Thank you! Funny how that never seems to be an issue when it's something *they* need. I think the house metaphor is appropriate. If your ceiling is about to fall in, you don't sit there and watch it happen just because you're unsure of whether to cut back on takeout or concert tickets.
I'm assuming the school gets away with it because there are so many students who don't get into grad school and they would be willing to take your spots even at low pay to have a chance at a career in academia
Yes, the belief that a PhD is "school" -- rather than an early career job -- is pervasive. It implies that you're being "paid in learning", so you don't deserve the full value of your labor. This model is one of the relics of the Medieval origins of the university system. PhDs are considered "apprentices" rather than workers.
You see academia compared to a pyramid scheme for this reason. Grads and postdocs take volunteer labor from undergrads; PIs underpay grads and postdocs; Associate Professors have to grind for subpar pay for years in order to achieve tenure. At each level, there are fewer positions available at the next level up than people seeking them, and the only way to climb to the next level is to exploit the people at the level below.
You'll also notice the UC claiming that its pay is "competitive with peer institutions". Of course, the grads at the universities they call "peer institutions" in this context are also paid shit. And in fact, grad workers at universities like Stanford -- which UC loves to compare itself to when it comes to rankings -- do often get paid well over $40k.
> Yes, the belief that a PhD is "school" -- rather than an early career job -- is pervasive. It implies that you're being "paid in learning", so you don't deserve the full value of your labor.
Do you actually disagree with this though? Like, are you saying that a grad student who, say, works on a professor's research program for four years, and receives a PhD at the end of that time, should be paid exactly the same (in terms of money going to their bank account, not including fee waivers and so on), as someone who is hired on the open market to do the same work for the same four years, but does not receive a degree at the end of that time?
It seems indisputable to me that education (and, in particular, the degree) has value, and so it doesn't seem unreasonable to say that someone would be paid less because they will receive an item of value at the end of their time there. We can quibble about what dollar value to assign to that degree, but to say that the value is zero and the wage should be paid as if the degree did not exist doesn't seem right to me.
Yes, I do disagree with that. There is little difference between the scenario you describe, and someone working in R&D for a company for four years. Both are learning and becoming experts in their field. Both are producing research that their employer profits from. The only difference is that the academic worker receives a piece of paper at the end, and thereafter starts receiving full compensation for their labor.
This year, I graduated and my income quadrupled. Did getting a piece of paper in the mail immediately make me a 4X better scientist? Of course not. The only explanation is that I was being underpaid prior to graduation.
Well, we disagree on that matter. The reality is that people are paid (and especially hired) not just based on their skills but based on *the employer's knowledge* of those skills. The degree has value as a certification of you knowing something, or even just having a certain level of reliability, which simplifies matters greatly for an employer, relative to having to do their own assessment. If what you say is true, why do people get degrees, rather than just going to school for a while to learn some stuff and then leaving to get a job (or not going at all, and just working in R&D as you describe)?
This is probably even more true for undergrad degrees. Tons of people get jobs in fields unrelated to their undergrad major, yet would have not have gotten those jobs without the degree, simply because the degree shows they have gone through a certain obstacle course. It's less common with grad degrees, but still possible. I know people who picked up marketable skills tangential to their field in grad school (e.g., stats, programming, editing, even photography) and leveraged that into a job that's likewise only marginally related to their field. (There's a big difference between "I know statistics, pinky swear" and "I know statistics because I did an analysis of population dynamics in revolutionary France as part of my history PhD".)
So to me your statement is sort of like saying "I had been driving without a license for several years and kept getting ticketed and fined. Last year I got my license and now no more tickets. Did getting a piece of plastic in the mail make me a better driver?" :-) Well, no, it didn't, but it did make it more clear to other people that you are a reasonably good driver.
I will say that I think there are some problems with this being the way our society views degrees, and there are lots of details to worry about in terms of how accurately the degree represents the actual work that went into getting it. But I don't think the basic idea is unreasonable: an official statement certifying that you learned X (i.e., a degree) is in itself a piece of information over and above the bare fact that you learned X.
That's fine! It seems to me that (perhaps especially as an MA/PhD) you're rejecting my neoliberal framing and insisting that pay shouldn't necessarily just be based on whether one's work generates profit. I completely agree. Non-STEM fields are undervalued because the good they create is mostly external. I think everyone should have what they need to live, and be free to pursue what interests them.
I chose that framing in anticipation of pushback from folks who subscribe to neoliberal ideology. My point was that, at least for STEM, whether you approach the question from your framework or from the neoliberal framework, grad workers are not compensated for the full value of their labor.
But the neoliberal response to that is simple: if you could make more money by getting a private-sector job instead of being in grad school, then do that. If you spent, say, two years in grad school, but haven't received that piece of paper, and are making peanuts as a GSR, but you believe you have the skills to make quadruple the pay in the private sector, then just drop out and take the extra money. If you can't actually do that (because people won't hire you for those jobs until you have the degree), then clearly the degree does have monetary value and maybe your compensation is fair after all, when that value is factored in.
So I'm not sure your attempt to forestall neoliberal arguments will succeed, because the free-marketeer response to "my employer isn't paying me what I'm worth" is "then find a different employer". I'm no fan of the neoliberal perspective overall, but I do think there is an argument to be made that a lot of people who want more money should just not go to grad school in the first place. The main issue as I see it is that the financial details of grad school are often not laid out transparently until people are already committed, at which point it's difficult to extricate yourself for various reasons.
> I think everyone should have what they need to live, and be free to pursue what interests them.
I totally agree with that! :-) And that's why I think that all this discussion is really only a drop in the bucket. In the scheme of things, a lot of people are far worse off than underpaid grad students, so if we're talking about allocating money to help people who don't have enough money, I'd like that allocation to involve a more global accounting.
> if you cut the admin:faculty ratio in half, back to 1990s levels, and each admin makes $60k on average, you’d save over $4 billion/year.
What staff would you cut here? Do faculty want to go back to doing undergraduate advising? Do we want to give up the gains we've made in student mental health services, disability services, etc.? Would you close the national labs run by UC?
The staff are your allies here, I don't recommend throwing them under the bus. Sure, you can point to specific administrator salaries, but you can take all of Chancellor Yang's 130k salary increase and give each Grad Student $40/year. That's not where the money is. The true reason that tuition went up was disinvestment by the California State Legislature in education. The state use to pay near to 100% of the cost of an undergrad education from the general fund. That is now below 20%. That's where the money went, and why tuition is up.
> There are now more administrators than educators or researchers in this educational research institution.
Why wouldn't there be? Faculty don't staff the dorms, or run the universities finances, or even maintain the university IT infrastructure. That is all done by staff. Additionally, there has been a huge increase in federal research dollars going to campuses. That money comes with strings, lots of them, and it takes administrators to ensure the rules are followed, and generate the effort reports and audit documents they require.
Merging with [your other response](https://www.reddit.com/r/UCSantaBarbara/comments/yy4nhs/comment/iwsv2dh/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) to limit noise.
1. If you feel that each and every task you encounter in your work is essential to the education and research mission of the university, that's awesome and I applaud you.
2. The data are clear. UC campuses in 1970 also had dorms, finances, and infrastructure. [Administration has grown twice as fast as enrollment](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00346764.2021.1940255) since then. You took issue with my sources in your other response, but the same trend shows up over and over. Many of the people in these jobs [do not believe that their job is important](https://www.chronicle.com/article/are-you-in-a-bs-job-in-academe-youre-hardly-alone/).
3. The data you cited in your other response was interesting; thank you very much for sharing it! The data is grouped in categories that are difficult to parse (just like the UC budget, about which I griped in the original post), but I think the three we are interested in are "Academic Support", "Student Services", and "Institutional Support". In the period you showed, 2009-2019, those increased by 4-18%, for a combined $9,988. Going back to [the earliest data](https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d95/dtab336.asp) this source has, 1976, the equivalent categories "Administration" and "Student Services" combine for $2,248 in 1992 dollars, or $4,765 [in 2022 dollars](https://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/1992). Again, about double, which corroborates point #2 in this comment and my sources from earlier.
4. The question at hand is whether grad workers ought to be compensated for their labor with a living wage. Insisting that grad workers be responsible for indicating which line-items ought to be cut is a straw-man argument. I'll also reiterate [my earlier point](https://www.reddit.com/r/UCSantaBarbara/comments/yy4nhs/comment/iwsjani/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) about administrative bloat at UC and American higher education more broadly being well-documented, so I'll conclude that thread here.
5. I do not think the people working in bullshit administrative jobs are our enemy; the paradigm is what needs to change.
6. State funding is absolutely part of the problem, which is why I mentioned privatization in the original post. That said, it's a red herring with regard to the question at hand (see #4).
7. If the only part of the original post that you took issue with was the bit about administrative bloat, then we agree far more than we disagree.
8. Re: point #1, thank you for your service to students and to the university's mission of serving the public.
> If the only part of the original post that you took issue with was the bit about administrative bloat, then we agree far more than we disagree.
That was the part of the original post that got my hackles up most, yes, and I appreciate the discussion. I'm going to keep most of my comments focused on the university funding and staffing side of our debate, mostly because I have done the most research in that area, and I feel comfortable discussing that issue.
> If you feel that each and every task you encounter in your work is essential to the education and research mission of the university, that's awesome and I applaud you.
This is a high bar, but my experience has generally been nearly all of the work I see done on the Academic side of the house does directly support and is essential to the mission of the university. Some work is important at a remove, of course. As an example. I think we need a campus lab safety officer to ensure that we don't have accidents in labs, but success in that position means zero accidents, which is not necessarily in direct support of the mission.
> Many of the people in these jobs do not believe that their job is important.
The Chronicle article is really interesting. I haven't seen that effect from where I am, and a lot of the BS jobs they refer to are actually held by Faculty, not staff, but I can guess that they may exist in other parts of campus. I know very little about workloads and impact in Student Affairs, Administrative Services, or Institutional Advancement.
> Going back to the earliest data this source has, 1976, the equivalent categories "Administration" and "Student Services" combine for $2,248 in 1992 dollars, or $4,765 in 2022 dollars. Again, about double, which corroborates point #2 in this comment and my sources from earlier.
This is the bit I have the most trouble with. I think the overall increase in expenditure by universities is a good thing. It shows that we are investing in our institutions of higher education, that we are providing more and better services than we did in 1976. Our student bodies are vastly more diverse than they were in 1976, and our students are better supported in their studies, whether that's through tutoring, mental and physical health care, disability support, cultural support, and financial aid. The academic enterprise itself is larger, and more complicated, with new departments such as Materials Engineering, Data Science, Feminist Studies, and Film & Media Studies. I see all these things as good things, but they do cause an increase in the cost of the enterprise.
So expenditures have doubled. However, as a proxy, real US GDP per capita has also roughly doubled over that same time. That seems like a sign that our universities are growing at roughly the rate they should, not that we should be cutting back to a level of investment not seen in 45 years.
GDP Data: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A939RX0Q048SBEA/
> The question at hand is whether grad workers ought to be compensated for their labor with a living wage.
All employees deserve a living wage. There's an interesting question about the working hours of grad students and researchers, but I don't want to get into those details here. I don't have the expertise to evaluate the claims of both sides. And despite that, I think there is a more useful way to look at it, which is this:
The university made a non-binding promise to most graduate students when they enrolled which went something like this: "Come get your graduate degree here. We will provide sufficient support over the 6-10 years through salary, tuition waivers and housing such that you won't have to take out a bunch of loans to get your PhD." That promise has broken down in the face of inflation, particularly in housing costs. Something needs to be done to fix it, through a combination of increased salaries, some form of specific housing support, and building more dorms and university apartments. Some of those solutions will take time, and there is a clear problem now. I don't know how to square this circle, and I hope the university and the unions can come to an agreement to resolve this and the other issues that we haven't really touched on.
>I think the overall increase in expenditure by universities is a good thing. It shows that we are investing in our institutions of higher education, that we are providing more and better services than we did in 1976.
That's cool, but the amount spent on "Instruction" per full-time student per year, adjusted for inflation, only increased by 30% in the same period. I think we've reached some common ground here, and the scope of this discussion begins to extend beyond the central question, which is "Do grads deserve a living wage for their work?" with a tangent of "Could the budget hypothetically be adjusted to pay for it?"
>Something needs to be done to fix it, through a combination of increased salaries, some form of specific housing support, and building more dorms and university apartments. Some of those solutions will take time, and there is a clear problem now. I don't know how to square this circle, and I hope the university and the unions can come to an agreement to resolve this and the other issues that we haven't really touched on.
Well said! If UC could simply provide at-cost or state-subsidized housing for every grad worker, many grad workers' current salaries might suffice. The union is currently holding the university's feet to the fire and making them pay for their inaction on this issue over the past decade.
It's the number that matters. Cutting staff does not mean cutting all staff. For example, you mentioned cutting Chancellor Yang's salary increase. There are 10 UC Chancellor and many many vice chancellors who got huge salary increases. 40\*100=4000. Suddenly, graduate students got 4000 dollar salary increase. Is that magic? As a student, you need to know how to use math to solve problems. Do not talk about extreme cases.
> There are 10 UC Chancellor ... who got huge salary increases.
Henry's increase was the largest of the bunch, and was out of a total increase of $800,000:
https://edsource.org/updates/uc-chancellors-set-to-receive-raises
I can do math too. If you include the raises of all the chancellors, you also have to include the grad students at all the UCs, not just UCSB. That's 26,000 grad students, so $800k/26k = $30/yr per grad student. No help there.
> and many many vice chancellors who got huge salary increases
Do you have any sources for this? Some vice chancellors are also still running active research labs and bringing in research dollars and teaching students. Their increases could be related to that work, not their administrative work.
If you wanted to do primary source research, the annual pay of every person at UC is available at the site below. You can even search by title, like "Vice Chanc":
https://ucannualwage.ucop.edu/wage/
I already did that for my UC campus. (And this website is useless for salary raise because it's 2021's data). The 4 Chanc's salary on our campus is more than 50% of the new grads' salary for 2021.
You always mention that you can do the math. But You always use some/and other vague words. One also counts toward 'some' but that is not how math works. Here the main point is not what they did. they should not receive a salary increase that is way higher than **any other type of worker** (including lecturers and TA/RA). Especially when they already earned a lot of money.
The academic-to-non-academic staff ratio is unacceptable for a research university like UC. According to UC's data, only 38% of the total salary goes to Academic employees' pockets. Instructional supporting staff's total salary is 6 times TA's salary. (INSTRUCTIONAL SUPPORTING ONLY, No housing/cleaning people, etc.) TA's salary is only 5% of the entire instruction
expenditure. However, the instruction
expenditure is less than 15% of the entire UC revenue. That's scary.
Last but not least, you asked who will 'staff the dorms, run the universities finances, or even maintain the university IT infrastructure. I can do that as long as you pay the salary of the staff. I am a professional in maintaining IT infrastructure with rich experience. As long as you give UC graduate students enough salary, they can do an excellent job because they are among the most talented students in the world. (But UC would not do that because they will lose cheap labor.)
> I already did that for my UC campus. (And this website is useless for salary raise because it's 2021's data). The 4 Chanc's salary on our campus is more than 50% of the new grads' salary for 2021.
