College Professors don't exactly make the big bucks either.
Yet, universities in the US have made put many Americans in lifelong debt.
These colleges are all "nonprofit" (and get significant tax benefits), so where is the money even going?
I have a family member who works in the “alumni relations” department of a small, regional public university. Probably ranked like #300 or something. There are like 5 people in the department. They make a magazine, email newsletter and schedule alumni events.
It was really surreal when they explained their job and that the department exists.
There’s an admin costs problem in this country. There’s no sufficient governance or oversight in controlling university spending. This is even a public university and it’s just bizarre that they can make up positions that shouldn’t even exist.
As an example, here is the UC system:
https://lao.ca.gov/Publications/Report/4511
https://accountability.universityofcalifornia.edu/2021/chapt...
About 70% of the UC budget goes to salaries and benefits. Of that, 70% of staff is non-academic.
Full context below:
Non-academic staff employees constitute nearly 70 percent of UC’s workforce and are responsible for health services, student services, instruction and research support, compliance, and general administration (6.1.1). In October 2020, this group included 143,188 individuals. Overall, this staff workforce represented over 115,577 full-time equivalent (FTE) employees in that month.
STAFF WORKFORCE About six out of every ten UC staff FTE are working for the University of California Health system. These frontline workers (including doctors, nurses, administrators, technicians, and allied health professionals) are playing a critical role in California’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Over 97 percent of these employees are supported by non-core funds, typically the revenues generated by hospital services. Students often work part-time on campus as part of their financial aid packages or for research experience. During the pandemic, UC campuses transitioned to remote instruction. With staff, faculty, and students no longer on campus, student employee headcount at general campus halved from 36,000 in October 2019 to 18,000 in October 2020. General campus, non-student employees are the remainder of the University’s staff, at 43,752 FTE. This includes student services employees, career advisors, IT specialists, research administration, laboratory staff, food and auxiliary service workers, accountants, maintenance and janitorial staff, safety workers, and analysts (6.1.1).
- Too much admin per student compared to 40 years ago
- (Much more likely): Severe decline in funds from the state. I know at least one nearby university that showed the data that the increase in tuition from 1980 to 2010 was almost entirely due to government cuts, and that the budget spending per student hadn't changed in that time frame - adjusted for inflation.
- Fancy buildings
US schools get far less from the state than Europe and Asia. You can find many school budgets online, including sources of revenue. So this is easy to check. [2] lets you look at country per capita spending on tertiary education - the regions you mention tend to spend significantly more tax dollars than the US does.
The result is that most European and Asian schools get funded by taxpayers, i.e., those not attending university end up helping pay for those who do, while in the US more of the funding is paid by people that attend schools.
Also, the US, as a result, also ends up with a higher percentage of adults with college degrees than those with state sponsored schools [1], since those places tend to make it harder to go to college, since taxpayer pressure on cost reduces opportunity.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tertiary_...
That's not even counting the weird universities like WGU, where you can get a bachelors for less than ~$15,000 without too much trouble.
U of M spent about $100,000 per student bed (not per room) on those renovations. They could have bought brand new, custom built, state-of-the-art suburban-sprawl McMansions and given every student their own bedroom (vs. mostly-shared dorm rooms) for less money. And had the old dorms left over.
Yes, that money was on UM's Housing (vs. academic) side. But you should not expect other non-classroom, non-academic spending (by any part of UM, or similar institutions) to be any less profligate.
For state colleges, they're often some of the highest paid employees in the state. [1]
1. https://www.espn.com/espn/feature/story/_/id/28261213/dabo-s...
Research is also a cost, even though they some of it back, they aren't VCs so this can bleed money there as well, and pretty fast, especially for underperforming institutions.
I'm shocked shocked by the tuition fees in the U.S. But comparing with India and even Europe is a bit silly since those places don't compare in term of university ranking and average income level. Those professors/researchers are packed with long years of studies plus a loan they had accumulated themselves so it's a bit like a positive feedback loop.
Like I said, no idea. Ok, maybe some idea.
Administrative staff, which has ballooned over the past several decades. Many of these people have mediocre ability, don't really do much, but once a position is created it is hardly ever eliminated.
