Questions

Why would someone voluntarily work at a place that they thought treated workers badly?

Why would students attend a college where some of the instructors thought instructors were treated badly?

Why would trustees tolerate the “same ol’, same ol’?”

J.J., at 7:20 am EDT on July 7, 2008

FAIR EMPLOYMENT PRACTICES

It is good to see a committee addressing these problems, since it should be able to endorse the principles at stake: 1) all graduate students who work for a university should receive a living wage and full health care coverage; 2) tuition waivers should be a normal part of recruitment for doctoral programs. The committee may also need to consider proposing a timeline for implementation, since the current generation of students may otherwise be long gone before fair employment practices become the norm at South Carolina. Of course real negotiations would be best conducted by a union. Health care coverage for graduate student employees is typically the first benefit won in a negotiated contract.

Cary NelsonAAUP President

Cary Nelson, at 8:15 am EDT on July 7, 2008

USC prof

I’m a USC professor in the Computer Science and Engineering department and I know that our stipend for our GSRA’s is around $20K per year. We pay them that much because that is the market wage. Our graduate students are good programmers and can easily get a full time software or IT job paying upwards of $50K/year.

I read these slides and noticed that

1- these results are from an online survey that was mostly answered by students majoring in Education, Social Work, Library Sciences, and English (slide 10)

2- about 30% of these students are required to work fewer than 20 hours per week (most of these 5-10 hours, slide 15).

Thus, I don’t think the $9K number properly represents what the mean student, working 20 hours per week, is paid at USC (slide 16).

Jose Vidal, Associate Prof at USC, at 9:15 am EDT on July 7, 2008

Chapter 11 ahead

” .. all graduate students who work for a university should receive a living wage and full health care coverage ..”

Define, in econometric terms, “living wage.” Be prepared to defend that position to groups with intellectual abilities near that of U. of Chicago economics faculty.

Define “full health care coverage.” Explain how, if it were implemented, USC would prevent a Chapter 11-style bankruptcy reorganization that the new Massachusetts “full coverage” plan immediately entered upon start-up.

Explain the financial/economic impact of all this on USC’s tuition costs.

Explain whether USC might have to file for Chapter 11-style bankruptcy reorganization if all this were approved.

J.J., at 9:50 am EDT on July 7, 2008

“The university’s current minimum stipends are $1,000 per semester for students working 10 hours a week and $2,000 a semester for a 20-hour work week.”

At $2,000 for 20 hours of work over a 16 week semester, that works out to about $6.25 an hour. At the end of July when the minimum wage goes up to $6.55, they will be paying their graduate students less than the federal minimum wage.

Don, at 10:05 am EDT on July 7, 2008

To Prof. Vidal

I appreciate your response.

As I noticed you mentioned that most of the students who responded were studying in areas of — on average — lower paying careers, I wanted to explain that their work is more than what they are getting paid to do.

Do I believe the work an engineer does is something I could do? Absolutely not. However, I do believe the work I do warrants more than $9,000 a year. For the University to allow some students — no matter the area of study — to receive compensation that rivals a full-time salary compared to providing others with a stipend that allows them to just reach poverty is not right.

The students in Education, Social Work, Library Sciences, and English may never receive the monetary compensation an engineer receives, but they are worth more than 9,000.

2008 Grad, at 10:50 am EDT on July 7, 2008

Grad pay

Frank, To answer your question about parity between departments, we are unionized at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. TAs and PAs have scales that determine pay. We’ve still had fights with the state over insurance and pay but our families are covered under our plans for a minimal cost — I think I pay $13 per month for my tier 2 plan. We have full tuition waivers and insurance at an employment level of 33.3%. We pay our segregated fees. This is much ahead of USC but not as nice as our peer institutions in the big 10. I also must note that many of the 33.3% positions teaching courses how have become 25% positions due to budget cuts. This means TAs must find at least 2 positions to take advantage of the tuition waivers. I have no idea of the numbers of people who cannot find positions.

Beth, grad student at UW=Madison, at 11:15 am EDT on July 7, 2008

The problem

The general complaint seems to be the “poverty” wages. How do we solve this?