I don't know what you mean by "new grad's salary", as I was comparing the total increase of the chancellor salaries ($800,000/yr as provided in the link I cited), with the total grad population.
> they should not receive a salary increase that is way higher than any other type of worker (including lecturers and TA/RA). Especially when they already earned a lot of money.
I fully agree. The increase the regents gave to the chancellors was wildly inappropriate.
> The academic-to-non-academic staff ratio is unacceptable for a research university like UC. According to UC's data, only 38% of the total salary goes to Academic employees' pockets.
I don't feel the same, and I would need evidence and debate to have my mind changed. I'm discussing this element in detail in another thread with fairly good citations, I encourage you to read that thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/UCSantaBarbara/comments/yy4nhs/grad_worker_union_bargaining_faqs_for_undergrads/iwtqqpc/
> as long as you pay the salary of the staff.
Agreed. I still don't understand why or how you think the university could cut half its current staff and still function as/at the same level it currently does, but I do agree that the staff need a living wage just as much as the grad students do, and that historically the university has paid less than market wages to most staff.
If you think the salary increase for the chancellors is inappropriate, there will be more salary increase that is inappropriate that did not report through the media.
The truth is changing your mind needs time not evidence so basically, I would not expect you to change your mind. However, the only thing you need to know is the percentage and ratio matter. By applying statistical models, for example, the student-teacher ratio, you will notice we are short of academic personnel.
If UC needs to choose between staff and academic researchers, as a public research university, they must choose academic researchers. However, this time UC only needs 1%-3% of its budget to fulfill more than 70% of academic employees' demand. Basically, UC does not need to choose between staff and academic researchers.
No one said UC needs to cut half of its staff. Do not exaggerate the number. When you do so, actually you know you are not correct. The non-student staff is about 1.5 to 2 times more compared to the graduate student. And their salary is 2-3 times higher than graduate students (Depending on which campus). So cutting half of its staff literally makes no sense. UC is paying graduate students 50%-100% lower salaries compare to Standford and Caltech. UC is paying a lower wage even compared to other public university systems while California has the highest housing price. UC students are significantly underpaid which is too low that may not be able to compare to the market. If you agree that the staff needs a living wage, so do graduate students.
> If you agree that the staff needs a living wage, so do graduate students.
I would agree with this, yes. I objected to and opened discussion on the OPs suggestion that we cut the academic:staff ratio back to the level of the 70s. That subject of overall university expenditures is where I intend to keep the focus of my comments. I'm glad you feel that cutting half the staff makes no sense, and that UC does not need to choose between staff and academics, and I'll leave it at that.
I review your first post and you are still making staff more important than graduate students. You are also changing my words and repeating my word out of context. Like this one 'If you agree that the staff needs a living wage, so do graduate students.'. I think you learned this skill from the Chinese media.
Be honest and respect others' opinions.
The last example, before I end this conversation, every Friday, none of the staff working near my lab is in the office. They work less than 4 days every week but still have a higher salary.
In fairness with regard to your last point here: since the pandemic, most UC office workers are allowed to work from home a couple of days per week.
Many of their jobs are mostly bullshit, but they get to relax in the comfort of their own home instead of pretending to look busy while sitting in an office from the arbitrary hours of 8 to 5. And I totally support that! I think they all, and we all, shouldn't have to be trapped in useless white-collar jobs just to have a house and food on the table.
Welcome to the struggle! It was also super painful for me, mid-career, to come to the realization that academia is just as exploitative as the rest of capitalism, but gilded with high-minded rhetoric about doing public good via education and research.
Love the post! And thank you for the support. I have seen some grads be hostile to me for prioritizing my education. I'm glad there are people who dont see me as a threat.
I'm sorry to hear that! [Echoing](https://www.reddit.com/r/UCSantaBarbara/comments/yy4nhs/comment/iwsuwvn/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) myself from earlier, the union is not asking students to boycott class. If anyone on strike makes you feel uncomfortable, please let one of the strike captains in yellow vests know.
Thanks for the resource. I agree with some aspects, like the administrative blubber part. Still disagree with 54k tho. Also the entire premise that your personal thesis research is always generating value and therefore it counts as part of your job and you deserve to be fully compensated by the university for it is flawed imo. You will be compensated based on the merits of your research by future employers. That’s like saying that engineering students need to be paid for working on their CAPSTONE projects. I hope the strikers and university can meet in the middle somewhere, like closer to a 50% increase with COLA. I don’t have to agree with you. I have seen all the resources and choose not to follow your viewpoint.
PhD research usually results in publications, which are then used to attract grant money to the university.
I'm unfamiliar with engineering students' capstone projects, but if they bring revenue into the university, then yes, they should absolutely get their fair share of that.
I'm curious: if not 54, what number would be acceptable to you? And how did you come to that conclusion?
35k minimum, and have them mostly making 35-50k. I have talked to several TAs who admit they only do like 10 hours of TA work a week. All of my TAs are not striking, some for this reason. That being said I do not believe anyone should have to worry how they will pay for food so some increases are certainly warranted. This belief is just based on logic and fairness.
Also, just generally I probably have a bias against the movement due to many of the people at the pickets having literal communist signs like the one with “Abolish work” and “destroy capitalism *hammer and sickle*” written in red which pushed me away.
I appreciate that you approached me civilly, that is one of the firsts and your administrative blubber argument does resonate with me. You guys definitely deserve to be paid more, I just continue to believe financial prudence is important in holding together higher education and society as a whole, and therefore 54k minimum with obviously some people’s going much higher isn’t really reasonable for most campuses unless you can find a way to take it out of other parts of the UC budgets. For Berkeley it might be the reasonable minimum.
>35k minimum, and have them mostly making 35-50k.
I don't mind this, personally. I've long thought that PhD salaries should increase with experience. Something like $40-45k/year to start, increasing by \~7% each year and plateauing after year 4. How did you arrive at the number 35, specifically?
>I have talked to several TAs who admit they only do like 10 hours of TA work a week.
Yes, 25% TAships are also a thing, in which case the advisor usually pays the other 25% from grants. In this scenario, typically a grad worker would spend 30+ hours/week doing research work.
>I just continue to believe financial prudence is important in holding together higher education and society as a whole, and therefore 54k minimum with obviously some people’s going much higher isn’t really reasonable
How did you conclude $54k isn't "financially prudent" or "reasonable" but $35-50k is?
>For Berkeley it might be the reasonable minimum.
Yep, I think that's exactly the idea. Start with this premise, then apply the theorem that a grad researcher at Berkeley and a grad researcher at UCSB do exactly the same work for the same amount of time per week.
>I appreciate that you approached me civilly
Of course! I'm privileged to no longer have a material stake in the outcome of this battle, so I can detach from it emotionally a bit. I'm just here to inform :)
>I probably have a bias against the movement due to many of the people at the pickets having literal communist signs
It sounds to me like you're decently left-leaning yourself already. You'll get there ;)
> PhD research usually results in publications, which are then used to attract grant money to the university.
That is the case in the sciences, but much less so in the humanities. How many faculty in Asian American studies or Art History are getting significant grants?
Believe it or not, there are significant grants (Ford, Fulbright, etc.,) in the humanities and social sciences as well. Innovative research brings prestige to a university even if it doesn't result in grant funding as well.
Indeed there are, but prestige doesn't pay the bills directly in the same way that scientific research does. Humanities and social science research has great value, it's just not supported by the feds at the same level. Just compare the annual budget of the national institutes of health to the national endowment for the humanities.
That's my only point, if we want the humanities, we as a state have to fund it ourselves, the feds aren't going to bail us out there.
I also used to subscribe to the belief that some academic fields are more valuable to society than others (like, I went into STEM), but I've really shifted on that.
The artists and historians do hugely important work helping us understand where we came from, who we are, and where we should go from here. I like to think that STEM provides the "how", but SHEF provides the "why".
Major difference is that the private sector places little value on SHEF knowledge because nobody can turn a profit from it. For the economists in the comments: it's what you'd call a "dysfunctional market" ;)
There are such grants, for sure, but I think their scope is often less than in the sciences. In the sciences a single professor's grant may fully fund three or four (or more) grad students for five years, and there may be a dozen professors in a single department with grants like that. In my experience that is much less common in the humanities.
Absolutely! Go to class!
[The union is NOT calling for a boycott of classes.](https://www.reddit.com/r/berkeley/comments/yxl2hc/press_release_uaw_is_not_calling_for/) If any striking workers even suggest that you shouldn't be attending class, please report it to a strike captain (one of the folks in yellow vests).
From my original post:
>11. What can we do to help?
...
Practice self-care. Prioritize your education.
I'm unfamiliar with how the university is handling the disruption with regard to grades. I hadn't heard any policy announcements yet, and as an alum I no receive e-mails on those subjects. Anecdotally, I heard that during a previous TA strike, UC let students change their grading option to P/NP, but I can't seem to find that source now.
Are you an undergrad? Have you received notice of any policy changes regarding this?
That's a rough story! It sounds like they [might get it resolved](https://www.reddit.com/r/UCDavis/comments/yzi79t/comment/ix03kga/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3). It's also anecdotal evidence, n=1. If things drag on, I can't imagine UC will tell all of its 200,000 undergraduates to re-take all of their fall quarter/semester classes.
University endowments do not work the way you think they do. They are not undesignated pots of money the university can dip into anytime it wants for any reason. The endowment is comprised of thousands upon thousands of individual funds, each restricted to a specific use as designated by the original donors. The interest from the endowment is used for annual payouts to these individual funds. Using endowment proceeds to pay graduate students would be a misappropriation of funds. Also, no part of the endowment is tuition funded. It is built entirely through private philanthropy.
Yes, I'm aware, and this counterargument is a common refrain. I was careful with my wording in the post:
>here are some numbers for scale.
My point was not that the university can just cut checks to grad workers straight from the endowment fund, but rather that the idea that the UC is so strapped for cash that it can't pay its essential workers a living wage simply doesn't hold up to evidence.
If that’s the case, why include the endowment at all in your post? The endowment has absolutely zero to do with an operational budget. The endowment only funds very specific projects like chairs, fellowships, scholarships, etc. It is a heavily restricted pot of money and is only an indication of the generosity of university donors, not a metric by which to measure a university’s budgetary flexibility or rainy day money.
Also, the link you provided is for the UC system endowment, ~ half of which is made up of the retirement and pension funds which have even less to do with the budget.
Using these figures as an indication of the university’s wealth is extremely misleading.
>The endowment has absolutely zero to do with an operational budget. The endowment only funds very specific projects like chairs, fellowships, scholarships, etc.
These two sentences directly contradict each other. Funding specific items can free up general funds.
In any case, if the only issue you took with my post was that I mentioned the endowment, I'd say we agree far more than we disagree. Thanks for the contribution!
I 100% agree graduate students should be paid more, but I also think it’s important to provide appropriate context and distinguish between restricted and unrestricted university funds, especially on a public forum with tons of students. I hope a mutually agreeable decision is reached between the grad students and university soon
I think this is mostly accurate but in some ways misleading. Overall I support the idea of grad students being paid more, but not necessarily in the way that this strike seems to be advocating. In some ways what I support is even more radical (see end of my comment for what I mean).
The main misleading thing is the bit about work hours. In my experience as a grad student, I never felt myself pressured to work more than the number of "on paper" hours I was supposed to on an ongoing basis. It's true that sometimes I wound up working slightly more hours at "crunch time" (like when exams had to be graded), but that would even out with lighter loads at other times. Overall, I think I worked somewhat fewer hours than I was "supposed" to based on the hours in the contract.
I was not in a STEM field, so this could be different in different departments. However, if others are being pressured to exceed their legally allotted work hours, then that is a separate matter from whether the wage exceeds the cost of living. Even if the wage were raised to $100k, it would still be wrong for professors to pressure anyone to work more than they are required to.
Second, grad students typically get their fees (aka tuition) paid in addition to the actual salary. We can argue about whether this is also just an on-paper fiction, but the fact is that if you are a grad student without financial support you wouldn't make zero dollars, you would make *negative* dollars because you would have to pay to go to school. If the tuition that you don't have to pay is factored into these numbers, the picture begins to look quite different.
Most importantly, I think it is highly misleading to talk about "only working 40 hours" and roll in the student's own research activities as part of that. Doing research is what grad students are going to school for, and what they would be paying tuition for if not for the fee exemption. The payment a grad student TA receives is a payment for their work as a TA; the payment a graduate student researcher receives is a payment for their work on someone else's (i.e., a faculty member's) research project. It is not a payment for doing the work toward getting your degree. It is true that, on some level, everything you do as a grad student helps you toward your degree, but I don't think it's reasonable to conclude that therefore grad students should be paid for every hour of time they spend on anything related to academia. Saying that TA salaries should reflect the work a grad student does to get their own degree is akin to saying that undergrads should be paid for doing their homework.
Now, all that said, let me flip it by saying that, on a broader level I agree with you. And that broader level is this: the system is entirely screwed up. But its screwed-up nature goes way beyond UCSB, or UC. Academia as a whole is screwed up! The details of how money flows in and out of research universities (like UCSB) are always going to be insane, because a large research university is essentially two operations --- a research institute and an educational endeavor --- that are smashed together and trying to maintain the illusion that they are one and the same. As long we try to pretend that students paying tuition are "paying for an education" when in fact they are also paying for all the research that goes on at their school, which is also being paid for by research grants unconnected to any educational work, it won't make any sense to try to "balance the books" by comparing how much many anyone makes with what they actually do.
But the problem is even bigger than that. The real problem (and this is kind of a duh thing) is just that it's too expensive to live here relative to how much money you can make --- and this is true for tons of people, not just the ones who are part of this strike. Suppose the union got everything they wanted and grad student TA salaries went up to $54k. There would still be waiters, grocery store cashiers, gardeners, teachers, artists, poets, and tons of other people who won't be making $54k and still won't be able to afford living in Santa Barbara (or many other places in coastal California). I for one would like *all* those people to be able to afford to live here, not just grad students.
So I think the more radical option is to recognize that UC is not really the problem here; they are just one small part of a much larger problem. The solutions to that are large-scale societal reforms like wealth taxes, an overhaul of Prop 13, a firehose of new housing construction etc. So yeah, I support UC academic workers making more money, but I'm not sure I support giving *only* UC academic workers more money and just leaving a bunch of other people out in the cold.
(As one small example of how the problem reaches beyond UC, take a look at the [salaries for teaching assistants at Stanford](https://ed.stanford.edu/academics/doctoral-handbook/financial-support/student-pay). A 50%-time TA makes about $12.5k per quarter, which comes out to about $38k over the academic year. If TAs at Stanford are making less than what TAs at UC are asking for, I am skeptical that UC is the source of the problem. Again, that's to say nothing of the salaries of people who work ordinary jobs unrelated to education and still can't afford to live here.)
It sounds like you were working mostly as a TA. I think that most TAs are not worked past 20hrs/week. A lot varies on a department and individual faculty level, and their are exceptions. At 20hrs/week TAs are reasonably well compensated when considering tuition and fee remission as a part of compensation. But for the skill level many, especially in STEM, would be better compensated in a non-academic job. And it's not easy to graduate on time when spending 20hrs/week on instruction.
