It's a bit of a shame that the US doesn't really allow part time PhDs (at least not in any of the schools that I asked). If they did, conceivably a lot of these students could get a relatively well-paying job in engineering or a lab or something, and as such the schools could get away with paying less. Part of the reason that I didn't bother trying to pursue the CUNY PhD in mathematics was specifically because the stipend they were offering wouldn't be enough to cover my mortgage (~$2,000/month), and they didn't offer any kind of part-time plan.
Where is all this tuition even going to? Schools in the US charge an absurd amount of tuition compared to schools in Europe/Asia and yet these colleges are also systematically underpaying PhD students, Teaching Assistants, etc.
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.
Alumni relations is a profit center for universities, not a cost center. Many universities are funded as much by alumni donations and endowment gains on them as they are by tuition.
Society has decided that it doesn't want to support American universities through tax dollars [1] so you can't really blame universities for trying to find any and all other sources of funding.
>"Society has decided that it doesn't want to support American universities through tax dollars."
This is hyperbole, the government is spending billions on American Universities in a myriad of different ways. And, many ways of support are not direct. One could argue that the guaranteed student loan programs are a roundabout way of supporting universities through tax dollars as well.
> One could argue that the guaranteed student loan programs are a roundabout way of supporting universities through tax dollars as well.
No, guaranteed student loans are a way to transfer wealth from future taxpayers and borrowers to beneficiaries of tuition such as university staff and whoever is receiving money from the university such as construction companies and whatnot.
The guaranteed loans with no underwriting obfuscate costs and thus result in a mid allocation of society’s resources. Such as leagues of people spending their valuable years learning “communications” or “business” degrees and then sitting in a call center or other role that does not pay enough to make the degree they paid for in time and money to have any decent or even positive ROI.
Providing education isn't expensive; big campuses and teams of administrators are. Universities could easily return to the old ways, just cap annual loans at $20k per head. It would be painful, but they're fat, and what they're doing is bad for society.
You don't understand university sports revenues and expenses.
Feel free to download a breakdown of revenues and expenses for the university of your choice at: https://ope.ed.gov/athletics/#/
You are going to find that almost every school is net neutral with respect to their sports programs. Football and basketball typically funding all other sports.
“University of Georgia Athletics approved a new budget for the 2022 fiscal year on Friday. The budget is set at $150,290,994, which is $7.7 million more than in 2019 and $3 million short of the 2020 budget.
Georgia athletic director Josh Brooks told media that the 2020 budget shortfall is currently $30 million and was previously $53 million amid the COVID-19 pandemic.”
Later in the article, it states that the stadiums were at partial capacity (mid 2021), so once stadiums went back to full capacity revenue surely increase significantly.
Sports teams are a profit center. Season tickets are hundreds or even a thousand dollars. And then there's the absurd money they make at the concession stands and merchandising.
The money goes to the college administrators. They're major bureaucracies that plague and control universities money supply and more or less dictate universities' policies.
The data I've seen doesn't, by and large, bear this out.
The money goes to the athletics and the infrastructure. (Not in the sense of "the best infrastructure money can buy", sadly; no, it's more like "raise $300 million to build this new dorm and let the richest donor put their name on it, then spend about 30% of what it needs for maintenance for the next 30 years...and then spend 5x the amount we would've had to if we'd just maintained it in remediation and renovations".)
> The money goes to the athletics and the infrastructure.
Athletics for most schools are a net profit center, even for the #100 football program. The smaller schools aren't spending nearly so much on athletics as the schools with football programs.
First of all, I don't believe that's actually true based on what I've seen: what seems to be more often the case is that the tickets pay for the marketing and some of the athletic infrastructure.
Meanwhile, the coaches are being paid millions of dollars per year. I don't care how much money the athletic program is bringing in; that's not a responsible use of the money. (I get that it's something of a prisoner's dilemma at the individual institution level; I'm more talking about the broader issue.) If you have the money to pay the coaches $2M/year, that means you could, instead, stop paying your adjunct professors and regular staff sub-poverty wages, and/or perform proper maintenance on the buildings.
And do not get me started on the economics of stadium construction.
They're profitable because they pay their workers (the athletes) next-to-nothing. And even so, colleges would be better off spinning off their teams into professional entities that pay royalties to use the school's name. At the very least, it's one less distraction for the college administration and they can focus on their actual jobs: education and research.
Part of the issue is TOO MUCH governance. We have loaded colleges down with regulations and requirements, which then require administrators to handle these rules. Most of these administrative roles are not optional (at least not if you don't want to get sued).
Most of these requirements independently make sense, but the sum impact weighs down universities and drives up cost.
Factually unsupported cynical take: Without the made up jobs there would be even less of a market for the type of non-STEM graduates public universities like to produce.
The regulations provide the justification for the jobs program needed to soak up the excess supply of non-trade graduates generated by overenthusiastic student loan policy.
> Most of these administrative roles are not optional (at least not if you don't want to get sued.
They are mostly not optional if you want to receive federal funding. There are some small colleges that are totally private, do not take government funds, and so don't have to implement and administer many government regulations.