Buildings and renovations. Ever seen a modern student dorm? They are luxurious compared to what they were in the 1980s. It's a constant competitive war as students will actually choose a school based on the living accomodations over the education.
Programs to assist students who should really not be there, and other programs that don't seem to recognize that college students are adults and should be expected to manage their lives by themselves. Do they really need the university to arrange coloring book time to help with the stress of mid-terms?
For comparison, a mid-range preschool in the Bay Area costs about $30K/year, vs. $14K/year in-state tuition for UC Berkeley. If students get about 24 hours of instruction/week, for two 13-week semesters, that works out to about $22/hour. A nanny is about $25-30/hour, a therapist is $100+/hour, plumbers are about $200/hour, a lawyer can be $750-1000/hour. Given 20-30 students in the classroom, costs are not all that different from lawyers.
Schools in Europe/Asia are government-subsidized, like the public school system in the U.S, so you don't see the true cost.
Also, US incomes are among the highest in the world, everything should seem expensive here compared to the typical European nation. Comparing to eg Japan or Britain doesn't work, our incomes are far higher. If you want to look at costs for the median or above, you have to reference Sweden, Finland, Norway, Switzerland, Denmark, Australia for comps. Simultaneously our costs are still too high even after you adjust for that (in things like healthcare and education).
1. Non-teaching admin positions, like vice presidents and associate deans of whatever, and all of their organizations and support staff.
2. Large bureaucracies that eat money and grow continuously.
3. Country club campuses and amenities.
4. Student services.
5. Legal departments and regulatory compliance.
In CS, graduate students often intern over the summer and can make up for some of the difference.
Tuition is paid by the university, typically from a grant.
PhD has no tuition, except in an accounting sense (you pay tuition, they pay you back as a stipend).
Paying for stadiums, sports teams and millions in coach salaries.
How would you have time to finish? A full time PhD works a LOT. I can’t imagine doubling the time to a PhD.
Sadly, there are not a ton of universities that offer an online PhD in CS or Math, meaning that I was limited to what I could easily get to via train, at least in regards to schools in the United States. Eventually I found one school in England that was willing to let me do a part time PhD online, which is where I'm enrolled now.
On the other hand, all the history PhDs I know can't even get work at their own university.
It's not advertised and usually not recommended, but it's definitely possible. The key is to find a supervisor who's fine with it, don't even bother asking the administrators.
Of course, even doing a part-time PhD, you end up spending a fair bit of time studying (on the order of 4-6 hours/night).
When I was looking at programs, as I already had been working at a military lab since I was in HS, I asked every advisor I interviewed with if research work I was doing at the lab could be the basis of the phd if I wanted (i.e. to do the same thing as the labmate mentioned) and almost everyone I spoke to had zero issues with it, with the proviso that the work was appropriate for a phd.
At the end of the day, I did it all on campus (with many summers spent at labs or industry), but a good chunk of the work I did could easily have been done with proper guidance in an industry setting as well (though that's more in retrospect, I wouldn't have known how to sell the ideas to industry back then).
Data: https://jeffhuang.com/computer-science-open-data/#verified-c...
The main conclusions I arrived at from this exercise is that 1) CS stipends vary quite a bit but have slowly been increasing, but NSF funding needs to catch up for them to go higher, 2) the 12-month stipend makes a big difference from the 9-month stipend, and I think universities should guarantee the 12-month stipend (which only half do), rather than making summer stipend dependent on availability of advisor funding or student jobs (like TAing).
The posted numbers for my home institution, the University of Maryland, are a bit off; current offers are $25k for 9-month and up to $36k for 12-month, if funded on an RA over the summer. That RA summer funding is not guaranteed. Again, clearly, this needs to go up.
The 25K you're referring to is for 9.5-months so is normalized to 9 months to compare against the other 9-month numbers. It's already notated with the [1] footnote in the table.