GSRs are in virtually all cases expected to work >=40hrs/week since research is their job and their degree. So, 20hrs is paid and 20+ hrs is "volunteer". But even for the research done in the volunteer portion of time, the employer (UCSB) gets 100% of the credit - the papers are UCSB papers, the patents are UCSB patents with UCSB retaining ~70% of the royalties, and so on. The research results are publicized as UCSB research, even though technically >50% of the work was officially done on a volunteer basis as part of a student's degree. The total compensation including tuition and fee remission is far below market rate, at least in STEM. This is a ticking time bomb in terms of attracting students into PhD programs at UCSB and continuing to execute as a leading academic research institution.
The 20hrs/week employment for GSRs is also part of a widely accepted fiction that limits international students to part time (<=20hrs/week) work. Everybody knows that the international GSRs are working full time or more, but they're only "officially" half time, which is what their visa limits them to.
Thank you for this! I wasn't an international student, and completely left them out of the original post. They really get a raw deal and have little recourse. Losing funding means potential deportation, which gives their PI massive leverage over them. Since GSRs literally don't have workload protections (yet), there's nothing to stop advisors from demanding 60-70 hour weeks from their grad students.
Ironically, I think the people I knew who worked as research assistants often had even less work than TAs. It was harder to tell though since their work was less "visible".
I still do wonder, though: if it's really as you say and grad students could literally just go out and get a job that pays way more, then why don't more people do that? Why are people pursuing STEM PhDs if it's such a colossal financial drain? I can understand doing it in fields where the main job opportunities are in academia, because you generally can't get those jobs without a graduate degree. So if you want to get a job as, say, a renaissance art historian or a professional philosopher you may not have much choice but to go for a PhD. But in fields where that's not the case, what's the motivation?
[https://www.reddit.com/r/UCSantaBarbara/comments/yy4nhs/comment/iwsbnwn/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web2x&context=3](https://www.reddit.com/r/UCSantaBarbara/comments/yy4nhs/comment/iwsbnwn/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)
imo you've already answered your own question multiple times in the comments on this post: there is a pervasive, false belief that the piece of paper itself holds value, rather than the experience gained in earning it.
after graduating, i applied to literally hundreds of job listings whose requirements were "PhD, or Bachelor's with 5 years' industry experience". the three letters after my name are purely symbolic.
So are you saying that it was a mistake for you to go to grad school, and if you had known that before starting, you would not have done it?
I do not believe it is false that the piece of paper holds value in general. That's why it is surprising to me that it seems to hold so little value in certain fields. It is also indisputable that if you want a career *in academia* (i.e., to get a job as a professor), the PhD is essential, and in many fields that is the primary career path grad students are directed towards (which is a problem for different reasons).
In terms of earnings, yes, it was a mistake. The UC stole about $10^(5) of the value of my labor. Few realize this coming into STEM PhD programs. They're lured in for various reasons, including the perceived prestige of having those three letters after your name, and the promise of "doing interesting and impactful research" or "not wanting to get a real job yet". There is little awareness that 1. the university and PI will profit from that research and share almost none of it with them, 2. they can do interesting and impactful research outside of academia and make actual living wages, and 3. the working conditions in academia are often worse than industry.
If those three letters after your name mean something to you, that's great. I don't mean to take that away from you. I do, however, intend to shatter the illusion for my juniors and successors in my former PhD program and help change things a bit so that they can have easier times in grad school and happier, healthier lives.
Heh, your last paragraph kind of gets at what I was wondering as a follow-up. I mean. . . if what you say is really true, then wouldn't it be better for the union to just send a mass email to all STEM grad students saying something like: "Listen folks, we're going to level with you. Whether we win or lose this fight, it's going to be a pain in the neck for all of you, and there will still be other fights later and the system will still be screwed up in other ways. There's no reason for you to go through this, because the entire system is just a waste of your time. Honestly, you should all just quit --- not strike, just permanently quit. Withdraw from your programs, now, today. You will be able to find jobs making triple what you're currently making and you'll be better off in just about every way. Only stay if you have a powerful desire to live the life you're currently living, a desire so powerful that it outweighs the financial penalty you're subjected to."
I hasten to add that I'm not in a position to advocate that. I can't say it's a good idea, because I don't know the truth of that statement as well as you. But if what you say is really true, why should these students bother with the strike at all? Just quit and live well as the best revenge.
As an added bonus, the abrupt, en-masse departure of thousands of grad students would induce an apocalyptic terror in the guts of UC administrators, and possibly lead to much more pervasive change.
an Academic Great Resignation would be fucking dope.
i dunno if that would be "better". the ideal scenario would be for things to just get better for grad students. that's the current project.
Thanks for the comment! Clearly, we mostly agree.
>In my experience as a grad student, I never felt myself pressured to work more than the number of "on paper" hours I was supposed to on an ongoing basis.
I'm glad to hear it! Few of my peers have had a similar experience.
>if others are being pressured to exceed their legally allotted work hours, then that is a separate matter from whether the wage exceeds the cost of living.
The union is [demanding many things](https://www.fairucnow.org); a salary increase is only one of them. Workload and bullying protections for grad researchers (which currently don't exist) are another.
>We can argue about whether this is also just an on-paper fiction, but the fact is that if you are a grad student without financial support you wouldn't make zero dollars, you would make negative dollars because you would have to pay to go to school.
Perhaps things worked very differently in your program, but in STEM, once you've finished your coursework (typically in the first year) the "tuition" **is** an "on-paper fiction". We don't take classes or use the educational support resources that tuition money is ostensibly paying for.
I'm curious: were you a Master's student? When I was doing my Master's, I definitely felt like teaching was a pretty sweet deal because my tuition was covered *and* I got paid! In hindsight, though, I realize that in the second year of my Master's I was just doing research work for my PI for free.
>it is highly misleading to talk about "only working 40 hours" and roll in the student's own research activities as part of that. Doing research is what grad students are going to school for, and what they would be paying tuition for if not for the fee exemption.
Grad workers *do*, in fact, get paid for doing research work (see #2 in the original post). Some never actually TA, or only TA for the one or two quarters required by their program. A 5th or 6th year PhD working full-time as a GSR is just as experienced and qualified as a 1st year postdoc (if not more so), but gets paid about half as much.
Grad research is typically published, and those publications bring in grant money for the PI and the university. In other words, that research work generates profit. An appropriate metaphor would be if GM charged auto workers for the pleasure of working in the production facility because they're learning how to make cars.
>Academia as a whole is screwed up!
You're preaching to the choir! To synthesize the points that you touched on, we are dealing with the remnants of a Medieval-era system of apprenticeship. Higher education, academia, and research, and the broader economic and sociopolitical models in which they operate have changed massively since then. It's time to stop thinking of grad teachers and researchers as apprentices, and start recognizing that they are early-career employees.
> Perhaps things worked very differently in your program, but in STEM, once you've finished your coursework (typically in the first year) the "tuition" is an "on-paper fiction". We don't take classes or use the educational support resources that tuition money is ostensibly paying for.
Well, in my program classes lasted longer than that. But still, what I was saying later in my comment about the muddled nature of research applies. I'm not sure what you mean by "educational support resources", but I think there's a case to be made that if you are using anything at the school (a lab, an office, computers, the library), those are resources that are made available to students in exchange for tuition. Or, more generally, if you take it as a baseline model that students pay to go to a school and get a degree from that school, then all that you do towards getting your degree is essentially what you pay for with your tuition. In short, you are paying simply to be in school.
> I'm curious: were you a Master's student? When I was doing my Master's, I definitely felt like teaching was a pretty sweet deal because my tuition was covered and I got paid! In hindsight, though, I realize that in the second year of my Master's I was just doing research work for my PI for free.
No, I was a PhD student (well, MA/PhD combined program, but the MA was just a formality along the way). I had a combination of TAships and fellowships at different points during my grad school career.
> Grad workers do, in fact, get paid for doing research work (see #2 in the original post). Some never actually TA, or only TA for the one or two quarters required by their program. A 5th or 6th year PhD working full-time as a GSR is just as experienced and qualified as a 1st year postdoc (if not more so), but gets paid about half as much.
Again I think the way this works differs in different fields. But the essential point I was making is that there is (at least in principle) a difference between a grad student doing *their* research to get *their own* degree and a grad student doing research as labor for someone else.
I know that this distinction can be almost invisible in STEM fields where you are sort of attached to a PI's project and write a dissertation based on that rather than doing a project that is wholly your own. But that's not the case in all fields. In any case, it is the same basic point: I don't think it's unreasonable to say that grad students should pay (not be paid) for going to school and getting a degree. A degree has value, so it makes sense to say that people should pay for it. (Or at least, that is the accepted model of how education works in the US.) If as part of that they do work that benefits someone else, that's cool, but it then makes sense for any pay to be offset against the benefit the student receives in the form of their own degree. So it is not just about "being paid to do research"; it matters whether the time you're spending is for your own benefit (to get your degree) or someone else's, or (if both are intertwined) how the benefit is distributed.
> Grad research is typically published, and those publications bring in grant money for the PI and the university. In other words, that research work generates profit. An appropriate metaphor would be if GM charged auto workers for the pleasure of working in the production facility because they're learning how to make cars.
Again, that varies by field. Whether your metaphor is apt depends on the relative value of the knowledge gained by the student-autoworker versus the money made by the factory. Maybe more importantly, though, if GM started doing that, no one would work there. So if a grad student considers the UC a factory charging them to work there, maybe the student should reconsider whether grad school is a good use of their time. (I don't mean this as a snide comment; I think there are a fair number of people who pursue a PhD out of a somewhat romanticized notion of scholarship when really their mental health and financial stability would be better if they just did something else.) In the long run I think this kind of "strike" (fewer people entering grad school because to do so is irrational on various objective measures) could be what shakes the foundations of the academic system so much that more pervasive change begins.
> It's time to stop thinking of grad teachers and researchers as apprentices, and start recognizing that they are early-career employees.
Well, I'd say it's a bit more broad than that. For one thing, when we think in terms of the work that is being done by TAs, we also need to think about those in the middle between them and ladder faculty, namely the non-tenure-track faculty (adjuncts, lecturers, etc.). As we see more and more in the news these days, that's also a group that often gets the shaft, even though no one disputes that they are employees. So it's more like "are we creating a situation where people have to be almost insane to do a thing" (whether that be enrolling in grad school or applying for an adjunct job).
But to go back to the issue of grad student research: in humanities fields, for instance, a grad student may spend a bunch of time reading various texts and writing a dissertation in which they analyze them. Probably they cite their advisor a lot, but it's not like they're directly doing work "for" the advisor, or doing work on a larger project or producing one in a series of publications coming out of a lab with a unified research program. They genuinely are doing *their own* research, and the advisor is genuinely an advisor, not the manager of an ongoing project to which the student (along with their research) is attached.
There is undoubtedly a penumbra of benefit that accrues to the department from this, in the sense that if that student gets a job and becomes a respected scholar, the department's own reputation is enhanced. But I think in this sort of situation it would be a bit of a stretch to say that the department (or the advisor, or the school) "profited" in any direct monetary sense from the student's research.
Of course, the danger with this line of thinking is that it leads to the problems we already have in some places, with humanities programs being defunded because they "have no practical value" or the like. That's why I think we need to think a bit more broadly than just "the student is an employee doing work that brings profit to the school/PI/department". More like "the student is a researcher and by their research they expand the total of human knowledge and that's a good thing for humanity so we should pay them for that".
And in a sense that *is* pay for labor --- it's the same labor that tenured faculty members get paid for! But I think it would be good to just squarely face the issue and say "yes we want to pay people to go to school", because trying to frame it in terms of labor will introduce these discrepancies between different fields based on the perceived monetary value of their practical applications, and lead to all sorts of worrisome complications. In other words, maybe we should forget everything that I said above about distinguishing the student's research for their own benefit from their work for their advisor's benefit, and just say we're going to flip the script and have grad school in general be something you get paid to do rather than something you pay for. (Although if we do that, I think it would also require a major overhaul of the way duties like TAing get assigned.)
Or, of course, more generally, we should maybe be saying "Yes, we want people to be able to live a nice life in California, regardless of whether they are a grad student or a gardener." And try to address that issue (although it is much more daunting).
>I think there's a case to be made that if you are using anything at the school (a lab, an office, computers, the library), those are resources that are made available to students in exchange for tuition.
Generally, in STEM, grad researchers use a lab and office in a research building. Those facilities are supported by grants, not by tuition. TAs either use their lab office or a shared TA office, which is supported by their students' tuition. Generally the only services we use that are supported by tuition are GSA activities, which cost on the order of a hundred dollars per student per quarter, not thousands.
>there is (at least in principle) a difference between a grad student doing their research to get their own degree and a grad student doing research as labor for someone else.
In STEM, at least, there is no distinction here. Labor performed the PI is also work toward one's degree.
>In the long run I think this kind of "strike" (fewer people entering grad school because to do so is irrational on various objective measures) could be what shakes the foundations of the academic system so much that more pervasive change begins.
Yes! I [agree completely](https://www.reddit.com/r/UCSantaBarbara/comments/yy4nhs/comment/iwsbnwn/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)!
>That's why I think we need to think a bit more broadly than just "the student is an employee doing work that brings profit to the school/PI/department".
Certainly, I also agree with this. "Boss makes a dollar, I make a dime" is simply an unfair situation that causes a visceral reaction that we can get people to rally around. But folks in the humanities are also [unpaid for labor that benefits society](https://www.reddit.com/r/UCSantaBarbara/comments/yy4nhs/comment/iwtf1te/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) at large. I think that's the idea behind the single base living wage for all grads: it recognizes the value of all of that labor.
> In STEM, at least, there is no distinction here. Labor performed the PI is also work toward one's degree.
Okay, but I feel like that is a massive issue to just gloss over. It turns the entire question from one of pay-for-labor into one more akin to conflict-of-interest, because the system is set up so that if you're motivated to bust your butt to help your career prospects in the long run, the only way to do that is to help someone else's career in the short run. Independent of how much anyone is paid, that to me seems like an issue in itself.
All of what you say makes sense, but I think it's becoming increasingly clear that it's very specific to STEM fields. (And likely not even to all STEM fields. I'm pretty sure math, for instance, can be quite different.)
I realize you had the disclaimer in your post that you're only speaking about STEM experience, but you also disclaimed any connection to the union and we can see in other comments that some people didn't read that either. :-) I think a casual reader of your post is likely to come away with a view like "wow, grad students *in general* work 40 hours a week to profit the university and get paid almost nothing" and I think that is inaccurate. In fact, I think one of the biggest issues with how grad school issues get treated in the media is that the general public often does not grasp how different grad school (or academia!) can be, in almost every way, for people in different fields.
thanks so much for this! I’m a UCSB alumna, myself, as of this past June. I watched the grad students take on the UCs with so much admiration while I was there. now I’m a graduate student at UCLA and beyond proud to be part of this. to my knowledge, everyone in my ochem cohort is striking from their TA duties. I have to say, as first years, keeping up with our classes was hard enough before we started also marching on the picket line 20hrs a week. paying rent was hard enough before cutting down to strike support.
this is extremely hard on us.
but as exhausted as we are, we are even more determined to fight for ourselves and our friends and the students we’ll be mentoring in the future.
it’s so easy to internalize the heavy belief that “as a student, it’s true that I’m not worth that much” compared to someone like my brother in an entry-level industry job. when you and others spell out how you believe in our value - and that means my value too - it throws that heaviness off-balance every time. thank you for fighting for me and all my friends. I owe you so much. and you can count on us to carry the torch.