You haven't presented enough evidence to show that there is a problem. If the alumni relations department is bringing in donations greater than their salaries, they are a net benefit to the university. Even if they don't bring in that amount every year, it might still be a net plus: it might bring in better students, spread the word about the university, and it might lead to big gifts later down the line.
The alumni donations total about $50k/year and I think there’s only like 200,000 alumnis that exist. The department is five years old and the growth is minimal as donations were like $30k with no department at all.
My anecdote wasn’t intended as evidence.
But there’s definitely a problem. You can look at official sources [0] for evidence showing that admin expenses are 21% at public, four year schools.
I found this article while looking for the official stats [1] that claims the average university in the US has 45 people in DEI. DEI is very important, I think, but 45 employees boggles the mind and seems to be more of a symptom of runaway costs and lack of controls that would allow for so many admin staff on a single topic.
I also reject the assertion they shouldn’t exist. The “Alumni network” is listed as one of the additional benefits when enrolling for a degree.
Further when the engineering firm you started after graduation with some of your classmates wines a National science award. Getting that profiled in the alumni newsletter could be unlocking a range of oppprtunities for your firm from grant funder interest to new commercialisation opportunity, all coming out of the alumni network.
Just cause the work is quiet doesn’t mean it’s pointless.
An alumni network is great. I think the issue is having so many admin staff working on low value activities like magazines and newsletters.
I’m a big fan of quiet work, but this is pointless. It’s not pointless because it’s quiet. It’s pointless because it has minimal to no positive impact.
Administrative bloat in higher education is well known at this point, and it's absolutely a part of where student money is going. All I see is a lot of "mights" in your post.
> Even if they don’t bring in that amount every year, it might still be a net plus
Or it might not.
Thats the root of the problem. The administrators are the people coming up with the metrics and arguments to justify their own existence.
I’m sure many of them believe they’re making a positive contribution, and the situation is more complex and tragic than just “these are the baddies” type arguments suggest, but there’s still an accountability problem that needs to be reckoned with.
For my family member the salary isn’t huge, I think like $40k so the whole department is probably less than $500k/year including overhead and whatnot. My assumption was if they are spending stupid money on this they are likely spending stupid money on many other things.
It’s stupid because there are no alumni donations for this school. They are nowhere near breaking even and won’t because there just aren’t many alumni.
The problem is that these aren’t efficient dollars anyway. Spending $500k to net $500k is not a good return. Schools should focus on better returns, like teaching and research.
I'm not suggesting that there is not an abundance of staff at some institutions, but at most institutions, "alumni relations" is a profit center not a cost center. At least if they are doing the job that our "alumni relations" department does. Yes, ours produces a magazine as well but their real job is (or should be) to entice giving.
This kind of thing would be like saying your typical account manager's job is surreal and perhaps in some cases that might be true :-)
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).
Some quick caveats, the employee count is for a year, and the UC system has about an 8% separation rate. The employee count also includes 29k student employees. Even so, that feels like way too many employees to service that student count, a bulk of which are listed as non-student professional and support staff.
Note that these employee counts probably include whole hospital staffs (since teaching hospitals / academic medical centers are frequently part of universities).
Yes, that is a good point. Staff employed by the hospitals are included. UC Davis alone is more than 10 thousand employees. I'd imagine a few of the other UC hospitals are also significant portions of that support staff.
So 40% of employees aren't paid by the university system's academic arm, but by the healthcare section. 30% are academic staff, and 30% are support staff.
Even with the cost of medicine going through the roof, college kids don't incur a whole lot of medical costs on average. So it's surprising the university would need to spend so much there.
- 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.
> - (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
This may be a good explanation for public institutions, but what is the justification for private institutions?
For example, a year at the University of Pennsylvania (a private university) in 1980 cost about $7200 (equivalent to $25K today), but Penn currently charges about $75K per year.
What is the justification for the additional tripling of charges, even after adjusting for inflation?
>Schools in the US charge an absurd amount of tuition compared to schools in Europe/Asia
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.
> [2] lets you look at country per capita spending on tertiary education
The link shows government spending per student as a percentage of GDP per capita, rather than overall government spending per capita. This figure can get distorted when there are more students in the system for any reason (such as due to private investment).
> since those places tend to make it harder to go to college, since taxpayer pressure on cost reduces opportunity.
This does not follow. Rather, having more students decreases the per-student government expenditure figure, even as the burden on the taxpayer stays the same.
As a percentage of GDP, US government expenditure on tertiary education is roughly in the middle of what various countries in Europe spend.
>Rather, having more students decreases the per-student government expenditure figure, even as the burden on the taxpayer stays the same.
That does not follow unless students cost zero to educate.
As more students enter, it costs more.
>As a percentage of GDP,....
And the US educates a larger portion of their population than most (if not all?) European countries. This is why using % of GDP is misleading, since the countries are paying for a different rate of educated people. The cost per student is more applicable, since as those other countries scale up the number educated will necessarily spend more, since on the margin people don't cost zero to educate.
This is why I pointed out the rates of education are different. Comparing a country spending 1% to educate 2% to one spending 3% to educate 10%, only looking at the 1% and 3%, is missing important information.
