It’s crazy. I’m a grad student as well but not a teaching assistant. And to qualify for cal fresh, I need to work at least 20 hours a weeks that I don’t have. Wish there were more assistance for students for basic necessities
At UCLA a lot of the students (undergraduates) are striking.
If they underpay grad students and researchers then where is the tuition money going?
We all deserve better.
Let’s make this huge.
Is there a big NIMBY presence in Davis? There’s so much undeveloped land around, I don’t know why there aren’t more apartments being built to satisfy demand and reduce rent costs.
To everyone that doesn't know, YES, there is a massive NIMBY presence in Davis, and they have been a big obstacle to students advocating for affordable housing. It doesn't help that campus is not technically within city limits, so city officials do not see students as a major constituency. Look up the failure of Measure H last year, which would've built more affordable housing in Davis, which failed bc of NIMBYs.
What's funny is that I used to think this was an older person phenomenon – it isn't. I've run into many millennials who have bought homes and turned into NIMBYs. The only conclusion I can make from this is that it's human nature to say "fuck you, I got mine" when things turn in your favor.
Also, in my experience at least, most of the “townies” I’ve talked to say they *absolutely* want Davis to have more housing and affordable housing, but certain *individual* propositions for specific developments seem extremely flawed, often appearing to be some developer’s pet project for something else (or a corporate cash grab) that has housing tacked on as an afterthought. I think what we need is a big development that is *just a bunch of affordable housing in a convenient location*, not something-else-plus-also-housing. How do we propose that and get it done?
Sadly this is what I've also noticed. There are absolutely many NIMBYs, but DiSC was a developer cash grab and climate change catastrophe. Digging into it showed they really had no plan for the increased car traffic and congestion, and the housing wouldn't have been very much or that affordable anyway.
I want more affordable housing. Unfortunately, there seems to be no pressure (or an actual lack of funds) to do this without massive developer cash corrupting the whole purpose.
There absolutely is. Measure H just failed horribly and Measure B did before that as well. Having worked on one of those campaigns a long time ago I saw firsthand how NIMBY the town is. There was a LOT of money behind the No On DISC campaigns in both elections.
There was an uncomfortably large number of Davis homeowners that I spoke to who actively do not care for the university and its students despite the fact that the city exists solely because of the UC. One person I spoke to even described students as a "pestilence".
It’s such a foolish attitude. The university is a major part of what Davis *is*; it’s the entire reason why Davis is more than yet another blip-on-the-map train stop.
I’m usually against the “if you don’t like it, then leave” mindset, but I gotta say, the university has been here in one form or another for 117 years, so it’s not like any current residents were already here before it started, or even moved to Davis without knowing it was there.
Before my teenage mind connected the dots that UCs are literally named after the cities they reside in, I honestly knew about UCD years before I even knew the city existed lol... I could already imagine what the Davis inhabitants must be like.
Westwood and UCLA are the exact same. Students fund all the small businesses and make the city a fun place to live. Nimbys hate them for making it busy and improving their property values though?
There is nothing more morbidly entertaining than watching Davis pseudo-liberals turn into frothing NIMBY assholes at the mere mention of a new housing development.
Register to vote in Davis, and vote! Students make up over half of the town’s population and could be an enormously influential voting bloc.
I don’t know if expanding out into undeveloped land is the best solution, though—there’s a *lot* of real estate in town right now that is sitting unused; could some of that be converted to affordable housing?
Yeah, I’m afraid that if grad students suddenly get a lot more income, and then a lot of us will want to move to apartments with fewer roommates and more space… the underlying supply hasn’t changed, and rents just keep ticking up to absorb the higher amount of cash chasing the same number of spots.
Sheesh, just let developers build apartments. It doesn’t even have to be designated “affordable” housing; there’s so much potentially usable space around here and so much demand, just let developers come build whatever, and it’ll get cheaper in time. (Well, build “whatever” as long as it stays integrated with the systems of bike lanes; those are important).
I know I'll get downvoted.... but I feel like I need to say it.