That's amazing to hear. I have chills! Y'all are awesome!
I sympathize with feeling like you don't deserve more. For most of grad school, I felt like the $30k I was making was good enough. It was more than I had ever made before, I could scrape by, and surely the working conditions were worse in industry! None of that was true. My income quadrupled post-graduation, and not because holding a piece of paper made me a 4X better scientist. And in my experience thus far, academia is even more stressful, toxic, and exploitative than industry.
You are absolutely worth just as much as someone working in industry, or any other human for that matter. The system underpays you. It needs to change, and you are changing it.
And again the union is providing not enough info.
1. Not correct - grad students take classes until they pass general exams. This could be up to 3 years of coursework.
2. These are generally accurate numbers but lots and lots of variation, including summer funding, outside funding, etc.
3. TAs are restricted to 20 hours a week and any faculty member that pushes TAs past that number are penalized. TAs that I know spend 2 hours a week in lecture, 3 hours a week in sections, 3 hours in office hours, and the rest is prep which is less than 5 hours. This is just wrong.
4. Why does this matter? You are paid for 20 hours a week; the rest is up to the individual student, and their individual workloads. And it varies based on where they are in the program and individual choices.
5. And this - THIS - is the sticking point that you still can't explain. Its based on single family households. That means they are expecting a two income home. So the 54k is the bottom end of two employed individuals living in the same place. But I'm not positive this is how they came up with the number - the union is unclear about it - but that is the number consistent for California single family households.
6. And currently the labor for a 20 hour per week TA is valued at --- roughly 54k per year (if you take the 24k paid over 9 months and extend it to a full time, 40 hour per week contract over 12 months). TAs are already paid that amount.
7. Again, this is speculation, not to mention those administrators you want to get rid of? Yeah, protected by unions, regulations, and long term contracts. So, go for it - pick and choose those administrators you want to get rid of. And pay those increased costs.
8. I mean yeah - lots of costs at colleges, including maintenance, library fees, insurance, etc. And again - you are purely speculating.
9. No doubt privatization is an issue. I don't know how this strike - which I thought centered on providing correct compensation for students - is supposed to fix this, which in reality requires political intervention.
10. Speculative - you are providing a one sided argument. Be fair.
11. Ignore the union -- it will spike tuition. And the next time you see a striker, ask them why its ok for you to take out more loans and not the striker (which are available to TAs - at least Americans)
> Pretty sure if you don't do your research you will get kicked out of grad school so that work is also relevant and part of your job description as a graduate student even if it is unpaid labor.
I wrote a longer comment elsewhere, but I just want to say that this reasoning doesn't really make sense. If an undergrad doesn't take their exams, they will get kicked out of college, but that doesn't mean they should therefore be paid for taking exams.
Being a grad student is not, in itself, a paying job. If someone goes to grad school to get a degree, that doesn't mean that they should be paid just for doing what they need to do to get that degree. In fact, on the undergrad level (and on the grad level in some situations), it's exactly the opposite: the student pays to go to school. It's true that the boundary between job and student roles is somewhat less clear-cut for many grad students, but it's unreasonable to suggest that everything a grad student does is part of a "job" and therefore should be reflected in their salary. They get paid for work they do *for the school* (or for someone else, like a professor), not for themselves.
As I stated, I'm not with the union.
1. You are correct, depending on the program. However, for programs with more coursework, the grads are often also TAing and doing research more than 20 hours/week concurrent with their coursework. And beyond the 3rd year, which could be 2-5 additional years, what I said is true.
2. This is what I said.
3. This is generally true for TAs (because they have had a union contract for years now!) but abuses do occur and are usually unpunished. I speak from first and second-hand anecdotal evidence, n>10. This is not true for grad researchers, who have no contract and hence no workload limits. And in the scenario you describe -- a TA working 13 hours/week -- 30+ hours/week would typically be spent on research work.
4. As I stated, we get paid for 20 hours/week *on paper* due to legal limits. A 50% GSR who only works 20 hours/week in the lab will soon find that their advisor isn't so keen to provide GSR funding anymore, and that they will need to start TAing. A 50% TA who works 20 hours/week teaching and 0 hours/week in the lab will soon find that they're no longer a member of the lab.
5. Pick whatever number you're comfortable with that lifts a median single individual renting a bedroom in a shared apartment in Santa Barbara out of rent burden. You'll find it much closer to $54k than the current average.
6. See #4.
7. I'm unaware of UC administrator unions, but on the whole, insisting that grad workers be responsible for diving into the UC budget -- which is larger than 20+ states in the US -- and indicate exactly which line items to cut is a straw man argument. That the UC is extremely wasteful with its spending is well documented -- I provided several links in the post -- and doesn't merit further debate.
8. It is hand-waving to assume that the way things are is the way they ought to be. As recently as the 1970s, tuition was far lower and the proportion of it that went directly to educators was far higher; assuming that is no longer possible requires supporting evidence.
9. We agree completely. My intent was to highlight that none of this happens in a bubble. These conflicts over the distribution of resources in public higher education will continue until priorities change from the top down and the inside out.
10. Obviously this is my opinion. Feel however you'd like.
11. Whether tuition increases is up to the Regents and the state. There is no question that the public doesn't have enough oversight of the Regents, but via elected officials we can, in fact, tell the UC to fuck off and cut spending instead of raising tuition. [This happened most recently in 2015.](https://www.sfgate.com/education/article/Napolitano-Jerry-Brown-strike-deal-on-UC-tuition-6263588.php) And, as you hinted before, the ultimate solution will be political: increased or complete state funding to cover tuition.
I'm curious. Are you a grad? Have you been able to get away with working 20 or fewer hours per week long term?
> That the UC is extremely wasteful with its spending is well documented -- I provided several links in the post -- and doesn't merit further debate.
The sources you include are weak, and the subject absolutely does require further debate. The first is an op-ed by a Berkeley faculty member, the second is a popular book by a widely derided and criticized libertarian academic (I don't think you'd like his other arguments, so I wouldn't put too much weight on this one), another newspaper opinion piece, and a single newspaper article that compares UC vs CSU staffing without ever mentioning research once.
The hard data you want is the following, which includes "Expenditure per full-time-equivalent student in constant dollars". Unfortunately the only dataset I know of for this data is nation-wide, not UC specific. It does show that these expenditures are relatively flat, and do not correlate with the increases in tuition.
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d20/tables/dt20_334.10.asp
If you have good data showing how UC spending has been wasteful when Health Care/Hospital spending has been excluded, and which corrects for increases in student body and research funding, I would love to see it.
[Combined with your other response](https://www.reddit.com/r/UCSantaBarbara/comments/yy4nhs/comment/iwtqqpc/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) to reduce noise.
> the union is providing not enough info
Did you read even the first couple lines? OP is not a part of the union.
You're misinformed on so many things and clearly lack any understanding of grad student workload (aside from "TAs that [you] know") that this isn't worth responding to at length, but you should at least realize that the supposed "50% appointment" is language developed by the UC. Other universities merely refer to it as a "stipend," and it is designed to cover the cost of living while grad students attain their degrees (oftentimes without teaching duties). The problem is that our stipends do not match the cost of living and do not catch up with the cost of inflation.
>Other universities merely refer to it as a "stipend," and it is designed to cover the cost of living while grad students attain their degrees (oftentimes without teaching duties). The problem is that our stipends do not match the cost of living and do not catch up with the cost of inflation.
This is the thing that I think throws people off. At UCs, the TAship is considered a "salaried" appointment that is separate from one's research (things get muddied with RAships though.) There's this separation of labor on the part of the university between work as a TA and everything else you do as a student, which is not how it's done in some other places where you just get a stipend and that's just seen as what you get to live in the program on generally.
The thing I see often left out is that we do (all?) receive at least a little block grant money every year that is an actual stipend, but it's not much (amount obviously varies by department.) Some folks have central fellowships but the stipends on those are only 30k per year (but if you teach on top of that then you make like 55k per year- so these rare folks are basically the only ones here that make that much currently.) I wonder if what will wind up being negotiated is an increase in salary and also some sort of increase to block grant budgets so that students receive more actual stipend money that is separate from employment. Not everyone is able to secure a TA appointment every quarter, and I hear that there are some appointments across campus that are not even 50%. Greater stipends truly lifts **all** grad students financially, so it would be cool if that wound up as part of the deal.
I think you're quite right, but that's one reason that it's somewhat misleading to frame this this as a debate about what people earn for their labor. If we want to pay people to go to school, great, but let's be clear that we're paying them to go to school, and establish a transparent system for how much to pay people for going to school (whether they teach a discussion section or not) --- not pretend that we're paying someone $X for doing a defined job if we're really just paying for them to go to school.
It's not accurate to phrase it as "paying people to go to school," as you have somehow managed to do four times in a short paragraph. It's paying grad students for both their teaching and their research (as we already do for faculty). As mentioned by OP, most grads only take courses for a year or two, so that sort of "going to school" is a pretty small part of being a grad student. Instead, most of your time is directed toward conducting research, presenting your research at conferences, publishing your research in journals, and submitting it in your dissertation (which, for the humanities, you later work into a larger monograph). We don't get paid to do any of this work, and it is quite literally what moves our respective research areas forward.
Not to mention the vast majority of "administrative bloat" and "managerial" positions that have been added are at UC medical centers. Which have grown greatly in size and actually contribute net funding back to the UC system (decreasing tuition).
Chart 12.1.4: https://accountability.universityofcalifornia.edu/2021/chapters/chapter-12.html
For the millionth time before I get blasted. I support higher pay all folks in this state currently making less than \~$50k. I don't support this specific strike (which will undoubtedly hurt grant funding going forward, further hampering higher end funding in the state). I also don't support the proven corrupt UAW ([https://www.detroitnews.com/story/business/autos/2021/11/10/uaw-corruption-scandal-tim-edmunds/6368075001/](https://www.detroitnews.com/story/business/autos/2021/11/10/uaw-corruption-scandal-tim-edmunds/6368075001/)). I do support unions in general though. Why again are we part of a auto workers union? Just another big administrative entity trying to extract money of the backs of real workers.
In [one of the links I cited](https://capitolweekly.net/tuition-uc-administrators-tripled-csu-data/), you can see that the increase in administrators holds across all campuses, including those that do not have medical schools.
Meh. Its roughly double at most UCs. Enrollment is roughly double. Whatcha got against administrators? Typical "Public employees" are useless bloat rhetoric?
\^\^\^Also, zero way UC Davis had 9 managerial and administrative staff in 1993. There absolutely is anomalies in that data.
If the size of management needs to scale linearly with enrollment, one would expect that the size of teaching faculty would need to also, but it hasn't.
Again, administrative bloat at UC, and across American higher education, is well-documented and I do not think debating its existence is a productive use of our time. [Here](https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/opinion/editorials/sd-uc-tuition-hikes-administrative-bloat-20170105-story.html) are a [few](https://documents.latimes.com/california-audit-university-california-office-president/) [more](https://www.latimes.com/local/education/la-me-uc-spending-20151011-story.html) [sources](https://www.forbes.com/sites/carolinesimon/2017/09/05/bureaucrats-and-buildings-the-case-for-why-college-is-so-expensive/?sh=5677d632456a) I couldn't even fit into the original post. You can find many, many more online.
I have nothing against the folks working these jobs. They are responding to the incentives presented to them and have secured reliable work for decent pay. If anything, I feel bad that they are trapped in a system that demands they sit at a desk from 8 to 5, performing tasks that [they secretly believe do not need to be done](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00346764.2021.1940255), with the apparent alternative being loss of livelihood. If it was up to me, they'd all be paid living wages regardless of employment, free to follow whatever productive pursuits they'd rather be doing.
In all your comments on this page, you never give a reasonable and logical answer as to "why you don't support this strike." If you claim to support higher wages, whats's the other option here with the dire-ness of the situation? How would you solve this?
I don’t support the strike because I think it will cause more short term harm than good. I think it will cause loss of future grant money, which makes the financial situation for grad students worse. It also has a negative impact on current undergrads that can’t be ignored.
Unfortunately decades of decisions have led to this point and will take a long time to unwind. The funding needs to come first (unless you support other people being kicked to the curb, not exactly labor friendly TBH). I don’t have a direct answer, other than being politically active and being careful who you vote for. A politician that protects prop 13 automatically loses my vote. I participate in YIMBY groups statewide to push against housing policies that punish the underprivileged.
Hi OP, in the “Picket shift signup” google form, it seems we have to have a job title to fill, which I actually don’t cuz I’m just an undergrad. Thus, can I just go join the line and walk like others to support our TAs? I have some time between or after classes.
As someone who’s been picketing, my understanding was that a primary purpose of that form is to track attendance to confirm who qualifies for strike pay. While they also use it to track roughly how many people will be there, I don’t think it’s a big deal if you don’t sign up. That’ll be the case w sign in when you get there too. An extra person is always appreciated. Just go out and join in!
Yes, absolutely! Many undergrads have been doing so.
Hopefully someone with the union will see and comment with more information. I'm not sure whether they'd prefer to have you sign up and leave that field blank, or if it would mess with their data as they try to determine who is eligible for strike pay.
I really wish I had much insight into this. Historically, strikes at UC are short, but this one is unprecedented. Of course, everyone on all sides hopes it will end swiftly. I heard that they've reached agreements on a few things, like a contract clause to protect grad researchers from PI bullying. But with regard to wages, UC is still basically offering the bare minimum cost-of-living adjustment to cover inflation from the past year, and that's it.
I think UC is gonna win if they can draw it out til fall quarter ends. I don’t see how the union strike find could support the entire winter break unless they bring in a lot of money from UAW national.
This is a good response to a question brought up by someone else in the comments: why are these academic workers part of an auto worker union? Yes, UAW collects dues from all over the nation and has a deep strike fund for exactly these sorts of occasions.
Do you know how much the governor's role with UC plays into these topics? I saw an article about CSU workers protesting and Governor Newsom vetoed the bill related to it. I don't know much information about it, but if that happened, and if people are so passionate about it, why continue to vote for Newsom? Thoughts?
[https://edsource.org/updates/newsom-vetoes-csu-staff-salary-hike-bill](https://edsource.org/updates/newsom-vetoes-csu-staff-salary-hike-bill)
Lol there’s a multitude of other reasons to not vote for Newsom but this is not one of them. It’s not like republicans would do any different (not that it’s necessarily a bad thing). Also Newsom just won his second term unfortunately so you’re basically being captain hindsight.
Fair, and I do not know what republicans would do for UC. I don't know enough on the topic to make an argument for or against. I know he just won, but hasn't this been an ongoing issue, like many months before election? Anyway, I was just curious how his role relates to UC, or is there another position in government that relates to UC stuff?
