaining agreement, the university said."
It's not clear that the union authorized it, despite what they're quoted as saying further down the article.
I don't know enough about unions to know whether they could authorize a strike after not explicitly authorizing initially.
It reads like the union didn't authorize the strike, but was fine seeing what would happen/causing a reaction.
At the legal level, unions are obligated to prevent wildcat strikes. That's why people talk about a grand bargain between labor and capital happening mid century: unions would channel labor conflict into a bureaucratic process, and in return capital would agree in principle to negotiate with the union.
In practice, union bureaucrats really dislike wildcat strikes. They dissipate the negotiating power of the union; they basically show the entire hand of the union's most powerful weapon, at a time the union views as suboptimal. And it's usually the threat of a strike, not the strike itself, that companies are more scared of: a company highy desires to avoid a disruption, but if it's already in progress, they don't have an incentive to negotiate unless the union has a really strong hand.
I wonder if the union seriously considered a strike or not. I read the article but I missed anything that indicated deliberation over the striker's cause on the part of the union. In the grand bargain the union has to refrain from merging with management or else it is illegitimate.
Probably not, because the strikers obviously had no leverage. The union officials knew exactly how this would go down, and they accurately believed that more subtle means of pressure would allow the workers to maximize their benefit.
Why would the union strike? The wages were exactly what they had bargained for, and the majority had voted in favor of. It isn't like they were working without a contract.
> The way workers in this country are treated is god-awful, and I'm saddened by the people in this thread who are cheering the firing of these students.
I'm not cheering their firing. I'm just explaining why their strike did not work out as they wished.
> ask for compensation that reflects the value they bring to the organization
That's not how it works in the real world. You get paid by market rate; which means if there is someone else accepting a pay cut, you'll get fired and replaced.
> Universities are no different to businesses in this respect
Universities are a competitive business, too; and students pay high tuition fees. If the universities are out-competed, they can lose business/students. It's turtles all the way down.
> That's not how it works in the real world. You get paid by market rate; which means if there is someone else accepting a pay cut, you'll get fired and replaced.
I agree, that's true. It's almost as if this is an unjust system that devolves into a race to the bottom and inevitable exploitation of workers. And that in the real world, anyone who tries to fight against this system ends up screwed by their employers.
I'm glad we could agree on the exploitation inherent to the labor market.
The vast majority of people in the "labor market" are making livable wages. This is not the "unjust system" that a minority at the bottom are complaining about. In any case this "exploitation" is temporary for these student teachers and most importantly as others have pointed out, most of these students are foreign workers and personally I think it's a little exploitive for them to demand entitlements while harming the school to get their way - if it really is so bad no one is forcing them to study here.
Perhaps due to incompetence. Better to take longer and get it done rather than get fired I suppose. When I was a TA 20 hours of work was the most it took (and it was frequently less).
It's good to see that your graduate school experience worked for you, but I would suggest you talk to the TAs striking before labelling them as lazy and unfit.
>this is an unjust system that devolves into a race to the bottom and inevitable exploitation of workers
Yet this system has increased the real pay of labor many, many fold over the past 100 years, to where even poverty level in the US is above a good portion of the world income, even though those other people also labor quite hard.
It's an odd race to the bottom that has raised wages so significantly for all quintiles.
I love how people dismiss injustice with an appeal to "the market" as if the market was a force of nature rather than a manmade and human manipulated entity.
Markets are created by a handful of people and affected by laws. And supply and demand is also an man-made creation. For example, by creating laws allowing seasonal migrants, you could affect the wages of farm workers. The same thing with work visas like H1-B. Also, laws favoring employers' rights and workers' rights can also affect wages. And of course "credentialing" and artificially limiting supply in the case of doctors affects wages.
> Universities are a competitive business, too;
Not really. Pretty much all the top universities stay at the top because of legacy. Also UC Santa Cruz is a public university. Very little chance it is going to be out-competed and put out of business.
> Also UC Santa Cruz is a public university. Very little chance it is going to be out-competed and put out of business.
Relatively little of the funding for the UC's comes from the state. Tuition is a much larger percentage. So they do have a concern of being out-competed.
> Also UC Santa Cruz is a public university. Very little chance it is going to be out-competed and put out of business.
Where do you think UC as a public institution would be if it lost political support of the faction allied with organized labor? It already doesn't have support from the opposing faction.
The market is an emergency force. It isn't determined by a secret cabal of evil capitalists. It may not be a "force of nature" (although that is debatable because it is a direct consequence of natural properties like scarcity), but that doesn't mean it can be simply up and changed.
>Markets are created by a handful of people and affected by laws
I bake a bunch of bread. You grow a bunch of potatoes. We are both willing to trade. That's a market. All people participate in the market if they consume goods and/or offer labor.