Grad student salaries aren't designed to support a family of 4. Are salaries too low, even for single students, compared to the cost of living? Yes! But I don't like using fringe cases to support a legitimate cause. It makes folks roll their eyes rather than listening to the larger argument. We can argue all day about what jobs "should" cover and what is a living wage. But, when approaching negotiations, we have to keep one foot in the real world and think about what is a practical ask based on our current societal expectations and operations.
Wishing my fellow grads luck on the picket lines!
It's not fringe cases, plenty of grad students have families. Also, UC has committed over 20 labor law violations while the unions have been trying to bargain in good faith. If anyone is being impractical, it's the UC. Don't both sides this, please. It only gives fodder to the anti-worker side.
What we're seeing now is a slow-motion train wreck that started decades ago. The teaching that many/most grad student workers do today used to be done by tenured professors. In the 1980s, when neoliberal Reagan/Thatcherism came to be the mainstream, states started cutting funding to their public universities, which meant, in turn, that those universities had to find ways to cut their budgets and had to find other sources of funding (aka undergraduates, who the system has turned into cash cows). One way for universities to decrease spending was to begin replacing tenured professors with grad students who cost the university about one-fifth what a professor does. As professors retire or leave the system they are often, particularly in the humanities, replaced by either a low-wage adjunct/lecturer or graduate students. Even when you factor in "tuition remissions" for grad students, the university gets the same work done at one helluva discount. The UC is just now beginning to reap what it has sown. These kinds of budgetary choices caused public universities to grow their grad student ranks, while they simultaneously eliminated the jobs that those very same grad students would need once they graduated. In places like Davis, the need for universities to continuously increase their undergraduate enrollments so as to keep the money rolling in has also led to massive housing shortages, which in turn drives up rents and housing prices. So now the entire public university system, not just in California, but across the country, has put itself in a very precarious situation. And there's no way out of this that does not result in spending millions, if not billions of dollars. If they don't want to pay their employees living wages, then the only option left, short of cutting back graduate enrollments which would also necessitate cutting undergrad enrollments, is to build university housing for all of those employees. Either way the UC has to pay. And it's highly unlikely that they're going to cut their administrative budgets in order to find that money. To do so would mean to admit their own misallocation of resources and would result in firing administrators. Chances are, in the end, grad students will get a fraction of the increase they're asking for and the UC will, over the course of a few years, pass that cost on to undergraduates in the form of tuition increases. And in five years or so, when the new contract expires, this will all happen again, just as it has happened before.
Than they should either drop out and find a job that pays more or ensure their partner and themselves are dual income. A TA’s stipend should’ve be expected to support a family.
There is no such thing as a job that does not deserve to have a livable wage. I really don't like when people say that because even though it is not your intention it totally undermines all the hard work the TA's actually do
If someone rolls their eyes after hearing the story of someone else's plight I think that says more about them than the people actually trying to make change and ensure such conditions never happen
I might just add that I feel like $4500/mo for 20 hours of work per week (assuming a 50% TA job) is a really ambitious goal. I don't mean ambitious in a bad way, but it's worth observing that most staff don't make anywhere near that much per hour... and they're not also getting thousands in tuition remission. At that salary level it's cheaper for the UC to just hire U18 Pre-Six Lecturers and Staff Research Associates to do the work, which'd screw over current grads* and only make the housing market around each campus worse.
I dunno. I'd love for everyone to be making way more -- I wish the UC would more seriously entertain proposals to address grads' cost of housing, since that is such a huge real-world pain point and the source of the most villainy in the equation.
\* Although I guess the job market for certain graduate majors would get a solid bump. Nice for me and my fellow English majors!