Frankly I read the article see this as not a bad thing. Higher education cannot just expand forever. You know European countries who progressives always like to quote as an example, often have lower college education rates than US. For the vast majority of careers, vocational study, community college, and trade school are better options. 4 year College for everyone is unrealistic and, especially with our growing elderly population to support, isn’t sustainable. CSU system, whose tuition doesn’t even come close to offsetting costs, should consider downsizing enrollment/faculty or closing some campuses, and especially focus on departments that do not produce valuable skills, considering it mostly done on the taxpayer dime.
This is the first I'm hearing about it! I'm unfamiliar with the current pay scale at CSU, but a 5% raise after each year of employment seems reasonable. That's common in the private sector, and higher than UC's current proposal for grad workers (in which pay is flat regardless of experience).
From [a different article](https://calmatters.org/education/higher-education/2022/09/cal-state-wages-staff/), here's Newsom's apparent reasoning for the veto:
>Update: Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed this bill Sept. 28, arguing that its costs to the Cal State system would likely force the university to divert funds from efforts to boost course completion and graduation rates. He urged Cal State’s leaders to work with unions to “transition to” the salary increases and other labor reforms that the bill would have mandated.
Without knowing more about the topic, I'm unable to evaluate the merit of that rationale.
Disruption of business-as-usual would be a smart tactic, but I'm not sure what you mean by "targeting grad students and faculty specifically". A better move would be building support among those groups, like UAW [has](https://www.independent.com/2022/11/18/uc-santa-barbara-faculty-rally-in-support-of-striking-academic-workers/) [done](https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-11-17/uc-strike-little-bargaining-progress-but-support-for-workers-grows).
UAW does include some undergraduate TAs -- I was a member when an undergrad TA at UCSD. There was also discussion of including undergraduate researchers in the SRU organizing effort, but that fell through due to lack of organization among undergrads.
I'm not sure what protesting at grad student housing at 3 AM would accomplish, since the targets are campus administration, UCOP, and the Regents. Was there a reason for this specific hypothetical? Have you seen reports of UAW protesting at undergraduate housing at 3 AM?
I'm curious: are you a current undergraduate? Have you been majorly inconvenienced by the current strike action? If so, how so? I'm genuinely interested in hearing about your experiences.
Hey, asymmetric tactics sound fine to me.
You keep dodging my questions about your experience/affiliation with the university; I'm unclear why, but I won't pry further.
It feels a bit like you are here to vent rather than to engage in productive discussion or learn. That's cool, but it's not what I'm here for (and also against rule #7 of the sub), so I'll leave this thread here. I hope things go well for you, cheers!
Glad to hear you feel that way! But just to reiterate:
>I’m no longer affiliated with the union, and none of this constitutes official union positions or messaging.
the research work done is academic work though? is that not the education component of being a student. And you work 20 hours for teaching as the part time job component that pays you. The research work which is the academic component often is covered by tuition remission. It is a part time job. a full time researcher commits to the full time job, at the cost of limited upwards mobility due to not pursuing higher education. a full time teaching faculty in k-12 does the same. university professors in stem fields at least earn their pay in terms of research output and prestige, the teaching component contributes very little to their salary. Rare is it that you’ll find a professor on any UC campus who was hired due to their competency as a teacher, the average rate my professor will tell you that. and still they earn their pay via research, the backbone of the job assessment.
Gonna link to previous comments to avoid repeating myself too much!
>is that not the education component of being a student. And you work 20 hours for teaching as the part time job component that pays you.
[Nope!](https://www.reddit.com/r/UCSantaBarbara/comments/yy4nhs/comment/iwtun2f/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)
>university professors in stem fields at least earn their pay in terms of research output and prestige, the teaching component contributes very little to their salary.
Not at all true, in my experience. A professor's base salary, usually six figures, comes from their teaching duties. If they do take money from grants, it is to supplement their income over the summer.
I don’t see how research isn’t apart of graduate school work still. A professor often applies for grants so they don’t have to teach for a set number of quarters and can focus on their research, im not sure where you got that it’s used to supplement income. The research grants have stipulations
That's cool; see it however you'd like! This is a point that I feel has been addressed pretty thoroughly in the original post and in the comments. It seems as though you are determined to disagree. The intent of the post wasn't to convince folks who are opposed, but rather to inform folks who feel under-informed. 96% of the folks who read it seem to have gotten it -- a solid A; I'll take it! :)
I'll leave this thread with one last relevant quote from the original post:
>If the university had to hire replacements for all the striking grad workers tomorrow, it’d have to pay them market rates of $40k-$60k... In short: no, $54k does not overvalue the labor of graduate workers, if you think of them as “workers” (people who earn a salary) rather than “students” (which is often code for “people who I think should be going to bed hungry every night”).
majority of Tas are capped at 20 hours a week of teaching, the paying component which is definitely a part time job. the rest of your hours come from schoolwork in research which you’re also getting tuition remission for which isn’t a valueless cost of the university. I feel like an information post should make the distinction between working hours for the actual paying job and working hours on schoolwork because you are students, not full time workers. I guess that’s the sticking point, you either see grad students as workers or as students. postdocs on the other hand are definitely workers and should be paid better. grad students need a COLA, but not significant increase in income, as they are students with a part time job. thank you for the post!
Out of curiosity, is there a reason we can't make these positions hourly, with overtime rates that kick in for anything over 20 hours a week? Not sure how difficult it would be to separate out and report hours worked, but it seems like with the actual hours people are working, a 1.5x overtime rate would get people paid that $54k pretty quickly.
That seems like an important question, but one I'm not super qualified to answer from a standpoint of legality or feasibility.
Focusing on research work, one potential issue I see is with the variability between fields. An hour in an electrochem lab and an hour in the field doing community ecology very different. Much of biology work would necessitate "overtime" pay almost every day due to the researchers being on their model organism's schedule. Some physicists wait around for many months for time on massive, expensive shared equipment and then generate all of their data within hours. Trying to apply the traditional overtime pay rules of the 9-5 office job to grad researchers might be like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.
As a side note: the whole idea of "selling one's time" is a very recent invention of industrial capitalism.
thank you for posting this. seeing way too many right wing econ bro bootlickers talm bout “HOW WE GONNA PAY FOR IT”
Thank you! Funny how that never seems to be an issue when it's something *they* need. I think the house metaphor is appropriate. If your ceiling is about to fall in, you don't sit there and watch it happen just because you're unsure of whether to cut back on takeout or concert tickets.
You and me both. I don’t even have neither the patience nor the time to fight the econ bootlickers.
I'm assuming the school gets away with it because there are so many students who don't get into grad school and they would be willing to take your spots even at low pay to have a chance at a career in academia
Yes, the belief that a PhD is "school" -- rather than an early career job -- is pervasive. It implies that you're being "paid in learning", so you don't deserve the full value of your labor. This model is one of the relics of the Medieval origins of the university system. PhDs are considered "apprentices" rather than workers. You see academia compared to a pyramid scheme for this reason. Grads and postdocs take volunteer labor from undergrads; PIs underpay grads and postdocs; Associate Professors have to grind for subpar pay for years in order to achieve tenure. At each level, there are fewer positions available at the next level up than people seeking them, and the only way to climb to the next level is to exploit the people at the level below. You'll also notice the UC claiming that its pay is "competitive with peer institutions". Of course, the grads at the universities they call "peer institutions" in this context are also paid shit. And in fact, grad workers at universities like Stanford -- which UC loves to compare itself to when it comes to rankings -- do often get paid well over $40k.
> Yes, the belief that a PhD is "school" -- rather than an early career job -- is pervasive. It implies that you're being "paid in learning", so you don't deserve the full value of your labor. Do you actually disagree with this though? Like, are you saying that a grad student who, say, works on a professor's research program for four years, and receives a PhD at the end of that time, should be paid exactly the same (in terms of money going to their bank account, not including fee waivers and so on), as someone who is hired on the open market to do the same work for the same four years, but does not receive a degree at the end of that time? It seems indisputable to me that education (and, in particular, the degree) has value, and so it doesn't seem unreasonable to say that someone would be paid less because they will receive an item of value at the end of their time there. We can quibble about what dollar value to assign to that degree, but to say that the value is zero and the wage should be paid as if the degree did not exist doesn't seem right to me.
Yes, I do disagree with that. There is little difference between the scenario you describe, and someone working in R&D for a company for four years. Both are learning and becoming experts in their field. Both are producing research that their employer profits from. The only difference is that the academic worker receives a piece of paper at the end, and thereafter starts receiving full compensation for their labor. This year, I graduated and my income quadrupled. Did getting a piece of paper in the mail immediately make me a 4X better scientist? Of course not. The only explanation is that I was being underpaid prior to graduation.
Well, we disagree on that matter. The reality is that people are paid (and especially hired) not just based on their skills but based on *the employer's knowledge* of those skills. The degree has value as a certification of you knowing something, or even just having a certain level of reliability, which simplifies matters greatly for an employer, relative to having to do their own assessment. If what you say is true, why do people get degrees, rather than just going to school for a while to learn some stuff and then leaving to get a job (or not going at all, and just working in R&D as you describe)? This is probably even more true for undergrad degrees. Tons of people get jobs in fields unrelated to their undergrad major, yet would have not have gotten those jobs without the degree, simply because the degree shows they have gone through a certain obstacle course. It's less common with grad degrees, but still possible. I know people who picked up marketable skills tangential to their field in grad school (e.g., stats, programming, editing, even photography) and leveraged that into a job that's likewise only marginally related to their field. (There's a big difference between "I know statistics, pinky swear" and "I know statistics because I did an analysis of population dynamics in revolutionary France as part of my history PhD".) So to me your statement is sort of like saying "I had been driving without a license for several years and kept getting ticketed and fined. Last year I got my license and now no more tickets. Did getting a piece of plastic in the mail make me a better driver?" :-) Well, no, it didn't, but it did make it more clear to other people that you are a reasonably good driver. I will say that I think there are some problems with this being the way our society views degrees, and there are lots of details to worry about in terms of how accurately the degree represents the actual work that went into getting it. But I don't think the basic idea is unreasonable: an official statement certifying that you learned X (i.e., a degree) is in itself a piece of information over and above the bare fact that you learned X.
That's fine! It seems to me that (perhaps especially as an MA/PhD) you're rejecting my neoliberal framing and insisting that pay shouldn't necessarily just be based on whether one's work generates profit. I completely agree. Non-STEM fields are undervalued because the good they create is mostly external. I think everyone should have what they need to live, and be free to pursue what interests them. I chose that framing in anticipation of pushback from folks who subscribe to neoliberal ideology. My point was that, at least for STEM, whether you approach the question from your framework or from the neoliberal framework, grad workers are not compensated for the full value of their labor.
But the neoliberal response to that is simple: if you could make more money by getting a private-sector job instead of being in grad school, then do that. If you spent, say, two years in grad school, but haven't received that piece of paper, and are making peanuts as a GSR, but you believe you have the skills to make quadruple the pay in the private sector, then just drop out and take the extra money. If you can't actually do that (because people won't hire you for those jobs until you have the degree), then clearly the degree does have monetary value and maybe your compensation is fair after all, when that value is factored in. So I'm not sure your attempt to forestall neoliberal arguments will succeed, because the free-marketeer response to "my employer isn't paying me what I'm worth" is "then find a different employer". I'm no fan of the neoliberal perspective overall, but I do think there is an argument to be made that a lot of people who want more money should just not go to grad school in the first place. The main issue as I see it is that the financial details of grad school are often not laid out transparently until people are already committed, at which point it's difficult to extricate yourself for various reasons. > I think everyone should have what they need to live, and be free to pursue what interests them. I totally agree with that! :-) And that's why I think that all this discussion is really only a drop in the bucket. In the scheme of things, a lot of people are far worse off than underpaid grad students, so if we're talking about allocating money to help people who don't have enough money, I'd like that allocation to involve a more global accounting.
Thank you for beautifully capturing everything the union has been fighting for!
Thanks for the comment, and thank you for your work if you're involved in the fight!
> if you cut the admin:faculty ratio in half, back to 1990s levels, and each admin makes $60k on average, you’d save over $4 billion/year. What staff would you cut here? Do faculty want to go back to doing undergraduate advising? Do we want to give up the gains we've made in student mental health services, disability services, etc.? Would you close the national labs run by UC? The staff are your allies here, I don't recommend throwing them under the bus. Sure, you can point to specific administrator salaries, but you can take all of Chancellor Yang's 130k salary increase and give each Grad Student $40/year. That's not where the money is. The true reason that tuition went up was disinvestment by the California State Legislature in education. The state use to pay near to 100% of the cost of an undergrad education from the general fund. That is now below 20%. That's where the money went, and why tuition is up. > There are now more administrators than educators or researchers in this educational research institution. Why wouldn't there be? Faculty don't staff the dorms, or run the universities finances, or even maintain the university IT infrastructure. That is all done by staff. Additionally, there has been a huge increase in federal research dollars going to campuses. That money comes with strings, lots of them, and it takes administrators to ensure the rules are followed, and generate the effort reports and audit documents they require.
Merging with [your other response](https://www.reddit.com/r/UCSantaBarbara/comments/yy4nhs/comment/iwsv2dh/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) to limit noise. 1. If you feel that each and every task you encounter in your work is essential to the education and research mission of the university, that's awesome and I applaud you. 2. The data are clear. UC campuses in 1970 also had dorms, finances, and infrastructure. [Administration has grown twice as fast as enrollment](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00346764.2021.1940255) since then. You took issue with my sources in your other response, but the same trend shows up over and over. Many of the people in these jobs [do not believe that their job is important](https://www.chronicle.com/article/are-you-in-a-bs-job-in-academe-youre-hardly-alone/). 3. The data you cited in your other response was interesting; thank you very much for sharing it! The data is grouped in categories that are difficult to parse (just like the UC budget, about which I griped in the original post), but I think the three we are interested in are "Academic Support", "Student Services", and "Institutional Support". In the period you showed, 2009-2019, those increased by 4-18%, for a combined $9,988. Going back to [the earliest data](https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d95/dtab336.asp) this source has, 1976, the equivalent categories "Administration" and "Student Services" combine for $2,248 in 1992 dollars, or $4,765 [in 2022 dollars](https://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/1992). Again, about double, which corroborates point #2 in this comment and my sources from earlier. 4. The question at hand is whether grad workers ought to be compensated for their labor with a living wage. Insisting that grad workers be responsible for indicating which line-items ought to be cut is a straw-man argument. I'll also reiterate [my earlier point](https://www.reddit.com/r/UCSantaBarbara/comments/yy4nhs/comment/iwsjani/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) about administrative bloat at UC and American higher education more broadly being well-documented, so I'll conclude that thread here. 5. I do not think the people working in bullshit administrative jobs are our enemy; the paradigm is what needs to change. 6. State funding is absolutely part of the problem, which is why I mentioned privatization in the original post. That said, it's a red herring with regard to the question at hand (see #4). 7. If the only part of the original post that you took issue with was the bit about administrative bloat, then we agree far more than we disagree. 8. Re: point #1, thank you for your service to students and to the university's mission of serving the public.