Maybe the protests and the media coverage are an important part of spreading information and correcting the demand problem for academic positions. We need to tell the world that academia is not what it is presented as.
Your position is akin to opposing online restuarant reviews because why put reviews online if the market will put bad restaurants out of business..
> It isn't determined by a secret cabal of evil capitalists.
Capitalists? Socialists, communists, monarchs, mercantilists, etc also use laws to create and manipulate "the market". The US, China, Saudi Arabia, North Korea, EU, etc all create markets. Not all of them are a cabal of evil capitalists. I was talking about markets, not capitalism. Markets exist with or without capitalism. Two people could just form a market as you noted below.
> although that is debatable because it is a direct consequence of natural properties like scarcity
You can force scarcity through laws as well. Coal, fishing, diamonds, etc being examples.
> but that doesn't mean it can be simply up and changed.
It sure as hell can influence it. Which was my point.
> I bake a bunch of bread. You grow a bunch of potatoes. We are both willing to trade. That's a market.
In other words "a manmade and human manipulated entity".
Just because a "cabal of evil capitalists" doesn't say a doctor should make $100,000 doesn't mean that the "market" isn't manmade and manipulated. We could relax laws and allow a flood of doctors from around the world and I suspect doctors' wages would decline. You get the idea?
The market is no more an "emergent force" than the rules of monopoly are an emergent force. No more than cities, governments, etc are emergent forces. They are all man-made structures with levels of human manipulation.
Workers are treated as replaceable when they are in fact easily replaced. Grad students aren't even really workers, though. They're students where teaching responsibilities are part of their professional training, and as with most similar positions (apprenticeships and internships), they aren't especially lucrative and there's a line around the block to replace anyone who quits.
"As part of its commitment to transparency and public accountability, each year the University of California publicly reports employee pay data. The report covers UC's career faculty and staff employees, as well as part-time, temporary and student employees." [1]
I think the commonly accepted definition of worker is someone who is an employee and not a manager. Grad students are pretty clearly employees, according to the UC system.
If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then for all intents and purposes, it is a duck.
As a grad student, I taught 2 undergraduate courses a semester as the professor, the same load as a full faculty member—very much ‘workers in the traditional sense.’ Moreover, grad students are also writing a dissertation and doing research for their advisors and taking a full course load, and apparently in CA, also working a side job to pay their bills.
Grad students teaching courses is, as with interns, a hybrid role that is both paid employment and professional training. And, as with interns, the pay is much lower than an experienced industry veteran's salary [1] because part of the compensation comes in the form of experience, connections and resume-building.
[1] There are two exceptions to the rule that interns don't get paid much: professional services and engineering. Both fields use internships almost exclusively as a recruiting tool and don't claim to provide any educational value.
Grad students do hold a lot of the cards here. They are frequently required to teach and grade classes, and they perform research critical to their advisors career and the future success of the department. Schools stand to loose training grants as well if research output is diminished, and would fail to recruit grad students who are of high caliber and have choices to go to other schools, so the quality of research would further go down.
It's not a tenable position for the school to be in long term, and they are hoping they can scare other students back into line if they start axing students. If anything, this has fired up the students, not made them accept the status quo of loosing money for every year they live and work at UCSC.
With time, the supply of graduate students should fall. Nobody should want to accept such a deal when these folks could go work in industry and make far money than the UC system will ever pay them. Getting 50-some replacement graduates could be a challenge for UC Santa Cruz. Usually enrollment is on an annual cycle.
>"Getting 50-some replacement graduates could be a challenge for UC Santa Cruz"
It won't be. UCSC is a globally renowned research institute. One of the top public schools in the nation. Not to mention being situated in one of the most beautiful places on earth. There are literally thousands of equally talented people waiting to take these spots. As much as I sympathize with any workers' struggle, these people have no idea how privileged they truly were.
Getting 50-some replacements before the start of the next academic year. Everyone else is already locked into their plans for the current academic year. After that period passes, I agree with you.
The grad students want more pay because housing is so damn expensive in Santa Cruz. Why is it expensive? Because the city refuses to build enough.
If their pay doesn't go up, I assume more an more applicants will just pass on Santa Cruz and go for a school where housing is more reasonable and their pay covers most of their expenses.
I had a different impression, which is that they had cards and deployed them poorly. They seem to have whittled the holdouts down to a point where the impact wasn’t so great. But I’m kinda curious if UC doesn’t make grade reporting more incremental now.
They lack much of the risk a normal strike carries. It's not like this is their only possible job with their current credentials. Many of them will probably see a pay increase as a result of getting fired.
There is a power asymmetry between the worker class and the capitalist class. By that Gilded Age logic, certainly all unqualified workers -- and many qualified ones as is this case -- do not have the right to strike.
It's because of that power asymmetry that there are utterly basic protections such as it being illegal to fire strikers, hire scabs, etc.