> That does not follow unless students cost zero to educate
The remaining funding comes from the private sector (e.g. tuition fees).
Comparing the US with Germany, for example, the US spends 0.9% of GDP from public funds and 1.6% of GDP privately for a total of 2.5% of GDP, resulting in 44% of the population being tertiary graduates.
Germany spends 1.1% of GDP from public funds and 0.2% of GDP privately, for a total of 1.3% of GDP, and 27% of its population are tertiary graduates.
So as a proportion of GDP, Germany pays only about half of what the US does, but still manages to have three fifths as many graduates as the US, proportionally. That is better value for money spent overall.
>The remaining funding comes from the private sector
Again, that does not follow. Adding students means more students will apply for government aid, so more aid will be allocated. Lots of places get paid $X per student from the govt - adding students adds public cost.
So yes, more students means more govt cost. Any student can apply for govt help, and if they meet requirements, they get the aid. They're not told sorry, you're number N+1 and we only fund N. You have to go private funded.
>That is better value for money spent overall.
Germany, (and pretty much all countries) pays far less for all advanced jobs. You cannot hire professors in the US for what you get them for in other countries (Baumol's cost disease, for example), so again this is not an accurate comparison.
>That is better value for money spent overall.
Such things are not linear - educating the last % would cost far more per person than educating the first 1%. Just like making something 50% burglar proof is not half the cost to make something 100% burglar proof. As you reach deeper into the pool of candidates they will take more effort, more time, and more money, per person to educate to some fixed level.
To be fair, if you graduate in four years, and are alright with state universities or community colleges, and major in some kind of field that allows you to be an engineer, university doesn't have to put you in lifelong debt. Many students do community college for the first two years, and then finish at a university, and end up on the order of ~$30,000 of debt. That's a lot of money, but generally not a life-ruining amount for an engineer.
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.
> Many students do community college for the first two years, and then finish at a university, and end up on the order of ~$30,000 of debt.
For people in many European countries, this is an absurd amount of debt to get a university degree.
Edit: For context: About 20 years ago, my university's annual fees was $15000/year for out of state students, and $4600 for in state - in today's dollars. Now that university charges $28K for out of state and $8.3K for in state - almost doubled after accounting for inflation. In other nearby universities I see people paying $15K/year for in state. This is a huge increase in two decades.
That's entirely fair, I'm a big proponent of making colleges either free, or extremely heavily subsidized by the government. I completely agree that it's still ridiculous to leave with $30,000 of debt.
I'm just saying that, for someone working an engineering job, that is not generally a life-ruining amount of money, especially in comparison to the increased earning potential that a degree affords you (which is, I suspect, why they get away with charging such exorbitant tuition in the first place).
I was taking them as separate. I did my bachelors online (while working full time), so I didn't know how to factor that into the calculation. I just texted a friend to ask, and he said he left his state school with about $35,000 in debt, but that was with a partial scholarship for the tuition, so I suspect a good chunk of that was the dorm.
If we double the number I gave to $60,000, that's a lot more, and starting to approach life-ruining territory, but I'd say still falls a bit shy of it for an engineer.
I met a person who went to a for profit university, never got a degree, and works at Cheesecake Factory. He owes $120,000 and has three kids. His life was effectively ruined by this college.
I'm sorry to hear that; I think that a lot (most?) for-profit universities are really predatory. You pay an obscene amount of money to them, you get an education that's maybe on par with a local community college, and if you drop out you end up owing a ton of money without even that. That's why I qualified my statements with "state school or community college". They're generally at least somewhat respected, and don't cost anywhere near as much as a for-profit school. There are also some non-profits private universities that don't charge a ton of money for tuition, like the aforementioned WGU.
The first time I attempted school and dropped out, I started getting a ton of advertisements for for-profit universities in the mail. I knew that they were often scams, so I threw them away, but I can totally see an alternate universe in which I don't know that and end up with a boatload of debt for the rest of my life.
Your European parents paid that $30K and more in additional taxes though. The money came from somewhere; land and buildings and qualified professors do not come for free in Europe.
Well, sure, but it isn't like taxes are that much higher - honestly, my taxes moving from the US to Norway weren't realistically higher than state + federal + health insurance, and if you consider the out of pocket for health care, the bill is cheaper. Not to mention that Folks that go to school and wind up working a lower-paying job (teaching, for example) aren't on the hook for all of it either.
And you aren't even paying for the same sort of things: Many colleges have sports teams in the US, for example, and the degrees take longer in the US. For example, you don't have to get an undergraduate degree in Norway to become a doctor so you spend less time actually in school.
I'm failing to connect your comment with mine. Yes, of course it came from additional taxes. Those additional taxes did not put people into $30K of debt in those countries. If you're poor, you don't pay that much in taxes. My mythical European parents did not get go into debt paying those taxes so I could go to school.
Another commenter pointed out that German universities need 1.3% of GDP to educate 27% of the population without charging them tuition. USA actually gives more public funding to colleges than Germany and yet those colleges are still asking for tuition.