At USC every department is free to pay their students whatever they want (above the stated minimum). Also, every department has a fixed pool of money it can use for these payments, which mostly comes from the tuition paid for the classes that department teaches and the research grants its professors secure from outside funding sources.

For example, the department of X has to make the decision of either hiring 200 students at $10k/year or hiring 100 students at $20K/year. Right now it appears that some departments are choosing to pay more students fewer dollars.

If the University passes a rule that says that all departments must pay $20K/year what will happen is that a lot of departments will simply hire fewer students and make them work longer hours.

Would this be better? I don’t know. I think this is the kind of decision that is best left to each department.

Jose Vidal, Associate Prof at USC, at 11:30 am EDT on July 7, 2008

unions

It seems superfluous for grad students to unionize, and I’ve heard talk of a strike of some sort in the fall. I don’t think I can afford to strike and miss the work, but I’m not sure I can afford another year without more compensation than last year. It’s hard to produce quality research papers when I have to work a side job to pay the bills.

brian, at 11:45 am EDT on July 7, 2008

disperate pay ok but there ought to be floor

I’ve got no problem with Computer Science and Engineering graduate students earning more pay than Humanities and Natural Sciences (biology, chemistry, etc) grad students. But there should be a bare minimum below which no one should be allowed to fall. As a full stipend graduate student at Rice University I earned about $11K a year in the mid 1990s. Hardly rich but with subsidized student housing and meals, it was enough to get by on and have a little fun on weekends, too. It was just about right. I did go into a little debt upon loosing my stipend due to not finishing my MA in the expected 2 years, so I had to finance that last year of my “terminal Masters” degree.

For my MLS, I had to go much, much deeper into debt to get my degree. The few stipends/fellowships to be had were intensely competitive and I did not get one, though I did at least interview for one. I was fortunate also to get a part-time job working in the campus library as a circulation clerk. Most of my student loan money went to paying up rent for the semester in an off campus apartment because there was no available/subsidized on-campus housing to be had for most grad students, and also stocking up about 1 months worth of groceries. If I didn’t have my part time job at the library on top of that, I don’t know how I would’ve made it.

Ah yes, “The Chicago Boys", some of whose Econ grad students are no doubt hard-core Libertarians, but going to school on Pell Grants and living in subsidized housing...ah, the irony is rich.

Screw the Chicago school. Fascism’s handmaidens.

John J. Ronald, Librarian I at Texas Woman’s University, at 1:35 pm EDT on July 7, 2008

I am surprised at the comments questioning our decision to attend USC (e.g., “Why would you choose to go to a school where they didn’t value you?"). USC grad students, by and large, are not self-victimizing. I spent a lot of time researching programs (and the faculty involved) in my field. USC was not my first choice, but it was my second choice, and I was offered a TAship which includes tuition abatement and a stipend. USC was the only school to offer me full tuition abatement, so how could I refuse? However, after a year as a TA, I did not sign a new contract. The stipend is not ‘measly,’ but it really gives you barely enough to get by. I could not pay rent and bills in full unless I did not buy groceries, and so I had to depend on my parents to make ends meet. In addition, the University did not allow me to register for classes until I paid for the health insurance costs, despite the fact that I had full coverage (and the documentation/paperwork to prove it) under my father’s plan.In sum, I feel that the tuition abatement offered in conjunction with a TAship is very tempting, and reduces the needs for loans (which means less debt later). However, other conditions of accepting a TAship may not be worth the free tuition, as crazy as that may sound to someone that hasn’t experienced it.

M.C., former GTA at USC, at 2:15 pm EDT on July 7, 2008

I graduated 3 years ago (MS/PhD biochemistry) In science, we are paid to do research because we rely on federal grants that cover a stipend. We are treated well, with excellent health benefits, and a survivable wage. However, since the field is competitive, we are forced to work very long and very hard with the constant refrain from the advisor “if you dont do X for me I won’t let you graduate". So things aren’t rosey here either. I started at 12k and when I left we were given 18k I think. Now as a postdoc I make almost 40k. But I can’t really find a job since the field is in a glut and we aren’t really trained for anything beyond academic research.