Your "free market" approach makes for a very dystopic world indeed.
I feel like these stories should mention the compensation for the people attacking graduate students for demanding a living wage. Someone making well into 6 figures really doesn’t have a good basis for summarily dismissing that need:
Why should they expect a living wage for sub-demand fields of research? Why do my choices to achieve financial stability override my experience prior to that? When you're from a poor family the decisions that these striking students are making are befuddling.
That might be a valid claim if STEM students made more than eg humanities students, but it’s unfortunately not the case in the real world that supply and demand dictate resources in a state university...I just graduated with a STEM PhD and comfortably make six figures, but that’s after five years of making $20k and teaching courses required by unrelated subjects, as the only professor. And I was lucky to have such a stable income for such a long time, which actually covered my rent...
Generally, grad student pay is not calibrated at the department / subject level, and that’s especially true of a large multi university state system like CA has...
Why should people need to work multiple jobs just to survive? Why should an employer be allowed to pay pay some workers six figures and others so little they must choose between a roof and a meal?
You can choose what to believe. I choose to believe that the world is a better place when people are paid a living wage for their jobs.
because they perform a service. they teach classes. that's literally what they were withholding - grades for classes they TA. so there is plenty of demand for that service. it has nothing to do with the labor market after they graduate. god some people just fall all over themselves to be smug.
If you want to have an actual conversation, I'm happy to. If not, let me know so I don't waste my time.
They do perform a service, sometimes teaching classes, sometimes grading papers, sometimes assisting with office hours. They get paid $2400/mo, putting them above median salary for full-time TAs.
Nobody is forcing them to go to graduate school in California and accept this job. This isn't something that they were coerced into.
The fact of the matter is that research is still a demand driven field. This is why you'll see stipends and grants to assist students in higher demand fields, like computer science.
When I was in school a few years ago, everyone knew that if they were not receiving a grant, they were going to be paying for their education. This isn't a surprise, and if they are willing to make the decision to fund their further education, that is something they should be able to do.
>Nobody is forcing them to go to graduate school in California and accept this job. This isn't something that they were coerced into.
What is the significance of this point when literally no one is forced or coerced except for slaves? By this token absolutely no one should be striking for higher wages - they should all go work somewhere else. Oh wait...
>They do perform a service, sometimes teaching classes, sometimes grading papers, sometimes assisting with office hours. They get paid $2400/mo, putting them above median salary for full-time TAs.
Medían where? The entire United States? California? Santa Cruz? And exactly why is that relevant anyway? It's quite possible that the median wage isn't enough! And this would be part of the process for raising it.
>The fact of the matter is that research is still a demand driven field. This is why you'll see stipends and grants to assist students in higher demand fields, like computer science.
When you look at the average salary of a tenured UC professor (the kind that takes on grad students) and the average salary of appointed administrators (deans, provosts, etc) it's very hard to believe that the issue is lack of money and not allocation.
I also have no idea what cs/stem has to do with this. Most stem PhDs don't get more money either (most do not have fellowships nor their own grants).
Even if you receive the biggest stipend out of all graduate programs in the entire country in computer science or whatever stem subtype you'd like to name, it won't be much higher than 35k/yr. Grad students in top programs in Boston and the bay area are living on the razor edge of affording a roof and food. It doesn't get much easier in the midwest, either. Your rents are cheaper but your stipend is comparatively lower, and opportunities are more difficult to find compared to networking on the coasts which are hubs of tech and biotech.
The current stipend is just not enough to pay for rent in Santa Cruz. In recent years the city has become a bedroom community for bay area commuters and appropriate housing supply hasn't been built to match the influx of people. There are grad students at ucsc where it is cheaper for them to fly across the world back to their home country for the summer than to live in Santa Cruz for those three months.
There are also graduate students who entered their program under a different union contract, with a different rental market landscape, and now find themselves with the prospect of being unable to pay for a wildly higher rent than they expected from data from 2016, something that they couldn't forsee when the signed their fellowship contract 4 years ago, so yes, some of these students are being baited and screwed.
On top of this, UCSC graduate students attempted to fix this at the negotiation table, but the agreement between all UC campuses and the greater graduate union did not take into account the rising cost of living in Santa Cruz when it was made; 83% of UCSC graduate students opposed this agreement at the time and their concerns were not heard by their union or the University of California.
For many students, the choices are to starve, attempt to derail their life by dropping out of grad school and reset it in another field somewhere far away from California with their lack of disposable income to even fund a move like this, or to strike and attempt to improve the situation. I can't blame them at all.
Hopefully the strike will now spread to other UC campuses.
The back story here is that United Auto Workers (the UC grad students’ union) negotiated an unacceptable contract, and despite many months of pushback from the students, and despite UCSC voting against it, the union ratified it anyway (including a no-strike clause).
Also, the faculty of UCSC voted against the firings.