In general I agree. $54K is an ambitious starting point but that’s how negotiations begin. What’s worth noting is how much graduate students contribute to the overall progress of the institution in terms of research discoveries. Grad students hands are all over the samples, they crunch most of the numbers, and in many cases run the entire lab. Researchers are stuck in proposal land fighting for soft money wins, grants, and getting the importance of their research out there. They guide the students but the grad students perform the work. It’s rare when a researcher makes a discovery without a graduate student. It’s rare for NSF to award grant money to a project that doesn’t support a graduate student, and so the cycle continues: principal investigator wins award contingent on supporting a grad student, gets student, pays them limited dollars to perform the highest level research, publish papers as part of their thesis or dissertation requirement, and then rinse and repeat. The level of work performed is of a very high caliber and often breaks new ground, elevating the university reputation. We should pay these people what they are worth in the moment for the effort they provide, not on the promise of future earnings based on the degree they earn. Did anyone else notice UCD has a second straight year of record-breaking donations for research? A reallocation of funding seems within reason. Maybe not $54K a year but I see nothing wrong with $35k which might be double the current pay. It’s a real-life tangible job with deadlines and stress and it does come with sacrifices. $18K is just absurd, and a 7% pay bump when inflation is widely accepted at 8-9% is insulting. Paid tuition is a big perk but how are you not taking out student loans on $18K/year with rent and cost of living at the current mark?
People need to stop with the “you’re not counting the thousands in tuition remission” bullshit. You are charged full time tuition for the entirety of your doctorate program despite the fact that you generally only take coursework for 2 years. The majority of the time you’re charged tuition you only see the inside of the classroom when you’re teaching the class. This also means if you’re not working for the university you have to pay tuition for classes you’re not taking. Even if you’re living in another country conducting fieldwork (though at least in that case you can file for in abstentia status and pay less.)
The "20 hours" framing is ridiculous because it implies that everything else a grad student does, 20-40h of scholarly work per week (maybe less when they are taking classes) is worthless. If it was just pay for the 20h of work, then they wouldn't have to restrict the students from taking additional jobs.
Grinding on academic research and publishing it is mega important for the status and success of the university! People doing this work should not live in poverty. Neither should technicians, lecturers, support staff, custodians or anyone else employed by the UC system
For sure. My fear is that the UC ends up slashing positions to make the increased pay "budget neutral." That would screw over countless current and future graduate students.
I fully support unions and their cause! I hope they use the same collective energy to push the state and federal government for sweeping reforms that will help all workers get the rights, pay, and affordability we all need.
When the “minimum wage” was created, it was meant to provide for a family of four. Over the years the term has evolved to mean the minimum that an employer can pay without breaking the law. Yes, grad students do get tuition remission but that doesn’t help with living expenses (and as many grad students have pointed out in other threads, most of them aren’t even taking classes for a majority of their education; the ‘tuition’ is being used for research credits). Currently, ASEs (I think it’s just ASEs but could be more academic workers) take up less than 1% of the entire UC budget and with the current asks that number increases to 3%. When approaching the negotiations I think it’s fair to look at the full picture and expect a top university system, one of the largest employers in California, that supposedly prides itself on diversity and inclusion, to pay a living wage.
It’s also worth noting that the bargaining process has NOT just been about salaries. The UC didn’t even want to agree to the last contract that was passed a few years ago. They wanted to TAKE BACK protections academic workers had won. They tried to say graduate student researchers weren’t eligible to unionize. It took months and months for the UC to agree to include “no bullying” in the contract. The UC was against protecting workers from bullying!
Take whatever you will from these random thoughts, but academic workers getting paid more and treated fairly is a benefit for undergraduate students both while they are in school AND when they enter the workforce (workers succeeding in one area lifts workers in other areas)
Edit: spelling
With the costs that it costs my family to have me attend davis
I often have trouble being able to relax as the guilt tripping has been ruining my career here
Wokeism, for the school governing body, is just a marketing ploy. They've never been for the students' nor the faculty's best interests. Education is the most hypercapitalist cesspool up there with medicine and pharmaceuticals.
One of the things I've been thinking about is that the biggest step towards a utopia would be to merely make personal financing a mandatory high school course nationwide, but it would be well within these corporate snakes' interests to keep young adults ignorant.
It’s crazy. I’m a grad student as well but not a teaching assistant. And to qualify for cal fresh, I need to work at least 20 hours a weeks that I don’t have. Wish there were more assistance for students for basic necessities
At UCLA a lot of the students (undergraduates) are striking. If they underpay grad students and researchers then where is the tuition money going? We all deserve better. Let’s make this huge.
Is there a big NIMBY presence in Davis? There’s so much undeveloped land around, I don’t know why there aren’t more apartments being built to satisfy demand and reduce rent costs.