~6 years ago, the Univ. of Michigan did major renovations on its large student dormitories. We're talking old but structurally quite sound reinforced concrete & masonry buildings, each housing ~1,000 undergraduates.
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.
Coach salaries -would- look like a bargain if revenue correlated with win-loss rate or quite frankly any measurable activity the coaches do. But, they don't.
IMO the guy in big-10 football who deserves a multi million dollar salary is the guy in the mascot fursuit.
The vast majority of coaches don't make this kind of money. I refuse to believe tuition is insanely high because of coaching salaries. I was actually under the (possibly incorrect) assumption that coaches salaries come largely from boosters and things like ticket sales, jersey sales, etc.
Athletics is normally (always?) a separate self-funding enterprise attached to th e university. Tutition dollars don't pay the coaches; alumni donations/gifts, sponsors, and ticket sales do.
Most of it goes to academic instruction expenses, and operations. The fast growing expense is more likely the latter as administrations have rather grown in size per student.
Land appreciates in value too, even if the universities may own campuses, it remains in the balance sheets.
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.
I don't think it is fair to compare with Europe. The Norwegian University of Science and Technology, as an example, got around 1b USD over the national budget. Stipends and loans to students are provided by another governmental body (Lånekassen), but in the US some students get a "full ride" (incl. accommodation and so on). However, the amount of debt you hear some americans ending up with is crazy.
Just to add to that - Students at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology do not pay tuition fees. So the stipend and loan provided by Lånekassen go mainly to living expenses.
No idea. But aren't those campuses wonderful with their huge buildings, new carpet, great landscaping, and every admin staff member has an amazing office chair and fitout. They even refresh that carpet every year along with brand new seating. The art! Its always changing as well. The university cars are great too. I've seen plenty of amazing cars that researchers drive around. The libraries are constantly changing each month. They renovated that building just last summer, didn't they? That oval is being redone as well. Amazing.
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?
>Many of these people have mediocre ability
Perhaps. University never intends to compete for top talent with their salary offerings. I recall during a salary discussion years ago, my manager at the time mentioned that the salary was indeed below market but offered up the point below as an advantage.
>don't really do much, but once a position is created it is hardly ever eliminated.
Yup. This was true and was a definitely a benefit.
Source: 6 years working as IT for a public university.
Baumol's Cost Disease. Basically anything that requires non-scalable human interactions is super expensive, because the cost of labor in the U.S. is super expensive. People don't realize it because when the Baby Boomers grew up, the U.S. effectively had a monopoly on capital, which meant that our "ordinary factory workers" could enjoy massively outsized productivity relative to the rest of the world. Now our ordinary factory workers are being undercut by ordinary factory workers abroad, since the rest of the world has rebuilt its capital stock, and so only professions that still enjoy global monopolies (eg. big tech) can afford service workers.
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.
I worked at a small private college for a few years in IT. Tuition increased every year, yet our budget always seemed to be the same or smaller ("we need to do more with less"), and my salary certainly didn't get proportionately larger.
Admin and prestige buildings, across decades, along with the upkeep related to those things now and going forward (pensions/retirements, building maintenance & upkeep).
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).
This article is about graduate student stipends. Tuition does not have a cost for these students, so the stipend only needs to cover living costs (which as the article points out, it frequently does not).
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.
They definitely do in engineering - USC and UCLA had most of its PhD students working full time in industry and only part time in their PhD program and grad school generally. I know because I was one of them.
I did a part-time PhD (not in the US, so I am only responding to the latter part of your comment). It's hard, exhausting and can occasionally be frustrating. I gave up most of my weekends during the time. My sleep hours were less than what they should have been - and I did this for years. If you're wondering, it did lead to some health problems (esp. my back), thankfully not major, most of which I've recovered from.
Do it only if research really interests you - this was my case, so the sense of gratification from learning and finding out things offset many of the negatives. Also, having a patient advisor and good friends helped a lot.
Out of curiosity, since you've gone through this before, do you have any advice on the best way to manage your time doing a part-time PhD.
I've started my part-time a month ago, and it's been pretty exhausting already, and I suspect it will get harder. How did you budget time to talk to family, or to do something for yourself to avoid burnout?
It was hard for me to set aside specific hours of the day for PhD during the week - because I occasionally had early morning and late evening meetings for my day job. And on some days the work itself would spill over. So the simple policy I followed as: if I am not involved in work from my job, work on the PhD. Far from simple to follow though.
I'd often work out of cafes and libraries (I used to cycle between a small set of my favorites), because the change of atmosphere, and often the ambient activity, helps. Not to mention, if you're tired and trying to work from home, it's easier to get distracted (I could justify dozing off), than when you're at a cafe with your laptop in front of you and there's little else to do. I found that university cafes can be particularly helpful because you see a lot of people working around you.
Family and friends: I didn't really plan talk time with my parents or friends but was mindful we talk without too much of a gap in between (at least twice a week with parents). I used to reserve the times when I really needed to unwind for these chats. Note: I was single for most of my PhD, and got married when things were winding down.