> Hopefully the strike will now spread to other UC campuses.
It already has. Graduate students at UC Santa Barbara started striking a few days ago, and there are rumors of solidarity strikes at other UC campuses as well as a direct result of these firings.
There’s no clear path to replacing UAW. They somehow got in control of union representation for the entire UC system.
The US is a closed shop country, so it is illegal for students to simply cancel their membership in UAW and join a graduate student workers union.
I’m not familiar enough with labor law to know the exact proceedue, but presumably students would need to mount a state-wide campaign to vote UAW out (if it is even possible).
Even then, I don’t know if campuses would be allowed to negotiate separately or not.
Wow being a graduate student is closed-shop in the US?! That’s crazy I never knew that. How does that square with academic and political freedom? A student who researches union abuse must join and fund a union!
Depends on the state and the public/private designation of the university. There is also the (mostly unanswered in the courts) question of whether private university graduate students are primarily employees or students. Read up on the kerfuffles at NYU and Columbia University to see how gnarly this all gets.
It's worth noting that graduate students were not able to unionize until recently at many private universities in the US. Even though they now can legally unionize, many remain unionless for one reason or another.
Sure there is; the rules for decertifying unions and replacing them are not mysterious.
> They somehow got in control of union representation for the entire UC system.
Because the grad students formed unions and voted to affiliate with UAW, even before their rights to do so were recognized.
> I’m not familiar enough with labor law to know the exact proceedue, but presumably students would need to mount a state-wide campaign to vote UAW out (if it is even possible).
That's the main option (they'd need support of 30% of the represented employees to force a vote)
In principle, they could also challenge the designation of a single statewide bargaining unit and argue that the separate campuses (or at least, their campus) grad student workers are somehow not part of a community of common interest with the rest of the existing BU, which would allow separate decertification for just their campus.
The International Union, United Automobile, Aerospace, and Agricultural Implement Workers of America, (UAW for historical reasons) is a broad multi-industry parent union, and has been since something like the 1950s or 1960s; The National Writers Union is part of it, among others.
UAW provided organizing and other support beginning shortly after the first few (unrecognized) campus unions were set up by the grad students.
When I was a UC grad student, it appeared to me that the UAW preyed on idealistic students that the UAW could take advantage of. I agitated for having them ejected but was told something along the lines of "we're not allowed to talk about that." I would have liked to continued questioning, but I lost the floor at that point.
The back story here is that United Auto Workers (the UC grad students’ union) negotiated an unacceptable contract, and despite many months of pushback from the students, and despite UCSC voting against it, the union ratified it anyway (including a no-strike clause).
Yup, the students joined the union and the union negotiated a contract they didn't like.
UC president Janet Napolitano was caught on a hot mic a few years back saying, “We don’t have to listen to this crap”, when grad students protested for living wages.
Sounds like not much has changed. Of course, she lives for free in the UC presidential mansion, and had the school spend $620,000 to renovate it before she moved in, so she’s all set.
I got filled with righteous internet rage when I read the headline, but then I read the article.
The particular strike was implemented by withholding fall grades, which seems to unnecessarily burden students who are to be buried under crushing debt, no? Also, they are apparently unionized and this strike was against the extant agreements.
The consequences of not getting a grade can affect a student’s entire career and ability to sustain themselves financially.
It's like protests is meant to cause a disruption.
I really have a terrible place in my heart for people who criticize protests because it caused a disruption.
That's the point of a protest.
I'm very happy for you that you've never felt the need to take these drastic steps, but they're protesting real issues and real problems they're having. The grades are ultimately the universities problem
Whether or not it hurts the students is up to the administration. Professors can grade their own exams, as they do in many courses already. The university doesn't even have to dip into their own pockets, they can use federally subsidized work study labor if they were short on labor.
However, by hurting students and adhering to draconian policies that serve to hurt more students, the school is paradoxically increasing support because the administration knows students are going to be enraged without looking into the nuance of why these things are happening to them, and who decides why these things should happen the way that they do.
From what I’ve gathered, the exams were turned over to the grad students for grading. The school asked for the grades, the grad students refused.
Has the school asked for the exams to be returned, so they could be graded? I don’t know. I assume the graduate students wouldn’t turn them over anyways.
And again, this is brought upon by the university and their adherence to policies designed to strike the biggest wedge between the student body. I've had classes at my university where if you miss one exam your grade is averaged from all the rest. If the building that housed the exams was engulfed in flames and all the exams were lost, this is probably what the university would do in response.
The university is free to make whatever rule they'd like to get around this, but instead go for maximum hurt to try to cut the legs off of this strike, and what is blowing me away is that this strategy by the university is working very effectively.
What is the college doing with regards to the withheld grades?
Even if they did average all my other work, I'd be pissed I put all that effort into something that has zero impact on my grade.