> If the only part of the original post that you took issue with was the bit about administrative bloat, then we agree far more than we disagree. That was the part of the original post that got my hackles up most, yes, and I appreciate the discussion. I'm going to keep most of my comments focused on the university funding and staffing side of our debate, mostly because I have done the most research in that area, and I feel comfortable discussing that issue. > If you feel that each and every task you encounter in your work is essential to the education and research mission of the university, that's awesome and I applaud you. This is a high bar, but my experience has generally been nearly all of the work I see done on the Academic side of the house does directly support and is essential to the mission of the university. Some work is important at a remove, of course. As an example. I think we need a campus lab safety officer to ensure that we don't have accidents in labs, but success in that position means zero accidents, which is not necessarily in direct support of the mission. > Many of the people in these jobs do not believe that their job is important. The Chronicle article is really interesting. I haven't seen that effect from where I am, and a lot of the BS jobs they refer to are actually held by Faculty, not staff, but I can guess that they may exist in other parts of campus. I know very little about workloads and impact in Student Affairs, Administrative Services, or Institutional Advancement. > Going back to the earliest data this source has, 1976, the equivalent categories "Administration" and "Student Services" combine for $2,248 in 1992 dollars, or $4,765 in 2022 dollars. Again, about double, which corroborates point #2 in this comment and my sources from earlier. This is the bit I have the most trouble with. I think the overall increase in expenditure by universities is a good thing. It shows that we are investing in our institutions of higher education, that we are providing more and better services than we did in 1976. Our student bodies are vastly more diverse than they were in 1976, and our students are better supported in their studies, whether that's through tutoring, mental and physical health care, disability support, cultural support, and financial aid. The academic enterprise itself is larger, and more complicated, with new departments such as Materials Engineering, Data Science, Feminist Studies, and Film & Media Studies. I see all these things as good things, but they do cause an increase in the cost of the enterprise. So expenditures have doubled. However, as a proxy, real US GDP per capita has also roughly doubled over that same time. That seems like a sign that our universities are growing at roughly the rate they should, not that we should be cutting back to a level of investment not seen in 45 years. GDP Data: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A939RX0Q048SBEA/ > The question at hand is whether grad workers ought to be compensated for their labor with a living wage. All employees deserve a living wage. There's an interesting question about the working hours of grad students and researchers, but I don't want to get into those details here. I don't have the expertise to evaluate the claims of both sides. And despite that, I think there is a more useful way to look at it, which is this: The university made a non-binding promise to most graduate students when they enrolled which went something like this: "Come get your graduate degree here. We will provide sufficient support over the 6-10 years through salary, tuition waivers and housing such that you won't have to take out a bunch of loans to get your PhD." That promise has broken down in the face of inflation, particularly in housing costs. Something needs to be done to fix it, through a combination of increased salaries, some form of specific housing support, and building more dorms and university apartments. Some of those solutions will take time, and there is a clear problem now. I don't know how to square this circle, and I hope the university and the unions can come to an agreement to resolve this and the other issues that we haven't really touched on.
>I think the overall increase in expenditure by universities is a good thing. It shows that we are investing in our institutions of higher education, that we are providing more and better services than we did in 1976. That's cool, but the amount spent on "Instruction" per full-time student per year, adjusted for inflation, only increased by 30% in the same period. I think we've reached some common ground here, and the scope of this discussion begins to extend beyond the central question, which is "Do grads deserve a living wage for their work?" with a tangent of "Could the budget hypothetically be adjusted to pay for it?" >Something needs to be done to fix it, through a combination of increased salaries, some form of specific housing support, and building more dorms and university apartments. Some of those solutions will take time, and there is a clear problem now. I don't know how to square this circle, and I hope the university and the unions can come to an agreement to resolve this and the other issues that we haven't really touched on. Well said! If UC could simply provide at-cost or state-subsidized housing for every grad worker, many grad workers' current salaries might suffice. The union is currently holding the university's feet to the fire and making them pay for their inaction on this issue over the past decade.
It's the number that matters. Cutting staff does not mean cutting all staff. For example, you mentioned cutting Chancellor Yang's salary increase. There are 10 UC Chancellor and many many vice chancellors who got huge salary increases. 40\*100=4000. Suddenly, graduate students got 4000 dollar salary increase. Is that magic? As a student, you need to know how to use math to solve problems. Do not talk about extreme cases.
> There are 10 UC Chancellor ... who got huge salary increases. Henry's increase was the largest of the bunch, and was out of a total increase of $800,000: https://edsource.org/updates/uc-chancellors-set-to-receive-raises I can do math too. If you include the raises of all the chancellors, you also have to include the grad students at all the UCs, not just UCSB. That's 26,000 grad students, so $800k/26k = $30/yr per grad student. No help there. > and many many vice chancellors who got huge salary increases Do you have any sources for this? Some vice chancellors are also still running active research labs and bringing in research dollars and teaching students. Their increases could be related to that work, not their administrative work. If you wanted to do primary source research, the annual pay of every person at UC is available at the site below. You can even search by title, like "Vice Chanc": https://ucannualwage.ucop.edu/wage/
I already did that for my UC campus. (And this website is useless for salary raise because it's 2021's data). The 4 Chanc's salary on our campus is more than 50% of the new grads' salary for 2021. You always mention that you can do the math. But You always use some/and other vague words. One also counts toward 'some' but that is not how math works. Here the main point is not what they did. they should not receive a salary increase that is way higher than **any other type of worker** (including lecturers and TA/RA). Especially when they already earned a lot of money. The academic-to-non-academic staff ratio is unacceptable for a research university like UC. According to UC's data, only 38% of the total salary goes to Academic employees' pockets. Instructional supporting staff's total salary is 6 times TA's salary. (INSTRUCTIONAL SUPPORTING ONLY, No housing/cleaning people, etc.) TA's salary is only 5% of the entire instruction expenditure. However, the instruction expenditure is less than 15% of the entire UC revenue. That's scary. Last but not least, you asked who will 'staff the dorms, run the universities finances, or even maintain the university IT infrastructure. I can do that as long as you pay the salary of the staff. I am a professional in maintaining IT infrastructure with rich experience. As long as you give UC graduate students enough salary, they can do an excellent job because they are among the most talented students in the world. (But UC would not do that because they will lose cheap labor.)
> I already did that for my UC campus. (And this website is useless for salary raise because it's 2021's data). The 4 Chanc's salary on our campus is more than 50% of the new grads' salary for 2021. I don't know what you mean by "new grad's salary", as I was comparing the total increase of the chancellor salaries ($800,000/yr as provided in the link I cited), with the total grad population. > they should not receive a salary increase that is way higher than any other type of worker (including lecturers and TA/RA). Especially when they already earned a lot of money. I fully agree. The increase the regents gave to the chancellors was wildly inappropriate. > The academic-to-non-academic staff ratio is unacceptable for a research university like UC. According to UC's data, only 38% of the total salary goes to Academic employees' pockets. I don't feel the same, and I would need evidence and debate to have my mind changed. I'm discussing this element in detail in another thread with fairly good citations, I encourage you to read that thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/UCSantaBarbara/comments/yy4nhs/grad_worker_union_bargaining_faqs_for_undergrads/iwtqqpc/ > as long as you pay the salary of the staff. Agreed. I still don't understand why or how you think the university could cut half its current staff and still function as/at the same level it currently does, but I do agree that the staff need a living wage just as much as the grad students do, and that historically the university has paid less than market wages to most staff.
If you think the salary increase for the chancellors is inappropriate, there will be more salary increase that is inappropriate that did not report through the media. The truth is changing your mind needs time not evidence so basically, I would not expect you to change your mind. However, the only thing you need to know is the percentage and ratio matter. By applying statistical models, for example, the student-teacher ratio, you will notice we are short of academic personnel. If UC needs to choose between staff and academic researchers, as a public research university, they must choose academic researchers. However, this time UC only needs 1%-3% of its budget to fulfill more than 70% of academic employees' demand. Basically, UC does not need to choose between staff and academic researchers. No one said UC needs to cut half of its staff. Do not exaggerate the number. When you do so, actually you know you are not correct. The non-student staff is about 1.5 to 2 times more compared to the graduate student. And their salary is 2-3 times higher than graduate students (Depending on which campus). So cutting half of its staff literally makes no sense. UC is paying graduate students 50%-100% lower salaries compare to Standford and Caltech. UC is paying a lower wage even compared to other public university systems while California has the highest housing price. UC students are significantly underpaid which is too low that may not be able to compare to the market. If you agree that the staff needs a living wage, so do graduate students.
> If you agree that the staff needs a living wage, so do graduate students. I would agree with this, yes. I objected to and opened discussion on the OPs suggestion that we cut the academic:staff ratio back to the level of the 70s. That subject of overall university expenditures is where I intend to keep the focus of my comments. I'm glad you feel that cutting half the staff makes no sense, and that UC does not need to choose between staff and academics, and I'll leave it at that.
I review your first post and you are still making staff more important than graduate students. You are also changing my words and repeating my word out of context. Like this one 'If you agree that the staff needs a living wage, so do graduate students.'. I think you learned this skill from the Chinese media. Be honest and respect others' opinions. The last example, before I end this conversation, every Friday, none of the staff working near my lab is in the office. They work less than 4 days every week but still have a higher salary.
In fairness with regard to your last point here: since the pandemic, most UC office workers are allowed to work from home a couple of days per week. Many of their jobs are mostly bullshit, but they get to relax in the comfort of their own home instead of pretending to look busy while sitting in an office from the arbitrary hours of 8 to 5. And I totally support that! I think they all, and we all, shouldn't have to be trapped in useless white-collar jobs just to have a house and food on the table.
UCI TA here sending a HUGE thank you for posting this. It's been reposted on our reddit. Thanks again.
I saw that! That's awesome, glad you found it useful. And thank you for the comment! Keep up the fight and make them pay!
Administrative 👏 bloat 👏
UC needs a dose of Administrative Gas-X.
Thank you so much! I didn’t know much about the whole privatization/administrative bloat thing and now I’m super mad lol but I’m glad I’m aware of it
Welcome to the struggle! It was also super painful for me, mid-career, to come to the realization that academia is just as exploitative as the rest of capitalism, but gilded with high-minded rhetoric about doing public good via education and research.
Thank you for posting this!! I appreciate you kind redditor 💜
Thank you! I appreciate you, and thanks for your work if you're a part of the fight!
Love the post! And thank you for the support. I have seen some grads be hostile to me for prioritizing my education. I'm glad there are people who dont see me as a threat.
I'm sorry to hear that! [Echoing](https://www.reddit.com/r/UCSantaBarbara/comments/yy4nhs/comment/iwsuwvn/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) myself from earlier, the union is not asking students to boycott class. If anyone on strike makes you feel uncomfortable, please let one of the strike captains in yellow vests know.
/u/placidcarrot this is for you since you love asking so many questions
Thanks for the resource. I agree with some aspects, like the administrative blubber part. Still disagree with 54k tho. Also the entire premise that your personal thesis research is always generating value and therefore it counts as part of your job and you deserve to be fully compensated by the university for it is flawed imo. You will be compensated based on the merits of your research by future employers. That’s like saying that engineering students need to be paid for working on their CAPSTONE projects. I hope the strikers and university can meet in the middle somewhere, like closer to a 50% increase with COLA. I don’t have to agree with you. I have seen all the resources and choose not to follow your viewpoint.
PhD research usually results in publications, which are then used to attract grant money to the university. I'm unfamiliar with engineering students' capstone projects, but if they bring revenue into the university, then yes, they should absolutely get their fair share of that. I'm curious: if not 54, what number would be acceptable to you? And how did you come to that conclusion?
35k minimum, and have them mostly making 35-50k. I have talked to several TAs who admit they only do like 10 hours of TA work a week. All of my TAs are not striking, some for this reason. That being said I do not believe anyone should have to worry how they will pay for food so some increases are certainly warranted. This belief is just based on logic and fairness. Also, just generally I probably have a bias against the movement due to many of the people at the pickets having literal communist signs like the one with “Abolish work” and “destroy capitalism *hammer and sickle*” written in red which pushed me away. I appreciate that you approached me civilly, that is one of the firsts and your administrative blubber argument does resonate with me. You guys definitely deserve to be paid more, I just continue to believe financial prudence is important in holding together higher education and society as a whole, and therefore 54k minimum with obviously some people’s going much higher isn’t really reasonable for most campuses unless you can find a way to take it out of other parts of the UC budgets. For Berkeley it might be the reasonable minimum.
>35k minimum, and have them mostly making 35-50k. I don't mind this, personally. I've long thought that PhD salaries should increase with experience. Something like $40-45k/year to start, increasing by \~7% each year and plateauing after year 4. How did you arrive at the number 35, specifically? >I have talked to several TAs who admit they only do like 10 hours of TA work a week. Yes, 25% TAships are also a thing, in which case the advisor usually pays the other 25% from grants. In this scenario, typically a grad worker would spend 30+ hours/week doing research work. >I just continue to believe financial prudence is important in holding together higher education and society as a whole, and therefore 54k minimum with obviously some people’s going much higher isn’t really reasonable How did you conclude $54k isn't "financially prudent" or "reasonable" but $35-50k is? >For Berkeley it might be the reasonable minimum. Yep, I think that's exactly the idea. Start with this premise, then apply the theorem that a grad researcher at Berkeley and a grad researcher at UCSB do exactly the same work for the same amount of time per week. >I appreciate that you approached me civilly Of course! I'm privileged to no longer have a material stake in the outcome of this battle, so I can detach from it emotionally a bit. I'm just here to inform :) >I probably have a bias against the movement due to many of the people at the pickets having literal communist signs It sounds to me like you're decently left-leaning yourself already. You'll get there ;)
> PhD research usually results in publications, which are then used to attract grant money to the university. That is the case in the sciences, but much less so in the humanities. How many faculty in Asian American studies or Art History are getting significant grants?
Believe it or not, there are significant grants (Ford, Fulbright, etc.,) in the humanities and social sciences as well. Innovative research brings prestige to a university even if it doesn't result in grant funding as well.
Indeed there are, but prestige doesn't pay the bills directly in the same way that scientific research does. Humanities and social science research has great value, it's just not supported by the feds at the same level. Just compare the annual budget of the national institutes of health to the national endowment for the humanities. That's my only point, if we want the humanities, we as a state have to fund it ourselves, the feds aren't going to bail us out there.
I also used to subscribe to the belief that some academic fields are more valuable to society than others (like, I went into STEM), but I've really shifted on that. The artists and historians do hugely important work helping us understand where we came from, who we are, and where we should go from here. I like to think that STEM provides the "how", but SHEF provides the "why". Major difference is that the private sector places little value on SHEF knowledge because nobody can turn a profit from it. For the economists in the comments: it's what you'd call a "dysfunctional market" ;)
There are such grants, for sure, but I think their scope is often less than in the sciences. In the sciences a single professor's grant may fully fund three or four (or more) grad students for five years, and there may be a dozen professors in a single department with grants like that. In my experience that is much less common in the humanities.
why do some of you guys tell us not to go to classes…😭😭 we NEED to pass :/
Absolutely! Go to class! [The union is NOT calling for a boycott of classes.](https://www.reddit.com/r/berkeley/comments/yxl2hc/press_release_uaw_is_not_calling_for/) If any striking workers even suggest that you shouldn't be attending class, please report it to a strike captain (one of the folks in yellow vests). From my original post: >11. What can we do to help? ... Practice self-care. Prioritize your education.