My wife graduated from the same program with a degree in medical physics. She accepted a professorship at a very presitigous medical center for 110k a year. She worked hard and is very talented, but most of her contemporaries also are landing great jobs. Its the market. They do useful work that is billable. We dont. (the number of biologists in ‘industry’ — billable is probably in the low hundreds versus the thousands that graduate every year). People with english or library science degrees are also completely dependant on academia for their career.

This won’t change. As long as you have a degree that prepares you for non-billable work, you will be forced to live on government largess, be paid very little, and have a huge amount of competition. Our society has told us we have way too many scientists and people with graduate degrees. We must obey the laws of market forces.

R.D., market at work at U Texas, at 2:40 pm EDT on July 7, 2008

Same to you

” .. But there should be a bare minimum below which no one should be allowed to fall ..”

Well, yeah, sure. And I’d like to bat behind Derek Jeter. And I’d like you and everyone else to force the Yankees to let me.

” .. Ah yes, “The Chicago Boys” .. Screw the Chicago school. Fascism’s handmaidens ..”

Ah yes, “The academic Democrat Crowd.” Screw them. Fascism’s handmaidens.

As for the U-Wisc. TAs union — that’s just a minimum. At a lot of the Big Ten, they attract the best with free parking, free conferences, lower class sizes, summer work, etc.

Even in the USSR, elites got better vodka than the proles. Pity.

J.J., at 3:35 pm EDT on July 7, 2008

reduce the number, increase the support

I know this is easy for me to say, since I’m almost done with my PhD, but perhaps part of the problem is too many graduate students? Given the realistic job prospects for many in the humanities, maybe departments should quit focusing on supporting everybody just a little bit, and support a smaller number of students but with full and ample incomes.

Not only would it relieve the pressure on the academic job market, but it would ensure more diversity as well — right now, the only people who can reasonably survive on these paltry graduate student incomes are people with some other source of support, such as wealthy families.

Peter Villella, PhD Candidate at UCLA, at 4:30 pm EDT on July 7, 2008

I assume graduate students would know the value their stipends and waivers would be BEFORE they accept the offer.

As a recently graduated physical science grad from a Big 10 school, the stipend for being a TA or RA, plus the full waiver, was competitive with other schools because such was the market.

I was poor (well, American poor anyway) but knew that this is what I had to do to earn my Ph.D. I also knew that if I dropped out, there would someone waiting to take my spot who might not mind the stipend.

Something I haven’t seen brought up: Working as a graduate student is NOT the same as just getting any old job during college. At the end you leave with research experience, and hopefully a degree, in order to be marketable within your field.

JS, Didn’t they know the pay BEFORE..., at 4:45 pm EDT on July 7, 2008

Depends

” .. Working as a graduate student is NOT the same as just getting any old job during college ..”

Depends if you’re on research, teaching, or both. Research tends to pay more, because it brings in more profit (no students to deal with).

Also depends on rank — level 1, 2 3, 4 ...

And, again — if what you do has real value — toss in the reserved parking space.

J.J., at 5:40 pm EDT on July 7, 2008

Health Insurance

I’m wondering why young people at the bottom of the income scale should be forced to buy health insurance.

Health insurance at $1000 a year when the expected payout for a normal, healthy 20something person is $0 strikes me as a bit of a ripoff.

If I’m making $4,000 a year, $1,000 a year for health care that I will never use strikes me as excessive to the extreme.

If you are working for a university at minimum wage or even a shade less, the university should either pick up your health costs, if they think it’s so important, or not require that you buy something you almost certainly will not need.