You're acting like the grad students have clean hands here which is clearly not true. They joined the union with the intent they would negotiate on their behalf. The union did so and promised to stop any wildcat strike. The students didn't like the job the union did, so they went on strike, violating the contract.
Their choice was to either not join the union or join another one.
They likely joined UAW because they were already representing UCSC employees (bargaining power). Along with that comes the fact that union represents all members, not just you.
If me and my flat earth friends shut down the highway you need to take to work in order to protest the teaching of sphereism in schools, you wouldn't complain?
I sense you've never been a low-income undergrad who has experienced the crushing burden of repaying a student loan without having either the a degree or career prospects to show for it.
If you read the rest of the article, you would see that the union is alleging that the UC administration was not willing to engage in negotiations to raise compensation for grad students, who were unable to afford their rent payments. It's no wonder a wildcat strike happened.
Also, I am saddened by your comment about withholding grades being an unnecessary "burden". That's the point of a strike. What do you think a strike is? They are withholding, not erasing grades, and the goal of the strikers is to force the university to pay attention. The true "unnecessary burden" is UC Santa Cruz not paying grad students enough to pay their rents. If the university had done so, then the grad students would not have had to try to get the administration's attention.
If you read the rest of the article, you would see that the union is alleging that the UC administration was not willing to engage in negotiations to raise compensation for grad students, who were unable to afford their rent payments. It's no wonder a wildcat strike happened.
The freakin union negotiated on behalf of the grad students and agreed to the contract!
Where was the union when that was happening?
They are playing dumb. They had every opportunity to bring up that issue when the contract was open.
I'm pretty sure what happened was the union decided that the deal was good enough for everyone they represented and threw the grad students under the bus.
If you think grad students have it bad, where's your sympathy for low-income college students (Santa Cruz has plenty) trying to qualify for a scholarship, internship or new grad job?
The reductio ad absurdum here is an ER doctor striking and walking out while their patient's chest is wide open, claiming it was the hospital's problem and that they had been warning the hospital for weeks.
It's not like people were forced to not recieve grades. The school is free to hire graders who aren't graduate students, and the professors are free to grade their own exams. If undergrads are upset, they should be directing their anger to the administration for failing to pay for labor rather than expecting someone to do full time work on a 20k salary while their yearly rental payments total north of 24k.
To be honest, I read only ~75% of comments, but I'm very surprised that [almost?] everybody discuss postgrad's salaries and conflict with university and is it «free market» of employment as TAs and scuh/.
Why doesn't anybody discuss housing situation & regulations?! Why these students protest against university and not City's government?! Why is it strike and not revolt agains housing regulations!? Why is here no discussion about «free market» of housing?!
I'm not live in USA, but looks like there is A LOT of demand for new housing and offer is limited by totally out-of-market reasons! And everybody discuss salaries and their fairness, not new housing and fairness of regulations! For me, outsider, it is «obvious» that housing regulations, not university, are to blame and protest against!
Also, I'm shocked, than room mates are offered as viable solution! I was raised in USSR, where one of the main sins of government (in top-10 for sure) was failure to provide personal housing for everybody.
I was raised in shared apartments (multiple bedrooms, single kitchen, toilet and bathroom). Of course, room mates is theoretically better, because theoretically you could choose room mates, and in USSR it was impossible to choice so-tenants, as these rooms and apartments were distributed by officials without consulting with people. But anyway, it is mind-boggling for me, that it is suggested as good solution for adults peoples, who effectively work for one of the best education institution in richest country in the world, to live in shared apartments. Of course, it must be allowed, if friends want to live together, but it must be decision based on convenience, not as only solution to have ANY housing!
The most disappointing aspect of this is how many people are locked out from these opportunities because they don't have or come from the family wealth to support living in a place like Santa Cruz while studying full time and TA'ing at such low wages. Something's gotta give, and only people with the means to do so can take the financial hit.
It's... more complicated than that. There is an existing union that represents these people which has negotiated an existing collective bargaining agreement. This strike wasn't authorized.
Now... maybe the union cut a bad deal, maybe their representatives aren't faithfully honoring their commitment, maybe there is literal corruption involved. But what is not true is that these workers were unrepresented at the salary negotiation.
Breaking the deal like this makes negotiating the next contract harder, not easier.
So what now? CA is a closed shop state, the students can't cancel their membership and join a new one. So they strike without the support of their union, their union gets sued by UC, and now their union is countersuing for a cost of living adjustment as of three days ago. If all pans out, taking this wildcat strike was exactly the right move to make.
This is missing the point of what collective bargaining is about. The whole idea is that you give up some autonomy over your situation so that you and all your compatriots can negotiate in unison for a deal that is better, in aggregate, than what you all could do individually. No, it's not always perfectly fair, but it does work.