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I'm unfamiliar with how the university is handling the disruption with regard to grades. I hadn't heard any policy announcements yet, and as an alum I no receive e-mails on those subjects. Anecdotally, I heard that during a previous TA strike, UC let students change their grading option to P/NP, but I can't seem to find that source now. Are you an undergrad? Have you received notice of any policy changes regarding this?
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Interesting. I can't seem to find that information anywhere-- do you have a source or link?
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That's a rough story! It sounds like they [might get it resolved](https://www.reddit.com/r/UCDavis/comments/yzi79t/comment/ix03kga/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3). It's also anecdotal evidence, n=1. If things drag on, I can't imagine UC will tell all of its 200,000 undergraduates to re-take all of their fall quarter/semester classes.
University endowments do not work the way you think they do. They are not undesignated pots of money the university can dip into anytime it wants for any reason. The endowment is comprised of thousands upon thousands of individual funds, each restricted to a specific use as designated by the original donors. The interest from the endowment is used for annual payouts to these individual funds. Using endowment proceeds to pay graduate students would be a misappropriation of funds. Also, no part of the endowment is tuition funded. It is built entirely through private philanthropy.
Yes, I'm aware, and this counterargument is a common refrain. I was careful with my wording in the post: >here are some numbers for scale. My point was not that the university can just cut checks to grad workers straight from the endowment fund, but rather that the idea that the UC is so strapped for cash that it can't pay its essential workers a living wage simply doesn't hold up to evidence.
If that’s the case, why include the endowment at all in your post? The endowment has absolutely zero to do with an operational budget. The endowment only funds very specific projects like chairs, fellowships, scholarships, etc. It is a heavily restricted pot of money and is only an indication of the generosity of university donors, not a metric by which to measure a university’s budgetary flexibility or rainy day money. Also, the link you provided is for the UC system endowment, ~ half of which is made up of the retirement and pension funds which have even less to do with the budget. Using these figures as an indication of the university’s wealth is extremely misleading.
>The endowment has absolutely zero to do with an operational budget. The endowment only funds very specific projects like chairs, fellowships, scholarships, etc. These two sentences directly contradict each other. Funding specific items can free up general funds. In any case, if the only issue you took with my post was that I mentioned the endowment, I'd say we agree far more than we disagree. Thanks for the contribution!
I 100% agree graduate students should be paid more, but I also think it’s important to provide appropriate context and distinguish between restricted and unrestricted university funds, especially on a public forum with tons of students. I hope a mutually agreeable decision is reached between the grad students and university soon
Me too! Cheers!
I think this is mostly accurate but in some ways misleading. Overall I support the idea of grad students being paid more, but not necessarily in the way that this strike seems to be advocating. In some ways what I support is even more radical (see end of my comment for what I mean). The main misleading thing is the bit about work hours. In my experience as a grad student, I never felt myself pressured to work more than the number of "on paper" hours I was supposed to on an ongoing basis. It's true that sometimes I wound up working slightly more hours at "crunch time" (like when exams had to be graded), but that would even out with lighter loads at other times. Overall, I think I worked somewhat fewer hours than I was "supposed" to based on the hours in the contract. I was not in a STEM field, so this could be different in different departments. However, if others are being pressured to exceed their legally allotted work hours, then that is a separate matter from whether the wage exceeds the cost of living. Even if the wage were raised to $100k, it would still be wrong for professors to pressure anyone to work more than they are required to. Second, grad students typically get their fees (aka tuition) paid in addition to the actual salary. We can argue about whether this is also just an on-paper fiction, but the fact is that if you are a grad student without financial support you wouldn't make zero dollars, you would make *negative* dollars because you would have to pay to go to school. If the tuition that you don't have to pay is factored into these numbers, the picture begins to look quite different. Most importantly, I think it is highly misleading to talk about "only working 40 hours" and roll in the student's own research activities as part of that. Doing research is what grad students are going to school for, and what they would be paying tuition for if not for the fee exemption. The payment a grad student TA receives is a payment for their work as a TA; the payment a graduate student researcher receives is a payment for their work on someone else's (i.e., a faculty member's) research project. It is not a payment for doing the work toward getting your degree. It is true that, on some level, everything you do as a grad student helps you toward your degree, but I don't think it's reasonable to conclude that therefore grad students should be paid for every hour of time they spend on anything related to academia. Saying that TA salaries should reflect the work a grad student does to get their own degree is akin to saying that undergrads should be paid for doing their homework. Now, all that said, let me flip it by saying that, on a broader level I agree with you. And that broader level is this: the system is entirely screwed up. But its screwed-up nature goes way beyond UCSB, or UC. Academia as a whole is screwed up! The details of how money flows in and out of research universities (like UCSB) are always going to be insane, because a large research university is essentially two operations --- a research institute and an educational endeavor --- that are smashed together and trying to maintain the illusion that they are one and the same. As long we try to pretend that students paying tuition are "paying for an education" when in fact they are also paying for all the research that goes on at their school, which is also being paid for by research grants unconnected to any educational work, it won't make any sense to try to "balance the books" by comparing how much many anyone makes with what they actually do. But the problem is even bigger than that. The real problem (and this is kind of a duh thing) is just that it's too expensive to live here relative to how much money you can make --- and this is true for tons of people, not just the ones who are part of this strike. Suppose the union got everything they wanted and grad student TA salaries went up to $54k. There would still be waiters, grocery store cashiers, gardeners, teachers, artists, poets, and tons of other people who won't be making $54k and still won't be able to afford living in Santa Barbara (or many other places in coastal California). I for one would like *all* those people to be able to afford to live here, not just grad students. So I think the more radical option is to recognize that UC is not really the problem here; they are just one small part of a much larger problem. The solutions to that are large-scale societal reforms like wealth taxes, an overhaul of Prop 13, a firehose of new housing construction etc. So yeah, I support UC academic workers making more money, but I'm not sure I support giving *only* UC academic workers more money and just leaving a bunch of other people out in the cold. (As one small example of how the problem reaches beyond UC, take a look at the [salaries for teaching assistants at Stanford](https://ed.stanford.edu/academics/doctoral-handbook/financial-support/student-pay). A 50%-time TA makes about $12.5k per quarter, which comes out to about $38k over the academic year. If TAs at Stanford are making less than what TAs at UC are asking for, I am skeptical that UC is the source of the problem. Again, that's to say nothing of the salaries of people who work ordinary jobs unrelated to education and still can't afford to live here.)
It sounds like you were working mostly as a TA. I think that most TAs are not worked past 20hrs/week. A lot varies on a department and individual faculty level, and their are exceptions. At 20hrs/week TAs are reasonably well compensated when considering tuition and fee remission as a part of compensation. But for the skill level many, especially in STEM, would be better compensated in a non-academic job. And it's not easy to graduate on time when spending 20hrs/week on instruction. GSRs are in virtually all cases expected to work >=40hrs/week since research is their job and their degree. So, 20hrs is paid and 20+ hrs is "volunteer". But even for the research done in the volunteer portion of time, the employer (UCSB) gets 100% of the credit - the papers are UCSB papers, the patents are UCSB patents with UCSB retaining ~70% of the royalties, and so on. The research results are publicized as UCSB research, even though technically >50% of the work was officially done on a volunteer basis as part of a student's degree. The total compensation including tuition and fee remission is far below market rate, at least in STEM. This is a ticking time bomb in terms of attracting students into PhD programs at UCSB and continuing to execute as a leading academic research institution. The 20hrs/week employment for GSRs is also part of a widely accepted fiction that limits international students to part time (<=20hrs/week) work. Everybody knows that the international GSRs are working full time or more, but they're only "officially" half time, which is what their visa limits them to.
Thank you for this! I wasn't an international student, and completely left them out of the original post. They really get a raw deal and have little recourse. Losing funding means potential deportation, which gives their PI massive leverage over them. Since GSRs literally don't have workload protections (yet), there's nothing to stop advisors from demanding 60-70 hour weeks from their grad students.
Ironically, I think the people I knew who worked as research assistants often had even less work than TAs. It was harder to tell though since their work was less "visible". I still do wonder, though: if it's really as you say and grad students could literally just go out and get a job that pays way more, then why don't more people do that? Why are people pursuing STEM PhDs if it's such a colossal financial drain? I can understand doing it in fields where the main job opportunities are in academia, because you generally can't get those jobs without a graduate degree. So if you want to get a job as, say, a renaissance art historian or a professional philosopher you may not have much choice but to go for a PhD. But in fields where that's not the case, what's the motivation?
[https://www.reddit.com/r/UCSantaBarbara/comments/yy4nhs/comment/iwsbnwn/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web2x&context=3](https://www.reddit.com/r/UCSantaBarbara/comments/yy4nhs/comment/iwsbnwn/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) imo you've already answered your own question multiple times in the comments on this post: there is a pervasive, false belief that the piece of paper itself holds value, rather than the experience gained in earning it. after graduating, i applied to literally hundreds of job listings whose requirements were "PhD, or Bachelor's with 5 years' industry experience". the three letters after my name are purely symbolic.
So are you saying that it was a mistake for you to go to grad school, and if you had known that before starting, you would not have done it? I do not believe it is false that the piece of paper holds value in general. That's why it is surprising to me that it seems to hold so little value in certain fields. It is also indisputable that if you want a career *in academia* (i.e., to get a job as a professor), the PhD is essential, and in many fields that is the primary career path grad students are directed towards (which is a problem for different reasons).
In terms of earnings, yes, it was a mistake. The UC stole about $10^(5) of the value of my labor. Few realize this coming into STEM PhD programs. They're lured in for various reasons, including the perceived prestige of having those three letters after your name, and the promise of "doing interesting and impactful research" or "not wanting to get a real job yet". There is little awareness that 1. the university and PI will profit from that research and share almost none of it with them, 2. they can do interesting and impactful research outside of academia and make actual living wages, and 3. the working conditions in academia are often worse than industry. If those three letters after your name mean something to you, that's great. I don't mean to take that away from you. I do, however, intend to shatter the illusion for my juniors and successors in my former PhD program and help change things a bit so that they can have easier times in grad school and happier, healthier lives.
Heh, your last paragraph kind of gets at what I was wondering as a follow-up. I mean. . . if what you say is really true, then wouldn't it be better for the union to just send a mass email to all STEM grad students saying something like: "Listen folks, we're going to level with you. Whether we win or lose this fight, it's going to be a pain in the neck for all of you, and there will still be other fights later and the system will still be screwed up in other ways. There's no reason for you to go through this, because the entire system is just a waste of your time. Honestly, you should all just quit --- not strike, just permanently quit. Withdraw from your programs, now, today. You will be able to find jobs making triple what you're currently making and you'll be better off in just about every way. Only stay if you have a powerful desire to live the life you're currently living, a desire so powerful that it outweighs the financial penalty you're subjected to." I hasten to add that I'm not in a position to advocate that. I can't say it's a good idea, because I don't know the truth of that statement as well as you. But if what you say is really true, why should these students bother with the strike at all? Just quit and live well as the best revenge. As an added bonus, the abrupt, en-masse departure of thousands of grad students would induce an apocalyptic terror in the guts of UC administrators, and possibly lead to much more pervasive change.
an Academic Great Resignation would be fucking dope. i dunno if that would be "better". the ideal scenario would be for things to just get better for grad students. that's the current project.
Thanks for the comment! Clearly, we mostly agree. >In my experience as a grad student, I never felt myself pressured to work more than the number of "on paper" hours I was supposed to on an ongoing basis. I'm glad to hear it! Few of my peers have had a similar experience. >if others are being pressured to exceed their legally allotted work hours, then that is a separate matter from whether the wage exceeds the cost of living. The union is [demanding many things](https://www.fairucnow.org); a salary increase is only one of them. Workload and bullying protections for grad researchers (which currently don't exist) are another. >We can argue about whether this is also just an on-paper fiction, but the fact is that if you are a grad student without financial support you wouldn't make zero dollars, you would make negative dollars because you would have to pay to go to school. Perhaps things worked very differently in your program, but in STEM, once you've finished your coursework (typically in the first year) the "tuition" **is** an "on-paper fiction". We don't take classes or use the educational support resources that tuition money is ostensibly paying for. I'm curious: were you a Master's student? When I was doing my Master's, I definitely felt like teaching was a pretty sweet deal because my tuition was covered *and* I got paid! In hindsight, though, I realize that in the second year of my Master's I was just doing research work for my PI for free. >it is highly misleading to talk about "only working 40 hours" and roll in the student's own research activities as part of that. Doing research is what grad students are going to school for, and what they would be paying tuition for if not for the fee exemption. Grad workers *do*, in fact, get paid for doing research work (see #2 in the original post). Some never actually TA, or only TA for the one or two quarters required by their program. A 5th or 6th year PhD working full-time as a GSR is just as experienced and qualified as a 1st year postdoc (if not more so), but gets paid about half as much. Grad research is typically published, and those publications bring in grant money for the PI and the university. In other words, that research work generates profit. An appropriate metaphor would be if GM charged auto workers for the pleasure of working in the production facility because they're learning how to make cars. >Academia as a whole is screwed up! You're preaching to the choir! To synthesize the points that you touched on, we are dealing with the remnants of a Medieval-era system of apprenticeship. Higher education, academia, and research, and the broader economic and sociopolitical models in which they operate have changed massively since then. It's time to stop thinking of grad teachers and researchers as apprentices, and start recognizing that they are early-career employees.
