Unionizing graduate assistants can be more advantageous to grad student TAs or RAs in some fields and much less advantageous to others. Some disciplines, like econ or finance, may offer their grad students a higher wage already while other fields, ex. in the humanities, may offer lower wages. Unions tend to reduce this disparity, which is better news for some students than others. The best paid students might be paying union fee for representation but not for better wages.
Then those departments are still more than able to top off their students’ incomes with grants and other research moneys.
For example, my grant package for my GSI-ing years is my GSI income + a few grand in grants. (Humanities field)
BTW, the schools with grad student unions tend to be publics in states with pro-union labor laws. I’m sure there’s a list of those schools/states online somewhere.
Michigan is a right to work for less state.
I am not in favor of graduate student unions. Graduate students are still students. They are not yet fully fledged members of the profession; they are apprentices. I am more in favor of adjunct unions, but the laws of supply and demand pretty much guarantee that adjuncts will always be underpaid relative to their training.
The union model emerged to protect low-skilled and semi-skilled workers from being exploited. The problem with applying it to academe is that the academic enterprise is competitive and diversified. You’re not working X hours per week producing widgets. Left-leaning academic types love paying tribute to the concept of unions, but in reality they are not willing to submerge their own individual interests to the well-being of all the academic pieceworkers out there. Academe is like the arts; highly competitive and very individualistic, despite the lip service to “solidarity.” Academics think of themselves as special, not one of a mass or labor fraternity. In the union I belong to, there are great tensions and conflicts of interest between the tenured faculty and the contingent faculty. These groups are infighting for a slice of a diminishing pie.
Unions also exist for such skilled workers as professional athletes, as well as skilled tradespeople. Unions are more prone to existing when the number of buyers for the given type of labor is limited (even if a large amount of labor is being demanded relative to supply), so that sellers of labor find limited competition for their labor (in the extreme case, a monopsony employer can act like a monopoly seller of something, with predictable results; of course, the formation of a union in this case can result in a monopoly seller (the union) and a monopsony buyer (the employer) attempting to make the market). Graduate students may be prone to forming unions because their choice of employer is limited after choosing their graduate program, since one would have to transfer to another graduate program if dissatisfied with RA/TA pay, benefits, or other employment practices. This is unlike the case for many other types of workers where dissatisfied workers can relatively easily find other jobs, so they have less desire to form unions.
Professional associations (e.g. for physicians and lawyers), while not engaging in traditional collective bargaining, serve a similar function as unions with respect to political lobbying to change or keep the rules of the game in their favor (with varying levels of success). They may also erect high barriers to entry to their profession in order to keep supply short to protect the incumbent people in the profession (again with varying levels of success). A university’s academic senate can be seen in a similar light, by keeping the tenure system to protect the incumbents or insiders, while making it very difficult for outsiders to get in.
This is nothing new and it is simply naive if one think most PhD may get a tenure position. Indeed, vast majority of PhD do not get tenure position even if they are in academia.
I’ve a longish history in the biology academic/PhD/postdoc arena, and this idea of few tenured jobs in academic research is not new. Others in this thread are completely correct in this regard. The problem all stems from obtaining grants to perform research. Universities don’t fund academic research, the government does (along much smaller amounts of money from private sources). To obtain, and certainly retain beyond a few years, a tenure-track position in a research university, requires securing a grant and then maintaining grant funding for several years. With grant funding rates hovering around 5% in the sciences, this is no easy task. Most students entering PhD programs are naive to this reality.
There are other options besides a tenured faculty position at a research university, as others in this thread have mentioned. This is the avenue the vast majority of biology PhDs will go after realizing they can’t secure long-term grant funding and/or don’t like research after all.
As far as unionizing students/postdocs, that won’t help the long-term job prospects. It may give this population better short-term benefits/pay in some instances.
Why would someone get a PhD in engineering? Engineering is applied skill. You need enough knowledge to come up with design/solution, but a lot of it comes from on the job experience. I am also wary when I see someone with a PhD in CS. Why would I pay up for that degree?
I work with “data scientist” (in quote because it has a lot of different definition) in the big data space. They need a lot more industry knowledge than advance math/stats degrees.
Oldfort, my D’s bf is getting his PhD in engineering and although my knowledge is very limited this is what I understand.
His phd is in mechanical engineering although his research is mostly materials. He wants to go into R&D in industry. From what I’ve been told there are many major industries that have R&D labs and they employ PhDs. Such as defense contractors, the auto industry, petroleum companies, aeronautics. Even though these industries fund at the university level, they still have their own labs.
BF’s father has a graduate degree in engineering also and did R&D at a top company. I know he helped research a process that is very familiar to everyone. I have a friend who recruites for a top chemical company and I know he hires PhDs also.
Someone else probably can explain better than I am and can add to this.