Tearing that deal up like this is effectively throwing all the other members of the union under the bus, because now UC has reason not to trust the union can keep its bargains.
If you want to support organized labor you can't be selfish. It just doesn't work.
> But what is not true is that these workers were unrepresented at the salary negotiation.
But many are if every year brings about a new set of graduate students. Perhaps you started your PhD at UCSC 4 years ago, with the understanding that compensation would be different, a wildly different real estate market than today, and under a different agreement by the school.
So yes, future students were not represented at the salary negotiation, and a the same time, students who came to the school before the negotiation came under a different pretext with a different understanding of the local rental economy and graduate compensation that is no longer true today.
Graduate programs are usually filled with a completely new set of students after 2-3 years. The likelihood of students taking similar actions in future years will have no bearing on the actions taken today by those currently enrolled.
Having a union doesn't fundamentally change the un-affordability of accepting below-market wages for skilled labor in a high cost of living area. They might be getting a better deal than they would have otherwise, but clearly there's a disconnect between the UC system, the union, and the students on the premise of today's arrangement and its long term viability.
Obviously no, strikes and labor actions can't change the microeconomics. But regardless of whether or not the wages are sufficient, and whether the agreement is just or not, it's an agreement. Breaking it only hurts things for future students, it doesn't help. Consider the union sitting down to the next contract, how do they negotiate successfully if UCSC doesn't believe their members will honor the agreement?
On the other hand, what to the grad students at UCSC do if they weren't represented at the bargaining table by their own union in the first place?
The agreement is not one the grad students at UCSC and UCSC, but with the grad students at all UC campuses with the University of California, et al. 83% of UCSC grad students opposed the original UC wide negotiation because the salary minimums did not take into account the rising cost of living in Santa Cruz due to market pressure in the bay area. They are striking without the support of their union because the union never supported their situation in the first place.
Some think the status quo is the way forward and such a progressive state cannot slide backwards - as California goes, so goes America.
Nixon, Reagan, Jarvis and a lot of very conservative Democrats controlled this state for generations. Democrats have largely left their old base behind to neoliberal economics, deregulation (Carter) and financial market weaponization (Clinton).
The radicals from the left aren’t from CA anymore, and my guess is a future that is a bit more Nixony but wearing Allbirds and sipping a Grapefruit IPA.
I think the Democrats are not the party of the working class anymore but the party of well paid specialists and middle management upwards. I would call them party of the top 10%. They have no ability to talk to the lowest ranks anymore.
I survived in grad school on much less than 28k in a very high cost of living city. If anything, graduate student compensation is ridiculously high these days. I don't see anything but money-grubbing here.
even 5-10 years ago rents were much lower. unless you just graduated in 2019 this is irrelevant as rents have in many cases doubled since then in many HCOL cities.
i "survived" in HCOL city then but even then it was not as expensive as it is today.
I see a lot of discussion about the consequences of TAs withholding grades. This situation is a consequence of poor management at UCSC. Every other university I'm familiar with makes faculty responsible for submitting grades. It's inconceivable to me why TAs would be responsible for grades. TAs should be teaching assistants, not adjunct faculty.
Edit: I read "assigning grades" to mean assigning the final grades for the course, not grading homework and exams. I'm pretty sure this is the responsibilities the TAs had, because UCLA sent out a memo to all the faculty explaining that senate faculty are responsible for grades here.
Most faculty does not want to grade anything. I've TA'ed 6 courses, the professor just showed up for lectures and reused last year's exams/homeworks. Students had the solutions, >70% of the class copied them exactly. The prof didn't care. And TA's were handling most complaints about the grades. This was common for majority of undergrad level classes I took (a different UC campus).
Also, it was my job as a TA to explain the material during my TA sections (which were basically lectures, only with more questions and more examples, and I used a blackboard while the prof just read PP slides).
Even though the above was the norm, there were a few great professors who cared, and taught very well.
The operative word here is ‘should be.’ In practice, at the state school where I did my doctorate, more than half of undergrad courses are taught by grad students...academia is a broken system that doesn’t work very well for anyone involved in it
Edit: this was the case in my department, a STEM subject required for graduation in multiple unrelated majors
academia is a broken system that doesn’t work very well for anyone involved in it
It works extremely well for administrators and professors with tenure, who are the exact constituencies most in favor of stasis and least in favor of change or experimentation.
Meh, it works well enough. I’d ask Napolitano or the UCSC faculty whose grad students are striking if it’s working extremely well for them. Grants are scarce. CA negotiated a single contract for grad students across nine different campuses all over a huge state, and no one seems happy with the outcome...sure I’d rather be chancellor, but ‘extremely well’ is a stretch
Depends on the course. For a large 300 person bio lecture, it will be the professor lecturing and the TA leading a quiz/homework section with like 30 people. For smaller classes with only 30 people, it's probably going to be a TA lecturing.