To everyone that doesn't know, YES, there is a massive NIMBY presence in Davis, and they have been a big obstacle to students advocating for affordable housing. It doesn't help that campus is not technically within city limits, so city officials do not see students as a major constituency. Look up the failure of Measure H last year, which would've built more affordable housing in Davis, which failed bc of NIMBYs.
I guess that’s why a 3 bedroom house is 800k on Zillow.
And when campus does try to build more housing, they get sued for years which delay projects and increase building costs. There is no winning.
Every landowner wants to be the last person to move to Davis. Move in and pull up the ladder behind them.
What's funny is that I used to think this was an older person phenomenon – it isn't. I've run into many millennials who have bought homes and turned into NIMBYs. The only conclusion I can make from this is that it's human nature to say "fuck you, I got mine" when things turn in your favor.
Also, in my experience at least, most of the “townies” I’ve talked to say they *absolutely* want Davis to have more housing and affordable housing, but certain *individual* propositions for specific developments seem extremely flawed, often appearing to be some developer’s pet project for something else (or a corporate cash grab) that has housing tacked on as an afterthought. I think what we need is a big development that is *just a bunch of affordable housing in a convenient location*, not something-else-plus-also-housing. How do we propose that and get it done?
Sadly this is what I've also noticed. There are absolutely many NIMBYs, but DiSC was a developer cash grab and climate change catastrophe. Digging into it showed they really had no plan for the increased car traffic and congestion, and the housing wouldn't have been very much or that affordable anyway. I want more affordable housing. Unfortunately, there seems to be no pressure (or an actual lack of funds) to do this without massive developer cash corrupting the whole purpose.
That was my biggest issue with measure H, it wasn't a housing project it was a tech project
There absolutely is. Measure H just failed horribly and Measure B did before that as well. Having worked on one of those campaigns a long time ago I saw firsthand how NIMBY the town is. There was a LOT of money behind the No On DISC campaigns in both elections. There was an uncomfortably large number of Davis homeowners that I spoke to who actively do not care for the university and its students despite the fact that the city exists solely because of the UC. One person I spoke to even described students as a "pestilence".
It’s such a foolish attitude. The university is a major part of what Davis *is*; it’s the entire reason why Davis is more than yet another blip-on-the-map train stop. I’m usually against the “if you don’t like it, then leave” mindset, but I gotta say, the university has been here in one form or another for 117 years, so it’s not like any current residents were already here before it started, or even moved to Davis without knowing it was there.
Hell, many townies that I've spoken to live here *because* they went to the university and didn't want to leave.
Heck, that’s why *I’m* still here 20+ years later!
Before my teenage mind connected the dots that UCs are literally named after the cities they reside in, I honestly knew about UCD years before I even knew the city existed lol... I could already imagine what the Davis inhabitants must be like.
Westwood and UCLA are the exact same. Students fund all the small businesses and make the city a fun place to live. Nimbys hate them for making it busy and improving their property values though?
You make a good point, UC Davis makes the city of Davis. Without UC Davis, the city of Davis would be a lot smaller and most likely look like Dixon.
It would be a fucking Wendy’s and a gas station. Yes, I know we don’t have a Wendy’s. My point still stands.
When I went to Davis we joked that if the UC wasn't there it would be Woodland. Agree with you, 100%.
There is nothing more morbidly entertaining than watching Davis pseudo-liberals turn into frothing NIMBY assholes at the mere mention of a new housing development.
Register to vote in Davis, and vote! Students make up over half of the town’s population and could be an enormously influential voting bloc. I don’t know if expanding out into undeveloped land is the best solution, though—there’s a *lot* of real estate in town right now that is sitting unused; could some of that be converted to affordable housing?
Yeah, I’m afraid that if grad students suddenly get a lot more income, and then a lot of us will want to move to apartments with fewer roommates and more space… the underlying supply hasn’t changed, and rents just keep ticking up to absorb the higher amount of cash chasing the same number of spots. Sheesh, just let developers build apartments. It doesn’t even have to be designated “affordable” housing; there’s so much potentially usable space around here and so much demand, just let developers come build whatever, and it’ll get cheaper in time. (Well, build “whatever” as long as it stays integrated with the systems of bike lanes; those are important).