This is news why? Pretty much a consistent story since the Sputnik furor died down. Few people bother to remember (or care) that the enormous bulge in grad school programs and attendance came about as a way for young men with bad draft numbers to avoid being sent to Viet Nam. Educational deferrals… and a huge explosion of graduate programs to handle all those 22 year olds. But even in the late 60’s we were producing too many PhD’s; the problem just became exacerbated during the Viet Nam war and has not subsided.
It’s only on CC where parents think their 17 year olds are going to go off to college, “do research”, get a PhD, and become a “STEM professor”. As if STEM were a department…
the title of this thread should be: High Probability of No Tenure-track Academic Job. (Colleges are making tenure harder to achieve – as well they should since tenure can be uneconomic in the long term – STEM has nothing to do with it.)
@oldfort, I did notice a higher percentage of American engineering students stop at BS, never continue onto the graduate school.
For some first-generation immigrants, they often start from the grad school in this country. If their family is not well-to-do, they can only afford to attend a funded PhD program. Most of them do not have enough financial resources to attend the costly UG programs here, even if their English skills are good enough. But it seems this is slowly changing recently – quite a many “international schools” (at the high school level) at many more developed countries are set up almost exactly like the upper-end private high schools (their teachers are mostly Americans) and many of their graduates are quite competitive as compared to the graduates from American’s private high schools – likely more competitive than the graduates at most average public high schools. They regularly send many of their graduates to the US colleges right after high school. I know a few attended elite colleges in US after graduated from this kind of international schools and one even knew how to “do premed” at the high school level (even most American students (like DS) do not know how unless their family somehow picked up knowledges about how to do this) and got into some BS/MD programs directly from an international school not in US.
When I was at a grad school in California, we were told that in order to make ourselves more marketable in the job market in Silicon Valley, some of UG classes are “must-have”. It does not matter whether we had taken similar course at a comparable college in another country. We had to repeat some of these key UG classes at an American college, to earn the “credentials.”
So almost everyone of us took all these must-have UG classes as grad students. For one particular course, almost no true UG students were able to register in THER UG classes in one year and they filed a complaints to the school officially and the school had to do something about it the next year – BTW, this is why I was biaed against the UG colleges at some research university whose graduate programs are particularly strong when DS was applying to college. (Many larger companies in Silicon Valley know something about these UG courses because they hire students from these California schools year after year.)
Did somebody post on some thread that there are more than a thousand students at Stanford taking some core/basic CS classes in one academic year? Maybe a high percentage of these students were grad students and they could have taken the course at the similar level for the third time?! (A wild guess here though. It is advisable to never take a class where there are too many grad students in the same class if GPA is your concern. (Unlike you as an UG student, they could take very few classes in that semester) - unless it is an upper-class one which is for both UG and grad students.)
Well said. I heard of another spin of the story which leads to the grade inflation around those years.
If the GPA is too low, the students more likely than not had no choice but were sent to the front line of the war. Since maybe the majority of faculty were against the war, they tried to “help” the students when they gave out the grades.
This led to the grade inflation at the UG level. Hey, deep in their heart, some faculty could be quite big in their humanity department, unlike those hardcore politicians.
The war did a lot of damage to us in many ways, for many years to come.
BTW, one of DS’s high school classmates, a football player at his high school, died in Iraq. I think it had happened even before DS finished his freshman year.
@NJSue At my school, Ph.D students who receive a stipend are paid less than $20,000/year. They make significant contributions to the university (help professors with their research, attract grants, teach undergrads) and are barely “students” after the first two years. They receive the stipend, which is then taxed, and then after it is taxed the university charges them “student fees” (even though they are supposedly fully funded). Do you think it’s worth having a grad student union to fight against this or do you believe this to be fair?
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Why would someone get a PhD in engineering?<<
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Outside of academia of course, but my DH and quite a few of his peers have their Ph.D in industrial applications, not just R&D and tech.
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Why would someone get a PhD in engineering?<< Labs such as HP, IBM Research, Microsoft Research, not to mention the gov't labs such as Los Alamos, hire PhD engineers and computer scientists to do that research. They hire MS folks too, but they are, by and large, the "grunts". I know this from experience; both my husband and I have EE PhDs and worked for years at IBM Research. Not to mention that it didn't cost either of us a dime other than delayed start of earning the big bucks.
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Today’s practical applications in science and technology are in part the result of yesterday’s theoretical research done by PhDs.
I really just haven’t worked with that many PhDs, maybe it is because what I do isn’t brain surgery. I don’t even use the math I learned in college. Most jobs do not require advance degrees. Unless you have a real passion for an academic discipline, I would think twice before spending all that time and money to pursue a PhD degree.
Oldfort, I agree with you, but my son is braving the torture of continuing on with his PhD. I’ve told him no harm in quitting, but he has put 5 years into it. He heard all my horror stories bout poor P.I.s and lack of support. What son has experienced is far worse than my worst times. Currently, I just try to be a rock of support.