Hmm. Even if TAs don't assign grades for a course, if they refuse to grade the assignments that can make it extremely difficult for the professor to give the students accurate grades.
I think "just" is underselling it a little. When we would grade exams it was quite an ordeal. The professor and all the IAs (maybe 5-8) would be in a room and grade all day long. We would order food delivered to the room so we could keep grading straight through meals.
Having 1 person do all that work would be intimidating.
The worst thing that’s going to happen is you’re fired and (unless you have some other source of income) forced to leave your PhD program, permanently ending your hopes of an academic career.
Not to mention, having to move because there are no jobs in Santa Cruz and no apartments you can afford without said job, and having to make this move happen to some unknown place that might have a job with your zero dollars saved up from your TA job. Homelessness for a spell is a real possibility.
i bet none of the 54 fired students were on student visas. they are not that dumb, i hope. it was hard enough to get into us school system just to get deported for striking.
The university knows that there is no dearth of graduate students coming into the US. These international grad students will work at whatever wages the university offers - simply for a chance to work in the US on OPT and a chance to get into the H1 lottery eventually.
We’re putting more grad students through the system than the economy is willing to absorb. Is higher wages going to help or hurt this problem? (PhD here with first hand experience of that opportunity cost)
I doubt this will be noticed but - the solution isn't higher pay. It's building more housing. There should be a lot of dedicated housing for students.
Grad students will constantly need to be negotiating for higher wages because the rent will continue to increase. All the students are advocating for is transfer of wealth from the university to landlords. :/
Just 1.5 generations ago, University was for those who could afford it. Many grad student programs today are in that category. This category of people competing for jobs otherwise filled by individuals with wealth will always exist, there's no 'solution' to this problem.
I think it's best to not take those jobs and to find a cost-efficient way to get through grad school. If people did this, the system would change. There are many ways to access less expensive education, you don't need to be on the coast of California. It's obviously 'too expensive' and that's a real and fundamental issue in life.
> Just 1.5 generations ago, University was for those who could afford it.
Not the UC/CSU systems, which is what this topic is about; they were primarily little to no cost universities 1.5 generation ago--depending on your residence. It wasn't until the administration bloat and race to capture as much foreign students/funding became the name of the game that it has become this cesspool.
Hell, in my freshman and sophomore year as an in-state student costs were sub 10k a year, it wasn't until the bubble got so big in 2007 (just before the financial crisis) that it became the sordid bacchanal, cash grab you see now. It mirrored the Banking Industry so well in my opinion, and just like banking it never corrected and just doubled down and it too has created a Trillion+ bubble and perpetual servitude and permanent underclass(es) ripe for exploitation.
And just so its clear, the CSU/UC system is only the most affordable in the US if you are not from CA; if you are, especially if you are multi-generational, because of the high tax levels in CA its probably on-par with some Ivy leagues and upper level tech schools.
I won't dispute your analysis on University as whole, as I have much more to say on the matter, but I agree with your conclusion. For most University (on ROI at least), especially if not in a lucartive field of STEM, it's just not worth it if you're technically inclined and have an disciplined autodidactic streak. But many seem to be looking for an 'experience' more than they are an actual useful education in a chosen discipline, which is why these predatory practices not only proceed to this day, but excel as they do, hence why so many are willing to accept such awful loans to do so--I can't help but think of the way many hapless souls got suckered into sub-prime mortgages.
1.5 generations ago in 1950, about %8 of people went to College. I don't think that 'free' in relative terms is quite accurate as it was clearly still out of reach of most people it'd seem.
People didn't go to college back then because it was out of reach, they didn't go because they didn't need to. In 1920 you could get into UCLA with a slip of paper signed by your principle certifying you did 4 years of high school; 100% of the people who produced this scrap of paper got into the school. In the 50s, this requirement was stepped up to a $5 application fee and you needed to average a B (1). It wasn't until the late 60s and early 70s that UC schools started to put limits on enrollment, and even in the 1980s UCLA's admission rate was 50%.
Perhaps the only people where college was out of reach back then were those whose transcripts and paperwork were held up by bigoted people, either on the side of the high school or the college itself.
In 1920, less than 20% of Americans completed 4 years of high school. How do you think the average economic status of that group compared to the whole country?
As old limits cease to be sufficiently exlusive, new ones are introduced.
If you didn't complete high school that means you joined the labor force instead. You are right that of those who went to college, it perhaps wasn't those with connections to the working class economy and readily available local blue collar job opportunities. That being said, if you didn't want to work with Dad on the factory line at 16, then you just hit the books, graduated, and were virtually guaranteed college admission if you simply completed high school.
People weren't completing high school back then because it was a difficult or a privileged thing to do, they didn't complete high school because they didn't need to complete high school in order to land a job paying a living wage and start a family. For decades, a year of college was something you could pay for with a summertime of part time work, it was not reserved for the rich and elite, but those who simply wanted to go to college.