On weekends, I would typically allow myself Sat morning off for a change of pace. On most weekends, I would drive off out of my normal ambit of travel, and work from a cafe/library away from home.
Of course, none of above advice worked during the pandemic- working on the PhD became relatively harder then.
Essentially, since I couldn't have changed the amount of work I needed to do, I substituted that lack of variation by constantly changing the atmosphere I worked in. That helped a lot.
Fair enough; when I reached out to schools within commuting distance of me (the general NYC area), none of them offered any kind of part time plan for Mathematics or Computer Science (the only fields I'm really interested in).
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.
Yeah, a friend of mine has a PhD in Economics, that he got while working full-time at FDIC. I know a number of people working full-time at government research labs in various math and science fields that are PhD candidates. The part-time PhD seems like it's extremely common as long as there is real, employment-market demand for that PhD, too.
On the other hand, all the history PhDs I know can't even get work at their own university.
Tbf, if it's not a lab-based PhD, you'll usually manage to work on the side. I know several people who were in full-time employment throughout pretty much their whole PhD (aided by supportive employers and sabbaticals). Even at (elite) universities that had explicit rules against it, and cases where the university and the jobs were in different countries. I even know one guy who did a lab-based engineering PhD and continued doing a bit of consulting work for his old employer. It's not even that uncommon among people with prior work experience and skills that fit well with consulting/freelance work. You'll see it on LinkedIn. Internships are also common in many disciplines like Math and CS, and good advisors can even help you get them (I know a prof who sends at least one grad student to intern at Google every year).
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.
I don't really know how one does a part-time PhD. The kind of work that you produce during a PhD requires 4-6 years of full dedication. A part-time masters I could see.
In England a PhD tends to take on the order of 3-4 years if done full time, largely because they generally require a masters as a prerequisite to even start the degree. A part-time PhD tends to take on the order of 5-6 years.
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).
A PhD is a full-time job, time-wise. I'm not sure how _really_ feasible a part-time PhD + part-time job really is. Maybe for some, but most likely not for most imho. Agreed that it would help financially though.
I believe that the stipulation of no part-time PhD is dependent on training grant requirements. I couldn't have a second job during graduate school and it would cause big problems for the department, and by extension, me, if I was found to have a second job. It might work differently in other fields, but this is at least my experience in a hospital-affiliated biology department.
when I was a phd student at Columbia, we had a student in our lab who was a full time employee at TJ Watson and his work at Watson was part and parcel of his phd. Basically supervised by both his IBM manager and my advisor.
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).
Engineering PhD candidates often have summer internships that pay extremely well. Most thesis advisors encourage their students to do this, since it helps ground research in real world problems (and conserves grant money, of course!)
I recently collected the first-year PhD stipends in computer science across 39 university departments, to have a real sense of the numbers. Basically to have a fair comparison, because a lot of reported stipends aren't clear whether they are 9-month or 12-month stipends, and stipends can different depending on the year/candidacy of the student.
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).
It can be argued that the credential to land a PhD in CS in any of these university would have most of the time guaranteed a much much higher paying job in the industry, and potentially less stressful one at that.
Jeff, thanks so much for putting that stipend information together; I'm sure your list has started discussions amongst students and amongst faculty at many institutions. The variance in stipends was eye-opening to me, and clearly they all need to go up.
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.
Thanks for checking about the numbers. I did just double check the Maryland numbers, and what's in my table seems correct:
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.
Oh, you're right! Good catch, I agree that the numbers are accurately reflected as you had originally written them. Thanks again for compiling all this information, really helpful service to the broad community.
> universities should guarantee the 12-month stipend
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)
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 deferred joining a Bio lab out of undergrad after being pulled aside during my acceptance visit and given an 'academia life 101' from a postdoc. There were too many bio PhDs, too few academic positions, and too few opportunities in the business sector to have a lucrative and fulfilling career. Unless I was very lucky - according to this postdoc - I was making a poor decision. He advised me to go to industry a few years then reconsider.
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.
This led to me consulting during my PhD to supplement the stipend up to a reasonable salary. A lot of PhD students, especially if your work touches on computational sciences, are a lot more valuable than the university would like you to believe.
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.
The rate universities charge external funding agencies for one hour or one year of grad student research work is substantially higher than what the student gets paid for that amount of work
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.
Non-profit institutions with billion-dollar endowments, massive overhead costs, and "tuition" charges that make no sense. I have a really hard time believing this for the larger institutions.
Note that this applies to biology PhD. Isn't a solution to reduce the amount of fellowship offered and increase the stipend. This would reduce the amount of publications, but potentially increase the average "quality" if more money means that students won't have to look for money on the side, and also if there is a more careful selection of the candidates.
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.
> 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.
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.
The last point is critical. This issue could largely be mitigated by subsidized grad student housing. It might be more like a dorm than an apartment, but I think many grad students would be fine with that.
If you know you're going to be living on $1261 / mo there are plenty of decent engineering schools in low cost of living areas. I don't know why on earth you would choose a place with that kind of housing market if you know you're going to live on poverty wages.
3 years' of pain is worth it for many in computing, data science, and engineering, because it will definitely give candidates an edge for the rest of their careers.