D

David H Dennis, at 8:25 pm EDT on July 7, 2008

Pearce & Pearce

First, I’d like to respond to the comment tat the University pays Engineering TAs higher stipends because the school gets more from them. WRONG: this is a myth only sustained by narrowly glancing at the issues at hand. Such a myopic perspective merely mimic the deceptive rhetoric of administrations in higher education at large. AT USC, at least, every single engineering student, just like every other student, is REQUIRED to take specific liberal arts courses. That means that liberal arts TAs do the BULK of the teaching and grading of these courses which every undergraduate must take. In my department, that means that TAs each teach 90 students a semester; we attend 2 lectures and teach 3 sections each week. On top of that if required by the professor, some of us must not only grade the essay exams and essays of all 90 of our students, but often we must grade weekly essay assignments; that is, on top of normal preparation to teach and grade exams, we must grade 90 essays each week, and then we are expected to keep up in our course work, publish, attend conferences, etc. My department is well run, and the faculty has proven to be our best advocates. But even that cannot protect us from the bureaucracy outside of our department that limits our stipends and provides us scandalously pitiful health insurance at our own expense. As for why I would choose to go to such a school: I have no doubts tht I have other options and could transfer to a better funded school. I know others in my department could as well. MA students in my department pass up phd programs at Ivy League caliber schools to remain here for a simple reason: our department and our faculty rival any in the country in specific subfields, so professionally it is best for us to stay here. This does not mean we do not resent an administration that forces exploitative conditions upon graduate students. And by providing us with the insurance policy from Pearce & Pearce is an example of either the administration’s ignorance or callousness. We do the bulk of grading and teaching. That is a fact. The university could not function without us. The VERY LEAST the administration could do is guarantee us health insurance on the level offered to professors and not the policy they pander to undergraduates; that is, they should make some effort to treat us as employees and not simply as students, since they expect us to shoulder more of the work load than the faculty. And this last statment cannot be brushed aside as a departmental issue rather than an administrative issue, because if the professors took up more of the teaching and grading they could not produce the research output expected from them by the university and necessary for their own promotion. So there is a problem: either the university enrolls grossly more undergraduate students than it can afford to teach, or it grossly under compensates the TAs that are responsible for the bulk of the work related to teaching an ever-expanding student body. I won’t detail all of the problems with Pearce and Pearce insurance. But let me relate my own experience and how it relates to problems with the university’s funding of TAs. Like most TAs I take out loans to help cover extra expenses every year (and am not angry about hving to do s). The Financial Aid department at USC urges us to only borrow the minimum amount we believe we can live off of. Sounds like sage advice, so I took it. Then, unexpectedly, I found myself with a medical crises, and prescription expenses alone reached a crescendo of about $1000 a month. I’ve researched the health insurance at other graduate schools, and some have a cap of about $15,000 a year in compensation for medication. That is reasonable. Pearce & Pearce has a cut-off of $750 per year—less than the cost of enrollment in its policy. My doctor, seeing the dire circumstances I found myself in, sought to work wit her pharmaceutical representative because Big Pharm co.s have programs for people too poor to pay for essential medicine. Of course someone making as little as myself should be covered, right? Well, no. I was refused assistance because I was enrolled (mandatory, remember) in Pearce & Pearce’s program. Big Pharm understood that Pearce & Pearce’s policy wouldn’t even reimburse me for one month’s worth of medicine, let alone a full year, but they still refused because I was technically “insured.” Let me spell this out: in my case, I would have been in a less precarious situation were I completely uninsured than I was because I was required to pay for Pearce & Pearce’s policy. Further, Pearce & Pearce only paid $35 for my appointments with my M.D., though they cost $135. That I could live with because she was out of network, and I had already received negligent treatment from an approved in network M.D. Then, outof the blue, I receive a letter saying they would no longer compensate me at all for seeing her, because they did not approve of her billing rates. Let me translate: “We at Pearce & Pearce will only reimburse you if you visit doctors so unqualified to treat you effectively that they are forced to charge as little as possible to stay in practice.” With a need of $1000 per month in medication, plus treatment, what was I to do during the middle of the school year, since I borrowed the minimum that earlier seemed necessary (as Financial Aid suggested) and my wages could hardly cover the costs? Desperate, I contacted Financial Aid and Sallie Mae to get a Plus loan or private loan. Luckily Sallie Mae approved my loan. Problem: USC’s Financial Aid refused to disperse the check, because they only disperse checks twice yearly, and it was now late Spring Semester. I tried to explain the extenuating circumstances to many people at Financial Aid, who each responded by transferring me to another colleague; the last of these, after hearing about my medical emergencies, said they could make no exceptions, that it was a legal matter, and—without intending to be funny—suggested I would be wiser to sing my tragic tune to my congressman rather than to him. Uh, hmmm. Thanks USC—for years I’ve worked myself to death to teach 90 students a semester, and that’s the best response you’ve got for my medical emergency? Am I that expendable, that you can’t take the time to ATTEMPT to work within the system to find a loop-hole so that I can receive a loan check from a third-party to pay my medical bills and stay off the streets? Call my congressman? Good advice. I know there’s a war, a fuel crisis, and an approaching recess, but I’m sure my congressman would demand that all of congress stop everything in order to pass a special dispensation in some obscure Federal Financial Aid rule, so that USC’s Financial Aid department can feel ok allowing me to have the check that Sallie Mae agreed to loan me. I’m sure that would have fixed everything, but I decided not to burden my congressman, because I know he’s got a lot on his mind. Okay, being a TA is never going to be a glorified position. We’ll never be rich (by American standards). But the USC should not treat us as expendable—literally that our lives are expendable because we are replaceable. But that is exactly the message they send to students like me when they force me to pay a substantial portion of my salary on Pearce & Pearce insurance, despite it’s unacceptable coverage—rather than assuring us that we can count on the same sort of health coverage promised to the faculty and administration. I apologize for any vitriol that may be sensed in my response, but I hope it somehow convinces the administration not to drag its feet in making right the situation with the graduate students. By the way, my significant other is a TA in one of the other Liberal Arts depts., and she qualifies for over $150 per month in food stamps. I failed to qualify on the basis that I make about $70/month too much (costs, such as health care, are not considered when applying for food stamps it seems.)