Now we've structured our economy such that if you want a living wage or a career you can grow, you do need to go to college, and not just any college but a good one, and sometimes more school afterwards. The economic incentives are not the same. For instance, the GI bill was invented to reintegrate returning veterans right back into their life plans when they returned from WWII with little difficulty. Today, the GI bill is used by many as a way to pay for college in the first place, not as a restitution payment for being conscripted to military service like it was after WWII. College is so necessary these days that people are willing to risk a deployment to a warzone to get this scrap of paper, but this wasn't always the case.
I think a lot of the people choosing to forgo education for an immediate job probably also had some familiar financial pressures that made that choice more appealing. Children helping their parents with money isn't new; the expectation of 12+ years of schooling is new.
Choosing to continue formal education rather than generate income is a choice that is a lot easier for those who are better off. It's surprising to me that, even as vaguely leftist sentiments run through it, your argument hinges on a myth of egalitarian education while denying any possible effect of wealth inequality.
Hopefully this wakes people up to the fact that not only are universities not the hotbeds of leftism that they are made out to be, but they are in fact run by the same kinds of right wing plutocrats that run everything else.
Sounds like some unionized grad students decided to go on strike on their own, without the unions approval. Firing doesn't seem unreasonable to me in that case, and it certainly isn't "union busting" as Bernie Sanders said in the article, given that the school has an agreement with the union. If you never could get fired for striking, it would allow employees to hold the school hostage indefinitely while making unreasonable demands (not that the demands in this case were necessarily unreasonable, just that I don't think firing strikers is inherently bad).
Just because you exist does not mean you deserve success.
This strain of leftism is essentially just jealousy and entitlement. I learned life isn't fair as a child it really isn't that hard of concept to grasp. That gave me the motivation to think about what I wanted out of life and to work towards that goal. I didn't get a loan from parents (they barely made ends meet growing up). I didn't go to college or a code camp. I worked delivering papers, then as a janitor ($5.65/hr), then a courier at a hospital before I got my first coding job. Instead of going out with friend in high school I stayed home and taught myself how to code. Now I have everything I want in life. I am happy. It just took actual grit and work.
There is, quite literally, endless opportunity in this country if you have the grit to find your own slice. But, because it is not dropped in some people's laps they cry foul.
Our modern society, which was created through capitalism and the defeat of socialism and communism, has lifted billions out of poverty, has made previously deadly diseases a thing of the past, and the list goes on. Instead of learning from our past successes these people throw a childish fit and refuse to work while demanding more pay. It is asinine. If money is important to you find a line of work that pays what you want. Grad school is not that.
Edit: I forgot to mention that these kids withheld students' grades from last semester as leverage. Those students have nothing to do with their compensation but are suffering due to their entitlement. The union for these kids didn't even authorize the strike.
I read a tweet on Reddit: if you think you made it through hard times okay but think it's okay for other people to go through the same hard times then you in fact did not make it through okay.
> There is, quite literally, endless opportunity in this country if you have the grit to find your own slice. But, because it is not dropped in some people's laps they cry foul.
Not available to so many of the international grad students.
You cancelled slavery but you do need your subset of oppressed workers.
Just finished my PhD and I advise everyone to stay away from this hellhole. I should have dropped out 3 years ago though. Terrible life choice.
sounds like you had a tough or not very easy start to life, which isn't great, but saying "screw you" to anyone who wants to improve the system for everyone is just promoting something bad because you had to
and to suggest that grad students don't have "actual grit and work" is stupid, they work just as hard and long - if not more - then any other person with a "normal job". and they know well that they won't be getting paid great, so their only real motivation to be doing their work - is because they love their work all else be damned, so trying to paint them as money grabbing leeches or something when they want a livable wage is just stupid
Read the article because I was curious what major the grad students had, but was disappointed in the journalist not detailing this fact. In my mind it does make a difference. I doubt the students were in math for example.
Some students take a debt for having the opportunity of achieving a grade. If they study, learn, and pass, they should be allowed to participate in the yet narrow window of time of hiring that follows after the formative period. Flashing your grade can be necessary before just start talking with your potential employer. Any random delay could make they lose a year and create a damage in their finances, curricula and lifes.
They just put themselves in a impossible situation. Damaging the lifes of your students, maybe forever, is not how anybody should do a strike and directly disqualifies you as a teacher.
Is not much different when you are a scientist. Strike is a luxury that some sectors really can't afford.
Later when I was a researcher I found out that the Provost takes 55% of grant money "for overhead like printer paper". If there is money involved, there are plenty of plenty of people willing to "take their cut" before it ever gets to the researcher or student.
If you can't afford to pay grad students enough to keep body and soul together, don't open the grad student slots.