But PhDs in some (not all) non-STEM fields almost seem like a blight on one's resume, and could make a PhD candidate's career harder, not easier.
Is that a signal there's an oversupply of PhDs in some disciplines? Possibly.
Interested to look into longitudinal studies of PhD students of different disciplines and where they end up 10 years' later..
In case some is curious about how it is in Europe: I'm a PhD student (physics) in Denmark and I get 2500$/month after tax. I save from 1000$ to 1500$ each month. Disclaimer: I bike everywhere and share a 1400$/month flat with partner. Also, the entire pay comes directly from the university, I never had to apply to get funding after getting accepted (this was the main reason to go to Denmark).
Here in France: I had a ~1 900€ salary after taxes (incl. income tax, 2 000€ otherwise) but because I was working in a company fulltime (the contract stated I was to devote myself 100% to my research, the reality was different but that's another topic).
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€)
I think the PhD is overrated, and along with that I think a lot of university education is overrated; note this is someone with two BA's and a Masters. Unless you're teaching, or doing some hard core research, I don't see that the PhD is necessary or even a good investment. That time could have been spent gaining experience, which IMHO, is extremely valuable.
Part of the annoyance there is that most research gigs are gatekept behind doctorates. I cannot tell you how many times I've been declined from Microsoft Research, despite having a bachelors degree and more than a decade of industry experience, specifically because I'm "not qualified enough" for a research engineer experience.
> 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.
To be clear, and I realize that the tone of my comment might come off as a bit more bitter than I intended it to, I don't blame MS for declining me. Obviously they're free to decline anyone they'd like, and I'm sure they get people with PhDs and industry experience all the time.
I don’t think anyone does grad school expecting that it’s going to be a good investment. Most people I know do it because they can’t imagine themselves doing anything other than research. Is it a waste if afterwards you just get some 9-5 software or finance gig? Definitely. That said, there’s few other ways you get to spend several years becoming a world expert *in a topic of your choice*
A PhD has never been about economics. It is about impacting the type of work you do and how much control you have over the direction of that work. Want to work in a major research lab? Get a PhD. Want to be a professor building a research program in an area of your choosing (assuming available funding)? PhD required.
I know biology and many other STEM stipends are very low.
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.
Have you considered a used bicycle for transportation? Hobbyists refurbish old steel frames that last forever and work as well as they did on day one, and they're usually $100-$300 depending on your desired comfort level.
Not all STEM is created equal. While there may not be thousands and thousands of jobs for a biology PhD, there are over 1 million open software/IT jobs. The good paying jobs are focused on what we value as a society. Clearly we value tweets and tiktoks and apps on mobile. We don't value teachers and nurses and lots of other essential jobs. If we want change, that is where we need to focus; find a way to value contributors to society.
That is how capitalism works. Profitability (yield on capital, exclusively for investors) trumps whether the activity is economic (Wirtschaftlichkeit in German) (i.e. maximize net capital growth per dollar of spending, for the entire economy). In fact, the latter is highly efficient yet we live in a system where capital has the ultimate say and it demands unreasonable yields that employers pass on in the form of terrible pay and working conditions and higher prices to consumers.
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.
Is it just me or is the rampant abuse of the H1B system absolutely prolific but a sort of hush topic in SV? The more I see the hiring from the inside the more obvious the exploitation seems. I would really like some context from someone with a more positive view of the subject as it is really souring me to current management methodologies from a nationalistic perspective at least within my filter bubble.
Let me burn up my hard-earned karma to answer your question honestly. I hope you catch this before it’s flagged and downvoted into oblivion
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.
I appreciate the thoughtfulness and detail of your response very much. These are all things near and dear to my heart and it is very rough to feel, as you said, that we are in a very similar kind of spiral as the Roman and other empires have self-inflicted. I wish I knew what could be done but the whole system seems like a juggernaut unable to change in any significance, and hence hopeless and futile to resist, but alas, Plato rings in my ears: “The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.”
I'm a CS PhD student in a place where rents are really high, but I pay no rent because I have an RA position in an undergrad dorm. It's not very much additional work, and saves me a lot of money. If you're a cash-strapped PhD student and your university allows grad student RAs, you owe it to yourself to apply.
While I agree that PhD students don't get enough cash on a weekly basis to get buy, they are certainly compensated well above what is quoted in the article.
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.
There's not a line in this that makes any sense. Sure, maybe you're only TA'ing 20 hrs a week max, but you're also doing research work well beyond those 20 hrs regardless of whether your advisor has enough grant money to let you escape the TA time sink by putting you on the clock as an RA for work you were already going to do.
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.
Why should you be paid to attend your classes or to conduct your own research? That is like asking to be paid to go to the gym.
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).
Of course tuition should be counted as part of compensation just as health care should be counted. You can be mad at the cost of tuition or healthcare if you like, but that is a separate issue.
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.
Universities aren't actually providing a service to the phd candidates though. The candidates are providing a service to the university. No one would get a phd if they had to pay tuition.