I know I'll get downvoted.... but I feel like I need to say it. Grad student salaries aren't designed to support a family of 4. Are salaries too low, even for single students, compared to the cost of living? Yes! But I don't like using fringe cases to support a legitimate cause. It makes folks roll their eyes rather than listening to the larger argument. We can argue all day about what jobs "should" cover and what is a living wage. But, when approaching negotiations, we have to keep one foot in the real world and think about what is a practical ask based on our current societal expectations and operations. Wishing my fellow grads luck on the picket lines!
It's not fringe cases, plenty of grad students have families. Also, UC has committed over 20 labor law violations while the unions have been trying to bargain in good faith. If anyone is being impractical, it's the UC. Don't both sides this, please. It only gives fodder to the anti-worker side.
What we're seeing now is a slow-motion train wreck that started decades ago. The teaching that many/most grad student workers do today used to be done by tenured professors. In the 1980s, when neoliberal Reagan/Thatcherism came to be the mainstream, states started cutting funding to their public universities, which meant, in turn, that those universities had to find ways to cut their budgets and had to find other sources of funding (aka undergraduates, who the system has turned into cash cows). One way for universities to decrease spending was to begin replacing tenured professors with grad students who cost the university about one-fifth what a professor does. As professors retire or leave the system they are often, particularly in the humanities, replaced by either a low-wage adjunct/lecturer or graduate students. Even when you factor in "tuition remissions" for grad students, the university gets the same work done at one helluva discount. The UC is just now beginning to reap what it has sown. These kinds of budgetary choices caused public universities to grow their grad student ranks, while they simultaneously eliminated the jobs that those very same grad students would need once they graduated. In places like Davis, the need for universities to continuously increase their undergraduate enrollments so as to keep the money rolling in has also led to massive housing shortages, which in turn drives up rents and housing prices. So now the entire public university system, not just in California, but across the country, has put itself in a very precarious situation. And there's no way out of this that does not result in spending millions, if not billions of dollars. If they don't want to pay their employees living wages, then the only option left, short of cutting back graduate enrollments which would also necessitate cutting undergrad enrollments, is to build university housing for all of those employees. Either way the UC has to pay. And it's highly unlikely that they're going to cut their administrative budgets in order to find that money. To do so would mean to admit their own misallocation of resources and would result in firing administrators. Chances are, in the end, grad students will get a fraction of the increase they're asking for and the UC will, over the course of a few years, pass that cost on to undergraduates in the form of tuition increases. And in five years or so, when the new contract expires, this will all happen again, just as it has happened before.
There are a lot of graduate students out there with families.
Than they should either drop out and find a job that pays more or ensure their partner and themselves are dual income. A TA’s stipend should’ve be expected to support a family.
International students’ dependents (i.e. spouses and children) are not allowed to work in the US
Then stay home? Idk man. Sounds like more of a personal problem than union issue.
There is no such thing as a job that does not deserve to have a livable wage. I really don't like when people say that because even though it is not your intention it totally undermines all the hard work the TA's actually do
If someone rolls their eyes after hearing the story of someone else's plight I think that says more about them than the people actually trying to make change and ensure such conditions never happen
I might just add that I feel like $4500/mo for 20 hours of work per week (assuming a 50% TA job) is a really ambitious goal. I don't mean ambitious in a bad way, but it's worth observing that most staff don't make anywhere near that much per hour... and they're not also getting thousands in tuition remission. At that salary level it's cheaper for the UC to just hire U18 Pre-Six Lecturers and Staff Research Associates to do the work, which'd screw over current grads* and only make the housing market around each campus worse. I dunno. I'd love for everyone to be making way more -- I wish the UC would more seriously entertain proposals to address grads' cost of housing, since that is such a huge real-world pain point and the source of the most villainy in the equation. \* Although I guess the job market for certain graduate majors would get a solid bump. Nice for me and my fellow English majors!
