<p>I’m just curious, we know the cost for grad school is massive, a minimum of $25,000/yr for each student. What kind of benefits does a school gain from spending money to finance some graduate students (through TA/RA/fellowships)? To save more money from hiring additional teachers/professors? or just merely commercial/promotional step? or both?</p>
<p>What do u guys think?</p>
<p>Graduate students are cheap labor. Costs way less to waive tuition/stipend than to hire actual professors or even adjuncts. Professors need assistants to do the grunt work of research, too.</p>
<p>Also, it’s part of the mission of a university.</p>
<p>There are certain programs that don’t have a TA requirement for students, so “cheap labor” certainly isn’t the driving motivation of a ton of schools.</p>
<p>To be more direct, if a program didn’t hire graduate students, they’d just be research centers, and perhaps the US government wouldn’t be as interested in investing in them directly, if they weren’t helping to produce future researchers. So long story short - they are doing their civic duty. Certainly they get a benefit out of the students, and some programs are less interested in their masters students (professionals) than their doctoral students (researchers), but overall I think these programs are interested in producing thinkers.</p>
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<p>You can’t just say that overall. The program I am going to has no undergrad courses in the subject, and so there is no teaching of undergraduates. The classes that one does TA for are certainly packed to the gills with students - but they are all graduate students. The majority of students do NOT TA - so there has to be a larger motivation.</p>
<p>Perhaps if you were in an English (or other Humanities) program, and was TA’ing the lab for a 300 student section I can see how you’re nothing more than a beat of burden, but there are programs that do not ascribe to this philosophy.</p>
<p>Oh please.</p>
<p>Science grads TA huge, if not bigger, classes. Don’t dig on English. At least they’re not doing it for some mythical government-generated STEM job.</p>
<p>Isn’t the whole point of the university to effectively teach grad students? I mean,undergrads go to COLLEGE.</p>
<p>From reading research on graduate programs in Economics, which is my field, it is my understanding that those programs which are the highest rated are those which are also the largest. This seems to be because when researchers publish in academic journals or are the subject of citation there are two credits which are issued, one to the Alma Mater (or is that supposed to be the UG only?) where the Ph.D was hooded, the other to the current institution. So a larger populace of graduate students contributes to the building of the program as a whole. The list of the largest Economics Ph.D programs? (in Alphabetical order):</p>
<p>Boston U, Columbia, Cornell, George Mason, Harvard, MIT, Northwestern, Princeton, Stanford, UCLA, U Chicago, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Yale.</p>
<p>If a professor mentors doctoral candidates at a successful clip, then there will only be a multiplier to the number of citations and the rich get richer. The next group down the line, Duke, Johns Hopkins, UW, could do better by retaining a few extra faculty and getting their students ready to publish.</p>
<p>One of the reasons IS cheap labor, so don’t let the fact that some schools have smaller or no TA requirements fool you. At many large universities, humanities graduate students teach full sections of English and STEM students teach lab or discussion sections that they otherwise would have to pay adjuncts for, which would cost more in the long run.</p>
<p>Another reason is cheap research labor, especially in STEM fields.</p>
<p>But other reasons are less negative - graduate programs heighten a school’s rankings, both because universities with grad students have higher research productivity and because good doctoral programs raise a university’s ranking, especially if there are a lot of them. Also, research professors do like generating themselves - teaching the next generation of scholars, moving forward the new generation of innovative work.</p>
<p>Not to mention that in many fields, the quality of a program is somewhat or largely based on where PhD students are placed as assistant professors. In that case, it benefits a program to have many PhD students to increase the odds that some of them place well.</p>
<p>The whole “grad student as university chattel” narrative is an unfortunate one; realistically it is a mutually beneficial agreement that has been morphed by years of dissatisfied graduate students. </p>
<p>The squeaky wheel gets the grease, so the mewling graduate student drives the “reality” of graduate school experience. </p>
<p>I think it is just incredibly disingenuous to say that “cheap labor” is the driving force for these universities when that labor can’t possibly be cheap. I mean you take a 20K stipend, on top of 30K tuition and you are already looking at a pretty good salary for an adjunct professor (and this is at a “normal” school). But there have to be other hidden costs (health care) that do not warrant carrying a load of X number of graduate students versus Y (less than X) adjunct/part-time faculty.</p>
<p>That “30K tuition” figure is mythical revenue that would never exist anyway. If Ph.D programs were not fully funded, the vast majority of those students would not be enrolled. Very few people are rich or naive enough to self-fund doctoral studies.</p>
<p>Doctoral study is effectively a long-term paid internship or apprenticeship program.</p>
<p>The opportunity cost of the lost tuition may be “mythical” but that is not so of the faculty and other resources consumed by graduate education. My doctoral program had only one or two classes with more than six students and the professors were always the best that the school had to offer for that subject. Once course work ended, there were many more hours of one-to-one with advisers and committee members. I would guess that each PhD student consumed the equivalent resources of a dozen or more undergraduates. The single semester that we spent teaching certainly did not pay back that investment.</p>
<p>A school can’t be taken seriously as a “Real University” if it doesn’t have a PhD program across most disciplines. As I recall, there is an explicit minimum average number of doctoral (or equivalent) degree grants per year to be considered R1 and R2.</p>
<p>Of course, where it’s practical to exploit the PhD students as cheap labor, schools will tend to do so. But it’s a stretch to claim cheap labor as the principal motive.</p>
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<p>Tell that to those of us that have had to TA term after term. :(</p>
<p>And the $30k isn’t mythical revenue. It’s being paid by your advisor, out of their research grants, to the school. When you TA this is often waived, which is why being one can be so useful for cash-strapped groups (or those trying to keep students off of federal funding for other reasons).</p>