The 36k is not guaranteed in the offers given to students: the UMaryland CS offer letters states "Students who are TAs or RAs over the summer earn an additional $5,600 up to $11,000", which I can only interpret to mean that 11K is not guaranteed. So what's reported in that table is my interpretation of the minimum stipend if the student does get one, but what you say makes sense, that an RA provides the higher number in that range -- I just don't have a way to represent that.
I'm not sure how this would work in practice.
If you hand out 12-month contracts, you'll lose a ton of students, because they often want the summer for themselves (in many cases, they are from another country and want to travel home, or they have a spouse working somewhere else in the country).
If you give the students the option on an annual basis, a school like Columbia might have the money to cover unanticipated expenses, but mine does not.
> rather than making summer stipend dependent on availability of advisor funding or student jobs (like TAing)
The money has to come from somewhere.
It's already working in practice for almost half the universities: summer stipends are guaranteed, but if students choose to intern elsewhere, you don't get the summer stipend. Nothing changes if their advisor is already funding them. I'm just saying the other half of universities should be doing this as well, that it should be universal.
Yes it does cost a bit, but if you think about what's happening now for universities with no summer guarantee, it's that PhD students without summer internships are getting no pay in the summer. And even the ones that do find summer pay, it's still a stressful situation for them during the academic year, so a complete distraction.
Honestly, I can't think of a better use of university money than to be paying PhD students who would otherwise be working for free in the summer (if their advisor can't fund them).
I never looked back, and I often reflect on his intervention.
It saddens me greatly that many of my friends still in Bio have lived this prediction, while meanwhile academica's administrative staff counts (and salaries) balloon. For all the promise to human economy, bio is still astoundingly complex, difficult to monetize, and hard to justify increased budgets for. On the flip side, as essential to our planet and culture as understanding esoteric biological knowledge is (e.g. deep-sea fish behavior), nobody is willing to fund it at the scale needed before much of it disappears forever thanks to climate change.
Not sure how the wage issue can be solved, but more sources of funding towards hard research for research's sake (i.e. fact-finding in-vivo science) seems like it could help. So too, could forcing schools to obviously pay more by reducing the amount of admitted students. Less labor supply could give some leverage to often powerless grad students.
After moving to industry, I'm starting to realize how valuable the consulting experience was. The project management and scoping skills, and wearing multiple hats, were big benefits.
Category error. Correction: You have the ability to do outside work that pays more than anything the University needs.
It's not the university's fault if you want to do a low value research job at the university.
You may not know it, but the truth is more like "than the university is able to pay". These are non-profit institutions, typically. Consulting is a great idea for many reasons, not the least of which is building your network.
While the article specifically calls out biology programs, at my university the CS department is similarly affected. (Stipends are set at a standard rate for all engineering depts.)
If your stipend is $19K, a single student's take-home pay is $16,734, less ~$1,600 in required departmental fees. So, you've got about $1261/mo to pay for everything. If you split a 1-bedroom for $2.2K (not including utilities), that means you've got $161 for electricity, food, phone, internet, fun, literally every other expense for the rest of the month.
The rapid rise in rents is the big killer here -- the difference between $500 and $1000 for a shared room is more than enough to break the bank.
Where is this? When I started my PhD in the early 2000's, my after tax monthly income (state school) was $1400-1500 per month, which is more than what you listed above. Granted, we got paid only 11 months of the year, and yes, did pay university fees, so the total per month may have been similar, but: Seriously, this was almost 20 years ago - I'm sure they pay more now. Either your numbers are off, or your school sucks (sadly, quite likely).
When I went to grad school, my original goal was Berkeley. But when I found out how expensive it was to live there, I picked a top school in a cheaper town. The monthly stipend was only $100/mo less than at Berkeley, but rent was several hundred dollars cheaper.
Edit: Hard to find numbers quickly, but just checked and one of the engineering programs there currently pay $2300/mo (11 months a year). That's $25K vs your $19K. Of course, in some cities, that's still not enough.
But PhDs in some (not all) non-STEM fields almost seem like a blight on one's resume, and could make a PhD candidate's career harder, not easier.
Is that a signal there's an oversupply of PhDs in some disciplines? Possibly.
Interested to look into longitudinal studies of PhD students of different disciplines and where they end up 10 years' later..
