"A Stanford professor"... Please make sure to attach names specifically for such bullshit views, it seems this is Jonathan Berk, you can only find the cowards name in what looks like footnotes.
Edit: he is by the way Professor of Finance, which makes him and his opinion even more unlikeable. Also got his PhD in 1990! Just to give some context to his idiotic intro here talking about how wondrous it was he got paid for doing a PhD.
You could owe them both in one of the most expensive places in the US to live. Teaching the lower division courses you won’t touch should at least afford rent, groceries, and gas.
Oh and Berk also objects to DEI, how surprising coming from an Apartheid-era relic. He’s just another conservative, tenured piece of shit who likes riling up the student body.
I finished my Biochem PhD in 2023 and the only way I survived the 6 years of indentured servitude was by working from 2014 to mid 2017 in the pharmaceutical industry. I saved and invested every penny I could, then moved to Pittsburgh where the $23,500 pre tax stipend went a bit further. Also, graduate student in my department were banned from having any other jobs, and yes it was enforced. One of my cohort had got in serious trouble working at the museum and one had minor issues when they picked up a faculty member while driving Uber.
Wait, PhD students still pay a tuition?
He's arguing that the tuition waiver is their income and they're choosing to spend it in tuition. It's an idiotic argument.
Only if they are stupid and/or don't understand what PhD supposed to be doing
I think you may be taking this wrong. The problem is that universities are severely underfunded and always have been. They simply don't have the money to pay a living wage to grad students. When forced to do so, some universities have simply dissolved student positions as a response.
The problem isn't the university or this professor. The problem is why we aren't funding these better so that they can pay a reasonable wage.
This statement is not based on any facts.
Stanford is private with an endowment over $35 billion and charges $25 grand per semester for graduate programs. I'm not interested in my tax dollars funding a private college primarily for rich assholes.
Billions of your tax dollars already go there to fund research. That is how universities work, public or private.
I'm aware, that doesn't mean I agree with it or support more money being siphoned from the working class to the elite.
It’s an endowment, they can’t just empty that pool of money they take around 4% of the money each year that they get from investments which ends up being around 10% of their budget
That's still 1.4B a year. They get $1.1 B in tuition a year. That's $2.5B. They have 2300 professors. At $200k salary that's only $0.4B of the $2.5B.
They also have 12.8 square miles of campus to maintain… which requires a lot more than just the 2300 professors. They also have adjunct professors, lab managers, researcher techs, facilities, and a ton of other expenses that are required from an R1 research university.
The grad students while they don’t get a “livable wage” do get their tuition comped and get a housing stipend. Like we can always do better but undergrad students are being done much dirtier than grad students as they are going into huge amounts of debt to try and even afford tuition
adjunct professors, lab managers, researcher techs
Those all fall into the underpaid category too. Adjunct professor is particularly abused.
$2.5B from tuition and endowment, $2.2B in sponsors and $1.6B in donations. $6.3B a year income. 27.4k total employees. If each and every employee was paid $100k, that's $2.7B for salaries.
You and I are the only people in this thread with actual experience at a university. The rest are just looking for places to project their anger and general malaise.
I worked at a university, did research at a university and was a student. There is obviously waste and definitely some amount of grift but the auditing requirements in place to prevent grift are arguably so strict that they cause as much or more waste as they save in grift.
You're right, we need to continue concentrating the salaries in the administration department!
You have to understand that the teaching assistants can't teach effectively unless the Dean gets his $50k/year mortgage paid for by the university along with a new car.
Good point!!
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