USC LIberal Arts TA, USC Liberal Arts TA at USC, at 4:55 am EDT on July 8, 2008

Missing a big issue

I am a poorly funded graduate student, but let’s not forget that at most any university, graduate students who are working 20 hours as week (for the pittance mentioned in this article) are also receiving tuition remission.

It isn’t fair to equate these students with other low-wage workers. To be completely fair, total compensation should include any tuition remissions as well.

While I agree that stipends should be higher, look at the everything the student is receiving from the university. As a PhD student (not at USC, but another large state university, where I was often paid less than $10K a year), I have worked as a TA or RA every semester. It has been hard to pay rent, etc. at times, but I will graduate with no debt, as I never had to pay tuition. This seems like a pretty good trade off to me.

PhD Student, at 10:35 am EDT on July 8, 2008

Maxed Out

You can only max out so many credit cards and take out so many student loans. Now that I’ve maxed out both I’m just praying I make it through my grad school experience. Everyone I know in grad school has to max out credit cards and use student loans to pay them off each semester. Providing for my children’s education is one thing, but at least the public school kindergarten she attends doesn’t force her to work for pennies and pay thousands in tuition. Universities should be ashamed.

Max, at 2:25 pm EDT on July 8, 2008

There is an endless supply of applicants from China and India to grad schools, and the university-government complex will make sure that supply stays robust. Probably the only thing keeping the stipends as high as they are is the fact that if they were any lower, the students wouldn’t be able to afford an apartment and the labs would all have to install bunk beds.

Mythical Man-Month, at 6:20 pm EDT on July 8, 2008

Using Petersons.com to see what school’s report to pay...

Petersons.com keeps an updated list of what university’s and their program’s report to pay graduate students. Some report, some don’t, and some bring up discrepancies that may exist.

Regarding VA Tech: http://www.petersons.com/GradChan...nid=9544&filename=&sponsor=1

Select a program of study, and then click on the financial aid and costs tab, it should show what the department reports to pay RA’s, TA’s, etc.

See if that helps, but yes, it is still very confusing.

sc, at 10:15 am EDT on July 9, 2008