As a university employee with a spouse who is tenured faculty I can assure you that phd candidates are not a net positive work wise from an institutional perspective. The good part is that you can usually rely on a phd candidate to produce the work they have been assigned. Masters candidates, you have a 50/50 shot of being assigned someone who will produce anything of value.
All you need to do to verify this is to look at the large number of candidates that languish after even a little of their institutional support goes away. Look at the percentage of candidates who can't get even to, let alone through their proposal then add on all the candidates who make it through their proposal but can't make and progress to a defense.
Everyone pays to get a phd. Like many others you are confusing a salary with compensation and in this case opportunity cost. Take 3 or 4 years to get a phd and that can be half a million in opportunity cost alone. Institutions certainly charge tuition and fees but your compensation as a candidate exceeds those benefits. The excess is what a candidate sees as their paycheck.
I know you don't want this to be the reality and I am sympathetic. I once worked as a camp counselor for an entire summer only to find my paycheck at the end of 3 months was a total of $100. I technically got paid a lot more but apparently the camp charged us for food and lodging and $100 was the net. It was a rude shock to be sure, but as an adult you need to understand how things work and why they work that way.
The question is only how much. Universities would be paying $0 if they could. Turns out they can't. If candidates tax bill goes up $10k universities would have to increase the stipend by that much. No one works for free. People pay for undergrad because it increases earning potential by huge amounts, a phd isn't really the same. Those candidates could easily get jobs if they wanted.
I finished coursework and tuition (half of which was for "non-candidate research" "courses" that seem to only really exist to collect tuition on) is no longer being included. I would not say my compensation just went down by half.
I don't intend to assert that PhDs don't do a lot more work that 20 hours. I know first hand they do. The work they typically are compensated for (TA/RA/FA) are typically capped at 20 hours a week. This also aligns with the legal limits for international students on F1 visas.
I suspect that even the people who wrote that rule knew it wouldn't actually mean anything practically. It's just a convenient excuse to exploit someone in a vulnerable situation.
I can't speak to the "by law" part. But many universities, including two that I have experience with, consider the PhD stipend to be compensation for a part time job (RA/TA), accounting for 20 hours of the student's time, with the idea that the remaining 20 hours are to be devoted to taking classes. And during the summer, when a student may not be taking classes, a student may receive a full 40 hours' worth of compensation.
I work at an elite tier 1 research university that is an international household name. My spouse is a tenured faculty member who runs a lab and several concurrent DoD funded grants.
I understand perfectly well what a phd candidate does and what they are compensated for as well as what their fully loaded costs are.
If you believe that the cost of a phd student is 18k a year, it is you who does not understand what working with a phd student involves. In fact, 18k probably does not even cover their health care costs. We can debate about what a phd candidate "should" be compensated for and if their current levels of compensation are fair but any argument needs to include the full picture.
This is a silly take. The "true" cost of an employee is _always_ higher than their salary. Often by 50-100%.
Your argument here is like saying the minimum wage needn't be increased because the "true" cost of an employee is already $15/hr. They should be grateful for those administrative costs! And doubly so that we don't tax them!
Time spent performing thesis research is accounted as course credit hours (There's typically an 800 or 900 level course for exactly this.) After all, you must be "taking classes" every semester, with very limited exceptions, in order to even be enrolled in the program.
Moreover, in my field, RA work for an advisor should ideally coincide with your thesis work. So in that case, the main thing a PhD student does is two-for-one RA+thesis work. If it doesn't coincide, that's not a great situation to be in.
And I do understand what getting a PhD involves, as I have one.
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.
There are both TA assistantships and research assistantships. As a graduate student researcher, your stipend "responsibilities" include research output.
I'm not sure where you are going with this. Certainly you can have a TA/RA/FA appointment and sometimes a combination of the three. At the university I work at, you should not technically be assigned more than 20 hours a week over those responsibilities. This blanket policy means faculty don't have to account for the potential visa limits of the individual students they work with.
Note though that an RA is research of behalf of a faculty member. Your RA and compensation for it is for assisting with that research. It is not for conducting your own research even if you dovetail it it to a larger research/lab project. In fact, you almost certainly need to pay for the use of the lab and project data via authorship (sometimes first authorship).
I'm not debating that this is fair. Going back to my original post though I'm just calling out that the total compensation package for phd candidates far exceeds their take home pay.
Thinking in this way has always been very toxic. Some professors think this way and will accidentally state how PhD students are overpaid and underworked... Any sane analysis would note that PhDs are valid added to society, we want PhDs, and pipelines into industry for them. Using your analysis there would never be another PhD student.
Your reaction is understandable but you lack a larger perspective. I have never argued that society does not benefit from PhDs only that when talking about compensation one must include all the factors.
Would you accept a job offer before considering the benefits package? I would certainly not.
I believe that FunnyBadger is pointing out that people have been pointing this out for a long time and is frustrated that nobody has paid attention to it until it became a crisis. You know, kind of like how we treat every other problem we have.
It's not a crisis. People are simply louder about it now. When people stop signing up for PhD programs, THEN it's a crisis. Until then, the system has no reason to care, thus the general public will remain completely oblivious.
