Negotiate your agreement, then keep to your agreement. Professors and TAs alike.
Six figures is what it takes to raise a family in that part of NorCal. Are you actually suggesting that the way to deal with underpaid TAs is to underpay professors?
Maybe someone could look at what this would even mean at Santa Cruz:
Take the tenured faculty with salaries over six figures, and a percentage of those salaries to be forfeited. Does it make a significant impact on TA stipend? I wonder if it would cover what is needed to live there? Maybe let’s subtract out the faculty/administrative appointments and do the calculation again.
If tenured professors forfeited a portion of their pay to the TAs, it would be an extremely short-lived solution, since the possibility of those tenured professors being replaced upon retirement is slim. As articles linked in this thread show, nationwide tenured faculty are being replaced with adjuncts. In many places, adjuncts make even less than TAs. When adjuncts replace tenured faculty entirely, who will pay for the TAs? Of course, at that point, it won’t really be a problem because the graduate programs will have been eliminated. And evidently, most of the population is fine with that.
Nevertheless, there are at least some professors (nationwide) routinely supplementing their own graduate students’ inadequate stipends by hiring them out-of-pocket for research help. Sometimes this research help is PhD research for the grad student. This isn’t a sustainable solution to the problem, any more than expecting public school teachers to pay for their own classroom supplies is a long term solution to lack of school funding.
I’m resigned to the fact that ten years from now, most state schools will not have graduate programs. It seems not to matter to most people in this country, especially for all those students in the much maligned “studies” departments. It may be interesting to watch how losing so many research scientists plays out.
I’m a CA resident. The problem is us. Just in the last 3 years, Michigan has raised instate tuition as follows:
2017-2018 2.9%
2018-2019 2.9%
2019-2020 1.9% (the lowest in 6 years)
https://record.umich.edu/articles/regents-approve-lowest-state-tuition-increase-ann-arbor-six-years/
https://nbc25news.com/news/local/university-of-michigan-board-increases-tuition-for-fall-2019
AFAIK, not a peep from the MI residents. If the UC Board of Regents attempts to raise the UC tuition, mass student protests would break out.
Also, upperclassmen pay a higher rate at UMich.
^^^ We’ll be like much of the third world: few highly educated people, our best and brightest leaving the country to get their PhDs – going to nations that actually fund their schools. Maybe even China, lol.
We live in an instant gratification society. We don’t need government until we do. We don’t need scientists until we do. Look at that happen now with the covi crisis.
CA is not the only state providing less than cost of living stipends to graduate students at state universities.
There will probably still be graduate programs at HYPwhatever. They just won’t be for regular middle-class folks. The clock will turn back 100 years or so on access to higher ed.
^^ Yup… it’s a nationwide issue, and in this instance compounded by the high cost of living in CA and a shortage of affordable housing in the entire area.
CA Taxpayers likely defeated a $15 Billion bond measure, though poorly named “Prop 13”, to improve our all our public schools:
I voted for it. But maybe many voters were confused that this new bond measure had the same number as the (in)famous Prop 13 in 1978.
“From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”?
Just the opposite. HYPSM can easily afford to recruit and pay for middle- and lower income grad students. It’s the publics in high cost areas that cannot afford a so-called “living wage” (however defined).
Doesn’t UMich also charge undergrads more for specialized programs, like Engineering? (Those lab building are expensive.)
Right now graduate school is extremely competitive. When the number of graduate programs is cut, it will probably become even more competitive. Students graduating from state schools without graduate programs will not be as competitive as students from elite privates. It won’t be their fault. They just won’t have had the opportunities to create competitive applications. So PhD programs will become more and more elitist, and professors will be coming from increasingly elitist institutions. Already lots of people complain about elitist professors, when they aren’t all being educated in such insular environments.
Right now we have tenured faculty with undergraduate and graduate degrees from state universities, which seems a good thing to me for a variety of reasons.
eta- It seems to me the number of graduate programs has to be cut, since there are so many unemployed PhDs. A good place to start would be cutting the programs that can’t (or won’t) pay a living wage stipend imho. I guess they will hire adjuncts as long as they are available to do the work the TAs did. That will work for a while, I guess.
My kid is studying in LSA, not CoE, but the tuition is the same for both.
Now, even in LSA, there are additional fees for classes/labs, facilities, student government, rec sports, etc. They’re not large fees by any stretch, but they can add up to $200-$300 more per semester.
^^my bad. It’s Univ of Illinois that charges Eng more in tuition.
https://cost.illinois.edu/Home/UgradBase?DiffCode=BASE&TermCode=120208&TableType=1
From November 2016:
“UC students disrupt regents’ meeting with protests against possible tuition hike”
https://www.latimes.com/local/education/la-me-ln-uc-regents-tuition-20161117-story.html
Seems to me, it’s the entire State of CA’s fault that TA’s aren’t getting paid.
It seems that the grad student union agreed to the same stipend for everyone, whether they are teaching math or English or biochemistry. In the open market, those in the hard sciences may be worth more. They might be able to get jobs, while still students, for large corporations and make extra money. They’d have to decide if it was worth it to pay tuition but earn real money outside or to get the tuition benefit and give up pay on the outside.
A friend is getting a Phd in special ed. She is fully funded but lives in student housing and is somewhere in NC, not in a great Cal beach community. She could not have afforded to take a position at a UC if the offered didn’t cover living expenses. Choices choices.
^^^ In the long run, I’m not sure it’s good for CA to lose its most competitive students to other states. Just like it’s not a good thing for our country to lose our most competitive students to other nations. And one would hope there are enough people - voters and administrators - in CA to think long term, but who knows anymore.
^^like a lot of midwestern states, CA has stopped growing. (for the first time ever, CA won’t be getting additional Congressional Reps after the census.) As a result, fewer students to be educated and more importantly, fewer new taxpayers moving in. (The latter is particularly troubling relative to paying off state bonds and future state pensions.)
That being said, the state does have a budget surplus today, but unfortunately UC is not on the Governor’s pet projects list.
Well, the midwestern states are losing people, period. CA has a lot of people moving out – but also moving in. Those who are moving in are higher educated, a demographic associated with lower birthrates. So while the midwest is simply dying, CA is simply changing. It would seem since it’s gaining educated residents, it WOULD be in CA’s interest to keep its schools top notch and well funded.
At least, that’s how I understand it. I’d love to hear more on this from folks who know more about this than I do.
China is the most technologically advanced country in the world other than the US. People who sneer at the top tier of Chinese universities are often motivated by xenophobic tendencies.