My partner, on the other hand, has a public contract (with teaching charge), she gets around 1 400€ after taxes. Living with this in Paris is not easy (1 studio of 15m² will cost around 650-700€)
> That time could have been spent gaining experience, which IMHO, is extremely valuable.
I certainly agree that if your goal is to maximize earning potential, than there's no question that industry experience is substantially more valuable than a PhD.
As someone in a business field with a very high stipend (32k), I am also feeling the pinch. My wife and I keep a relatively strict budget and I track with YNAB, and gas alone is pretty damaging to our spare income. And I am lucky to be at an institution in a college town with a relatively low cost of living. I don't know how my peers in cities like Boston do it.
The sad thing is that people start to think of returns to capital as « societal value » when the two are independent variables
We already have, it is called paying them more (and/or increasing quality of life at work such as shorter work hours, or remote work, etc). Generally, people do not like higher taxes though.
Yes, the H1B system is grossly abused. Yes, it is a hush-hush topic in Silicon Valley and on this site.
The evidence is right there in front of us. 40 years ago, the USA was the clear leader in technology. We had no trouble producing both factory workers and tech geniuses. We were literally the envy of the world. Doctors were paid more than they are now, we made our own cars from scratch, and our press pretended not to be partisan a lot of the time.
Other countries got smart and started sending their students here, in the cases of countries like China, as official acts in their national interest.
Along with the H1B visa problem, the US has been leading in massive numbers of immigrants, legal and illegal, who are not asked to respect citizenship in their own country. Imagine China, Denmark, Iceland, or Japan doing something like that. It would be unthinkable to them.
The biggest villain is of course the citizens of the United States. They no longer encourage their children to tackle Issues that may be difficult for them or that may make them feel bad as they struggle to learn. They no longer regard the founding principles as unique and precious, which they most certainly are. They no longer view the United States as uniquely suited to help move the world forward in civil rights or ingenuity.
And finally, our political class doesn’t give a shit about citizens. Republicans and Democrats are equally rife with corruption and exist only to preserve their own power. The uniparty sends our children and our treasure to wars where no national interest is present. Our three letter institutions violate their own principles, the law, and the sovereignty of other countries routinely.
Anyone who has read the history of Rome or Britain or China can see where we are in the lifecycle of this special experiment called the United States of America. It is a tragedy not only for us, but for the rest of the world as well.
Look at the endowments.
Look at the tuition costs.
Look at the grants.
Where is the money going? As usual in the US, not to the people doing the work.
International PhD students by law cannot work more than 20 hours a week. Most institutions cap paid responsibilities at 20 hours a week. Most have 9 month appointments, most likely get the full cost of their tuition and fees waved. Most of the time waved costs such as tuition are not counted as compensation so are tax free. Most likely get healthcare.
A PhD student at U-FL has an effective compensation package well above 75k per year even though they only directly see 18k in pay.
And it's a joke to pretend that you should owe tuition. That's nothing but a tax dodge for the university so they can pay you even less (pre-tax) for the same post-tax take-home.
If your employer pays more that 5k of your tuition then you own tax on it so the US tax system clearly sees tuition as a benefit. You can call BS on the cost of tuition but that does not fundamentally change the fact that a waived charge is a benefit. The US tax system was a hairs breath away from making all tuition benefits even institutional grants at the undergraduate level taxable.
What are you even talking about? Are you counting the bullshit known as “tuition” in the compensation? PhD candidates are really employees, not students.
Even a Princeton postdoc’s comp doesn’t reach 75k. A bit more than 50k actually in the physics department (might have risen a bit in the past few years, not sure).
Waved tuition is a benefit and it was a hairs breath from being a taxable benefit in the USA several years ago. It is still the case that if your employer pays more than about 5k of your tuition then that is taxable so clearly tuition waved or paid by your employer is a benefit at least in the US.
There are compelling arguments and union movements supporting the notion that graduate and PhD students should be classed as employees and I certainly don't have a big issue with that. That is also a separate issue though.
While most teaching (and research) assistanships might indeed be technically 20h/week, I can assure you most/all PhD students work >20h/week total.