I was accepted into a Chem PhD program in the early 80's, but knew it would pay crap for years, so I figured I could work as a programmer for a couple years and save some money. 40 years later - I never went back to the PhD.
I finished grad school twenty years ago. My stipend was $1100/month for nine months and no tuition waiver. They did let me pay in-state tuition, since I was an employee within the state. For a while, I spent 60% of my after-tax stipend check on housing.
I'm a software developer in a large german city and I'm facing this issue. Rent is very high, around 50% of my net income. Food gets more expensive by the day and the war in the Ukraine isn't even factored in yet. I can't live outside the city since I need to go to the office 2-3 times per week just for the privilege to stare at my monitor there, just like at home.
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.
As far as I can tell what he did is more or less common business in high speed currency trading (and part of the reason the EU originally planed to ban it, until lobby corruption happened).
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.
I was a little skeptical of this because of the impact of state-level minimum wage laws that are higher than the federal, so I pulled up the data on how many people are paid the US federal minimum wage.
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.
Doesn’t make sense to use federal average gas price here. Anyone making the federal minimum wage is in one of the lowest cost of living parts of the country and will subsequently also have one of the lowest gas prices to go along with that lowest income.
It doesn't vary enough to make a big impact. Regular gas in Alabama is only about 8-9% cheaper than the national average. So it almost cuts an hour off.
Pair it with the fact that by-and-by, apartments are extremely expensive, and in short supply, so that service jobs are often not near where people are forced to live, and that you have to pair the cost of a car with the cost of gas, and rent. Public transit is a joke, a hollow underfunded mess in most cities.
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'".
> Pop quiz: In what countries does it cost a full day's wages or more to fill a car's gas tank?
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.
People in southeast Asia have motorcycles or trikes (taxis) despite having comparatively much lower income. In China most households own a motorbike. Clearly motor transport is highly desirable and borderline "needed" to keep up the kind of industrial society that can maintain their population, healthcare systems, fertilizer production, life saving pharmaceutical production, etc. Many people would simply starve if motor vehicles could not facilitate the movement workers and goods necessary to maintain these populations.
Having avidly driven both motorcycles and cars, I can tell you the safety a car provides you is not just a luxury. It's a a way to protect your children from higher chances of death in transit. In some states in the US transporting the family on a motorcycle would simply be illegal, as they mandate minimum age for riding on the kind of vehicles that one can legally transport their family on (in Asia the family is often times 3+ up on the same tiny motorbike).
I suggest you work on repealing transportation child safety and emissions laws if you want to bring us closer to Asia. Families do not need the spoiled luxury of these foolish safeguards.
Lots of countries in Asia have a variety of taxi-style transport services that make owning a car not as necessary.
For example, just in India alone you can hitch a ride on a bicycle rickshaw, auto-rickshaw, taxi, bus, train or subway. It's pretty easy to get around anywhere without having to drive, but this is also only possible because labor costs are so absurdly low (and of course, generally not that great for the drivers), with costs for private rides on the first 3 often comparable to public transport costs in the US.
Plus, Europe and Asia are generally more densely populated than the US, so having a car is a status symbol in that it shows that you can afford a safe place to keep a car. Meanwhile, outside of big cities like NYC (where car ownership is similarly a bit of a luxury), people easily have room to safely park one car per family member.
These are all heavily intertwined factors though, just as owning a car isn't as much of a status symbol in less densely populated areas, owning a car is less necessary in more densely populated areas.
It's not really "spoiled", as that is the price due to the fuel taxes in Europe, where the U.S. pays almost nothing in fuel tax. If they don't like that high of a fuel price, then they're free to vote for another party.
> Pop quiz: In what countries does it cost a full day's wages or more to fill a car's gas tank?
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.
Pop Quiz: How many people in the US are working for the Federal Minimum wage right now today...
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
That looks to be 2020 BLS data, before the Massive labor shortage, the Great Resignation, and massive wage inflation.
Do you have a current source?
But even assuming that data is still valid, that is what 1.5% of the labor force, and about 1/2 that is teens, or under 24 years old.
so the massive amount of focus on "minimum wage workers needing to support a family" we are talking about 0.75% of all workers that would fall into that categorization, we should help these people with social programs to be sure, but I would not call that a crisis, or something needing massive economic/regulatory upheaval to resolve, it seems to be the market is doing just fine with wages with out government intervention
> Pop quiz: In what countries does it cost a full day's wages or more to fill a car's gas tank?
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.
I got an ebike and filling that up costs me very little. Not to mention the savings on insurance, registration, parking, smog, maintenance and they can be cheap to buy if you know where to look
Who needs to buy 15 gallons of gasoline daily (unless in the transit industry or doing a long road trip)? Seems like a mismatch between frequency of earning (days), and car filling.
Most people fill their car weekly or less. Heck, since the pando, I do it less than once a month.
Good point! Lowest wage I ever had was $7.40/hr. That was the minimum wage for my state at the time. It was a whole 15 cents more than the federal minimum wage.
15 cents * 8 hrs/day = a whole $1.20 per day above the federal minimum wage. It was awesome.