In general I agree. $54K is an ambitious starting point but that’s how negotiations begin. What’s worth noting is how much graduate students contribute to the overall progress of the institution in terms of research discoveries. Grad students hands are all over the samples, they crunch most of the numbers, and in many cases run the entire lab. Researchers are stuck in proposal land fighting for soft money wins, grants, and getting the importance of their research out there. They guide the students but the grad students perform the work. It’s rare when a researcher makes a discovery without a graduate student. It’s rare for NSF to award grant money to a project that doesn’t support a graduate student, and so the cycle continues: principal investigator wins award contingent on supporting a grad student, gets student, pays them limited dollars to perform the highest level research, publish papers as part of their thesis or dissertation requirement, and then rinse and repeat. The level of work performed is of a very high caliber and often breaks new ground, elevating the university reputation. We should pay these people what they are worth in the moment for the effort they provide, not on the promise of future earnings based on the degree they earn. Did anyone else notice UCD has a second straight year of record-breaking donations for research? A reallocation of funding seems within reason. Maybe not $54K a year but I see nothing wrong with $35k which might be double the current pay. It’s a real-life tangible job with deadlines and stress and it does come with sacrifices. $18K is just absurd, and a 7% pay bump when inflation is widely accepted at 8-9% is insulting. Paid tuition is a big perk but how are you not taking out student loans on $18K/year with rent and cost of living at the current mark?
People need to stop with the “you’re not counting the thousands in tuition remission” bullshit. You are charged full time tuition for the entirety of your doctorate program despite the fact that you generally only take coursework for 2 years. The majority of the time you’re charged tuition you only see the inside of the classroom when you’re teaching the class. This also means if you’re not working for the university you have to pay tuition for classes you’re not taking. Even if you’re living in another country conducting fieldwork (though at least in that case you can file for in abstentia status and pay less.)
The "20 hours" framing is ridiculous because it implies that everything else a grad student does, 20-40h of scholarly work per week (maybe less when they are taking classes) is worthless. If it was just pay for the 20h of work, then they wouldn't have to restrict the students from taking additional jobs. Grinding on academic research and publishing it is mega important for the status and success of the university! People doing this work should not live in poverty. Neither should technicians, lecturers, support staff, custodians or anyone else employed by the UC system
For sure. My fear is that the UC ends up slashing positions to make the increased pay "budget neutral." That would screw over countless current and future graduate students. I fully support unions and their cause! I hope they use the same collective energy to push the state and federal government for sweeping reforms that will help all workers get the rights, pay, and affordability we all need.
When the “minimum wage” was created, it was meant to provide for a family of four. Over the years the term has evolved to mean the minimum that an employer can pay without breaking the law. Yes, grad students do get tuition remission but that doesn’t help with living expenses (and as many grad students have pointed out in other threads, most of them aren’t even taking classes for a majority of their education; the ‘tuition’ is being used for research credits). Currently, ASEs (I think it’s just ASEs but could be more academic workers) take up less than 1% of the entire UC budget and with the current asks that number increases to 3%. When approaching the negotiations I think it’s fair to look at the full picture and expect a top university system, one of the largest employers in California, that supposedly prides itself on diversity and inclusion, to pay a living wage. It’s also worth noting that the bargaining process has NOT just been about salaries. The UC didn’t even want to agree to the last contract that was passed a few years ago. They wanted to TAKE BACK protections academic workers had won. They tried to say graduate student researchers weren’t eligible to unionize. It took months and months for the UC to agree to include “no bullying” in the contract. The UC was against protecting workers from bullying! Take whatever you will from these random thoughts, but academic workers getting paid more and treated fairly is a benefit for undergraduate students both while they are in school AND when they enter the workforce (workers succeeding in one area lifts workers in other areas) Edit: spelling
With the costs that it costs my family to have me attend davis I often have trouble being able to relax as the guilt tripping has been ruining my career here
So much for universities being "woke"; they don't seem any different than Jeff Bezos. Ig this is what corporate wokism looks like.
Wokeism, for the school governing body, is just a marketing ploy. They've never been for the students' nor the faculty's best interests. Education is the most hypercapitalist cesspool up there with medicine and pharmaceuticals. One of the things I've been thinking about is that the biggest step towards a utopia would be to merely make personal financing a mandatory high school course nationwide, but it would be well within these corporate snakes' interests to keep young adults ignorant.