You still need to do your research on the side. If you RA and your PhD research align, nice. If it doesn't, tough luck.
Wat. Citation needed.
F1 students are limited by law to 20 hours a week and where I work, stipend responsibilities are similarly capped at 20 hours though though that is not a legal cap, just one that aligns with the international cap.
Would you accept a job offer before considering the benefits package? I would certainly not.
Hint: it's not.
Hint: No.
If the action is having everyone else (including many who never attended college) pay off their debt, that seems like a bad idea. This just seems like a bad decision on the PhD student's part.
If your trading bot (here the "algorithm of the index") messes up you are deep in problems because other bots and people will find it and will use it to their advantage.
Pop quiz: In what countries does it cost a full day's wages or more to fill a car's gas tank?
US minimum wage is $7.25/hr. As of this writing, US gas prices average $4.71/gal. For a typical car the gas tank holds about 15 gallons. Even a small car would have a 12 gallon tank.
Turns out that 1.1 million people have jobs that pay the federal minimum wage or less. But that number does not include tips, and about 60% of those people work in restaurants or bars. It's hard to say how much in the way of tips they get, but it's fair to say that there are at least 440,000 people who are earning no more than the federal minimum wage and don't get tips to make up for it.
That's about 0.6% of the hourly workforce. For them, filling a 15 gallon tank of gas would take 10 hours of labor, or even more after deducting employee taxes.
Also, while the federal minimum wage demographic skews young, about half of the 1.1m figure above are over the age of 25.
Above data is per the BLS.
It is absolutely brutal out there, and the response is inhumane.
I don't want to discredit the experience of grad students. I've known more than a few Grad students (anecdote warning), and they are also stuck in a special kind of hell. As the article mentions, they often can't seek other employment, so they're stuck with what the university pays. But even if they could, they can't - universities may stipulate that they expect X number of hours a week, but that's a joke. Every task given over to graduate students comes with piles of mandatory overtime under crap conditions that are unpaid.
The university may talk about 'valuable experience that will pay dividends' (conveniently not paid out by the university), but grad students often deal with losing proof of that experience when their work or ideas appear under the byline of their advisor. What do you do? Your relationship with your advisor is crucial to graduating.
Suffer all that, and _maybe_ you'll get your PhD. I've met a couple of phD students who dropped out simply because their advisors were intolerable, or really disinterested in any part of the advising process except squeezing work from their student workers.
Looking from the outside in, there's a weird sorta hazing elitist mindset going on. Professors say, "My PhD program sucked, so now I'm going to make it suck for you. Can't hack it? Well, you probably don't 'belong'".
Most of them? If you're looking at minimum wages, Luxembourg with the highest at $14.91[1] comes out to about $120 daily. Gasoline is at or above 2€/l in Europe now, a typical gas tank holds about 60 liters, so about 120€ to fill the tank. Which is more than $120.
You don't need to fill the tank daily, at least I'd hope not.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_minimum_w...
Most countries.
i'm going to guess "most of them" if you're using minimum wage.
i just checked britain and came up with 107.31 pounds for an average tank, whereas 8 hours at their minimum wage will get you 76 pounds.
so what's the point? grad students are usually salaried in my experience, and can get housing near enough to the university that they walk, not drive, even in the US.
I am willing to bet it is very few given what I have seen advertised for traditional minimum wage jobs.
I am not sure how pointing to what the legal minimum wage is holds any value in the conversation, that matters is the current market rate for labor, we should not be looking to government as the basis of our economic worldview
In most of them, I'd bet. Just for example, in Czech Republic we're currently at $7/US gal. Our median (NOT minimum) income is around $8.5 per hour. So this is 1.5 working days for your 15 gallon tank for the average worker.
BTW, someone already did the relevant calculations: https://www.globalpetrolprices.com/articles/85/ -- feel free to compare the situation in the US to other countries.
I would assume most of the countries that have months of backlog for US Visas consular appointments?
Most people fill their car weekly or less. Heck, since the pando, I do it less than once a month.
15 cents * 8 hrs/day = a whole $1.20 per day above the federal minimum wage. It was awesome.