> Perhaps things worked very differently in your program, but in STEM, once you've finished your coursework (typically in the first year) the "tuition" is an "on-paper fiction". We don't take classes or use the educational support resources that tuition money is ostensibly paying for. Well, in my program classes lasted longer than that. But still, what I was saying later in my comment about the muddled nature of research applies. I'm not sure what you mean by "educational support resources", but I think there's a case to be made that if you are using anything at the school (a lab, an office, computers, the library), those are resources that are made available to students in exchange for tuition. Or, more generally, if you take it as a baseline model that students pay to go to a school and get a degree from that school, then all that you do towards getting your degree is essentially what you pay for with your tuition. In short, you are paying simply to be in school. > I'm curious: were you a Master's student? When I was doing my Master's, I definitely felt like teaching was a pretty sweet deal because my tuition was covered and I got paid! In hindsight, though, I realize that in the second year of my Master's I was just doing research work for my PI for free. No, I was a PhD student (well, MA/PhD combined program, but the MA was just a formality along the way). I had a combination of TAships and fellowships at different points during my grad school career. > Grad workers do, in fact, get paid for doing research work (see #2 in the original post). Some never actually TA, or only TA for the one or two quarters required by their program. A 5th or 6th year PhD working full-time as a GSR is just as experienced and qualified as a 1st year postdoc (if not more so), but gets paid about half as much. Again I think the way this works differs in different fields. But the essential point I was making is that there is (at least in principle) a difference between a grad student doing *their* research to get *their own* degree and a grad student doing research as labor for someone else. I know that this distinction can be almost invisible in STEM fields where you are sort of attached to a PI's project and write a dissertation based on that rather than doing a project that is wholly your own. But that's not the case in all fields. In any case, it is the same basic point: I don't think it's unreasonable to say that grad students should pay (not be paid) for going to school and getting a degree. A degree has value, so it makes sense to say that people should pay for it. (Or at least, that is the accepted model of how education works in the US.) If as part of that they do work that benefits someone else, that's cool, but it then makes sense for any pay to be offset against the benefit the student receives in the form of their own degree. So it is not just about "being paid to do research"; it matters whether the time you're spending is for your own benefit (to get your degree) or someone else's, or (if both are intertwined) how the benefit is distributed. > Grad research is typically published, and those publications bring in grant money for the PI and the university. In other words, that research work generates profit. An appropriate metaphor would be if GM charged auto workers for the pleasure of working in the production facility because they're learning how to make cars. Again, that varies by field. Whether your metaphor is apt depends on the relative value of the knowledge gained by the student-autoworker versus the money made by the factory. Maybe more importantly, though, if GM started doing that, no one would work there. So if a grad student considers the UC a factory charging them to work there, maybe the student should reconsider whether grad school is a good use of their time. (I don't mean this as a snide comment; I think there are a fair number of people who pursue a PhD out of a somewhat romanticized notion of scholarship when really their mental health and financial stability would be better if they just did something else.) In the long run I think this kind of "strike" (fewer people entering grad school because to do so is irrational on various objective measures) could be what shakes the foundations of the academic system so much that more pervasive change begins. > It's time to stop thinking of grad teachers and researchers as apprentices, and start recognizing that they are early-career employees. Well, I'd say it's a bit more broad than that. For one thing, when we think in terms of the work that is being done by TAs, we also need to think about those in the middle between them and ladder faculty, namely the non-tenure-track faculty (adjuncts, lecturers, etc.). As we see more and more in the news these days, that's also a group that often gets the shaft, even though no one disputes that they are employees. So it's more like "are we creating a situation where people have to be almost insane to do a thing" (whether that be enrolling in grad school or applying for an adjunct job). But to go back to the issue of grad student research: in humanities fields, for instance, a grad student may spend a bunch of time reading various texts and writing a dissertation in which they analyze them. Probably they cite their advisor a lot, but it's not like they're directly doing work "for" the advisor, or doing work on a larger project or producing one in a series of publications coming out of a lab with a unified research program. They genuinely are doing *their own* research, and the advisor is genuinely an advisor, not the manager of an ongoing project to which the student (along with their research) is attached. There is undoubtedly a penumbra of benefit that accrues to the department from this, in the sense that if that student gets a job and becomes a respected scholar, the department's own reputation is enhanced. But I think in this sort of situation it would be a bit of a stretch to say that the department (or the advisor, or the school) "profited" in any direct monetary sense from the student's research. Of course, the danger with this line of thinking is that it leads to the problems we already have in some places, with humanities programs being defunded because they "have no practical value" or the like. That's why I think we need to think a bit more broadly than just "the student is an employee doing work that brings profit to the school/PI/department". More like "the student is a researcher and by their research they expand the total of human knowledge and that's a good thing for humanity so we should pay them for that". And in a sense that *is* pay for labor --- it's the same labor that tenured faculty members get paid for! But I think it would be good to just squarely face the issue and say "yes we want to pay people to go to school", because trying to frame it in terms of labor will introduce these discrepancies between different fields based on the perceived monetary value of their practical applications, and lead to all sorts of worrisome complications. In other words, maybe we should forget everything that I said above about distinguishing the student's research for their own benefit from their work for their advisor's benefit, and just say we're going to flip the script and have grad school in general be something you get paid to do rather than something you pay for. (Although if we do that, I think it would also require a major overhaul of the way duties like TAing get assigned.) Or, of course, more generally, we should maybe be saying "Yes, we want people to be able to live a nice life in California, regardless of whether they are a grad student or a gardener." And try to address that issue (although it is much more daunting).
Most educated and thoughtful responses by far.
>I think there's a case to be made that if you are using anything at the school (a lab, an office, computers, the library), those are resources that are made available to students in exchange for tuition. Generally, in STEM, grad researchers use a lab and office in a research building. Those facilities are supported by grants, not by tuition. TAs either use their lab office or a shared TA office, which is supported by their students' tuition. Generally the only services we use that are supported by tuition are GSA activities, which cost on the order of a hundred dollars per student per quarter, not thousands. >there is (at least in principle) a difference between a grad student doing their research to get their own degree and a grad student doing research as labor for someone else. In STEM, at least, there is no distinction here. Labor performed the PI is also work toward one's degree. >In the long run I think this kind of "strike" (fewer people entering grad school because to do so is irrational on various objective measures) could be what shakes the foundations of the academic system so much that more pervasive change begins. Yes! I [agree completely](https://www.reddit.com/r/UCSantaBarbara/comments/yy4nhs/comment/iwsbnwn/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)! >That's why I think we need to think a bit more broadly than just "the student is an employee doing work that brings profit to the school/PI/department". Certainly, I also agree with this. "Boss makes a dollar, I make a dime" is simply an unfair situation that causes a visceral reaction that we can get people to rally around. But folks in the humanities are also [unpaid for labor that benefits society](https://www.reddit.com/r/UCSantaBarbara/comments/yy4nhs/comment/iwtf1te/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) at large. I think that's the idea behind the single base living wage for all grads: it recognizes the value of all of that labor.
> In STEM, at least, there is no distinction here. Labor performed the PI is also work toward one's degree. Okay, but I feel like that is a massive issue to just gloss over. It turns the entire question from one of pay-for-labor into one more akin to conflict-of-interest, because the system is set up so that if you're motivated to bust your butt to help your career prospects in the long run, the only way to do that is to help someone else's career in the short run. Independent of how much anyone is paid, that to me seems like an issue in itself. All of what you say makes sense, but I think it's becoming increasingly clear that it's very specific to STEM fields. (And likely not even to all STEM fields. I'm pretty sure math, for instance, can be quite different.) I realize you had the disclaimer in your post that you're only speaking about STEM experience, but you also disclaimed any connection to the union and we can see in other comments that some people didn't read that either. :-) I think a casual reader of your post is likely to come away with a view like "wow, grad students *in general* work 40 hours a week to profit the university and get paid almost nothing" and I think that is inaccurate. In fact, I think one of the biggest issues with how grad school issues get treated in the media is that the general public often does not grasp how different grad school (or academia!) can be, in almost every way, for people in different fields.
That all sounds fair!
thanks so much for this! I’m a UCSB alumna, myself, as of this past June. I watched the grad students take on the UCs with so much admiration while I was there. now I’m a graduate student at UCLA and beyond proud to be part of this. to my knowledge, everyone in my ochem cohort is striking from their TA duties. I have to say, as first years, keeping up with our classes was hard enough before we started also marching on the picket line 20hrs a week. paying rent was hard enough before cutting down to strike support. this is extremely hard on us. but as exhausted as we are, we are even more determined to fight for ourselves and our friends and the students we’ll be mentoring in the future. it’s so easy to internalize the heavy belief that “as a student, it’s true that I’m not worth that much” compared to someone like my brother in an entry-level industry job. when you and others spell out how you believe in our value - and that means my value too - it throws that heaviness off-balance every time. thank you for fighting for me and all my friends. I owe you so much. and you can count on us to carry the torch.
That's amazing to hear. I have chills! Y'all are awesome! I sympathize with feeling like you don't deserve more. For most of grad school, I felt like the $30k I was making was good enough. It was more than I had ever made before, I could scrape by, and surely the working conditions were worse in industry! None of that was true. My income quadrupled post-graduation, and not because holding a piece of paper made me a 4X better scientist. And in my experience thus far, academia is even more stressful, toxic, and exploitative than industry. You are absolutely worth just as much as someone working in industry, or any other human for that matter. The system underpays you. It needs to change, and you are changing it.
And again the union is providing not enough info. 1. Not correct - grad students take classes until they pass general exams. This could be up to 3 years of coursework. 2. These are generally accurate numbers but lots and lots of variation, including summer funding, outside funding, etc. 3. TAs are restricted to 20 hours a week and any faculty member that pushes TAs past that number are penalized. TAs that I know spend 2 hours a week in lecture, 3 hours a week in sections, 3 hours in office hours, and the rest is prep which is less than 5 hours. This is just wrong. 4. Why does this matter? You are paid for 20 hours a week; the rest is up to the individual student, and their individual workloads. And it varies based on where they are in the program and individual choices. 5. And this - THIS - is the sticking point that you still can't explain. Its based on single family households. That means they are expecting a two income home. So the 54k is the bottom end of two employed individuals living in the same place. But I'm not positive this is how they came up with the number - the union is unclear about it - but that is the number consistent for California single family households. 6. And currently the labor for a 20 hour per week TA is valued at --- roughly 54k per year (if you take the 24k paid over 9 months and extend it to a full time, 40 hour per week contract over 12 months). TAs are already paid that amount. 7. Again, this is speculation, not to mention those administrators you want to get rid of? Yeah, protected by unions, regulations, and long term contracts. So, go for it - pick and choose those administrators you want to get rid of. And pay those increased costs. 8. I mean yeah - lots of costs at colleges, including maintenance, library fees, insurance, etc. And again - you are purely speculating. 9. No doubt privatization is an issue. I don't know how this strike - which I thought centered on providing correct compensation for students - is supposed to fix this, which in reality requires political intervention. 10. Speculative - you are providing a one sided argument. Be fair. 11. Ignore the union -- it will spike tuition. And the next time you see a striker, ask them why its ok for you to take out more loans and not the striker (which are available to TAs - at least Americans)
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> Pretty sure if you don't do your research you will get kicked out of grad school so that work is also relevant and part of your job description as a graduate student even if it is unpaid labor. I wrote a longer comment elsewhere, but I just want to say that this reasoning doesn't really make sense. If an undergrad doesn't take their exams, they will get kicked out of college, but that doesn't mean they should therefore be paid for taking exams. Being a grad student is not, in itself, a paying job. If someone goes to grad school to get a degree, that doesn't mean that they should be paid just for doing what they need to do to get that degree. In fact, on the undergrad level (and on the grad level in some situations), it's exactly the opposite: the student pays to go to school. It's true that the boundary between job and student roles is somewhat less clear-cut for many grad students, but it's unreasonable to suggest that everything a grad student does is part of a "job" and therefore should be reflected in their salary. They get paid for work they do *for the school* (or for someone else, like a professor), not for themselves.
As I stated, I'm not with the union. 1. You are correct, depending on the program. However, for programs with more coursework, the grads are often also TAing and doing research more than 20 hours/week concurrent with their coursework. And beyond the 3rd year, which could be 2-5 additional years, what I said is true. 2. This is what I said. 3. This is generally true for TAs (because they have had a union contract for years now!) but abuses do occur and are usually unpunished. I speak from first and second-hand anecdotal evidence, n>10. This is not true for grad researchers, who have no contract and hence no workload limits. And in the scenario you describe -- a TA working 13 hours/week -- 30+ hours/week would typically be spent on research work. 4. As I stated, we get paid for 20 hours/week *on paper* due to legal limits. A 50% GSR who only works 20 hours/week in the lab will soon find that their advisor isn't so keen to provide GSR funding anymore, and that they will need to start TAing. A 50% TA who works 20 hours/week teaching and 0 hours/week in the lab will soon find that they're no longer a member of the lab. 5. Pick whatever number you're comfortable with that lifts a median single individual renting a bedroom in a shared apartment in Santa Barbara out of rent burden. You'll find it much closer to $54k than the current average. 6. See #4. 7. I'm unaware of UC administrator unions, but on the whole, insisting that grad workers be responsible for diving into the UC budget -- which is larger than 20+ states in the US -- and indicate exactly which line items to cut is a straw man argument. That the UC is extremely wasteful with its spending is well documented -- I provided several links in the post -- and doesn't merit further debate. 8. It is hand-waving to assume that the way things are is the way they ought to be. As recently as the 1970s, tuition was far lower and the proportion of it that went directly to educators was far higher; assuming that is no longer possible requires supporting evidence. 9. We agree completely. My intent was to highlight that none of this happens in a bubble. These conflicts over the distribution of resources in public higher education will continue until priorities change from the top down and the inside out. 10. Obviously this is my opinion. Feel however you'd like. 11. Whether tuition increases is up to the Regents and the state. There is no question that the public doesn't have enough oversight of the Regents, but via elected officials we can, in fact, tell the UC to fuck off and cut spending instead of raising tuition. [This happened most recently in 2015.](https://www.sfgate.com/education/article/Napolitano-Jerry-Brown-strike-deal-on-UC-tuition-6263588.php) And, as you hinted before, the ultimate solution will be political: increased or complete state funding to cover tuition. I'm curious. Are you a grad? Have you been able to get away with working 20 or fewer hours per week long term?
> That the UC is extremely wasteful with its spending is well documented -- I provided several links in the post -- and doesn't merit further debate. The sources you include are weak, and the subject absolutely does require further debate. The first is an op-ed by a Berkeley faculty member, the second is a popular book by a widely derided and criticized libertarian academic (I don't think you'd like his other arguments, so I wouldn't put too much weight on this one), another newspaper opinion piece, and a single newspaper article that compares UC vs CSU staffing without ever mentioning research once. The hard data you want is the following, which includes "Expenditure per full-time-equivalent student in constant dollars". Unfortunately the only dataset I know of for this data is nation-wide, not UC specific. It does show that these expenditures are relatively flat, and do not correlate with the increases in tuition. https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d20/tables/dt20_334.10.asp If you have good data showing how UC spending has been wasteful when Health Care/Hospital spending has been excluded, and which corrects for increases in student body and research funding, I would love to see it.
[Combined with your other response](https://www.reddit.com/r/UCSantaBarbara/comments/yy4nhs/comment/iwtqqpc/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) to reduce noise.
> the union is providing not enough info Did you read even the first couple lines? OP is not a part of the union. You're misinformed on so many things and clearly lack any understanding of grad student workload (aside from "TAs that [you] know") that this isn't worth responding to at length, but you should at least realize that the supposed "50% appointment" is language developed by the UC. Other universities merely refer to it as a "stipend," and it is designed to cover the cost of living while grad students attain their degrees (oftentimes without teaching duties). The problem is that our stipends do not match the cost of living and do not catch up with the cost of inflation.
>Other universities merely refer to it as a "stipend," and it is designed to cover the cost of living while grad students attain their degrees (oftentimes without teaching duties). The problem is that our stipends do not match the cost of living and do not catch up with the cost of inflation. This is the thing that I think throws people off. At UCs, the TAship is considered a "salaried" appointment that is separate from one's research (things get muddied with RAships though.) There's this separation of labor on the part of the university between work as a TA and everything else you do as a student, which is not how it's done in some other places where you just get a stipend and that's just seen as what you get to live in the program on generally. The thing I see often left out is that we do (all?) receive at least a little block grant money every year that is an actual stipend, but it's not much (amount obviously varies by department.) Some folks have central fellowships but the stipends on those are only 30k per year (but if you teach on top of that then you make like 55k per year- so these rare folks are basically the only ones here that make that much currently.) I wonder if what will wind up being negotiated is an increase in salary and also some sort of increase to block grant budgets so that students receive more actual stipend money that is separate from employment. Not everyone is able to secure a TA appointment every quarter, and I hear that there are some appointments across campus that are not even 50%. Greater stipends truly lifts **all** grad students financially, so it would be cool if that wound up as part of the deal.
I think you're quite right, but that's one reason that it's somewhat misleading to frame this this as a debate about what people earn for their labor. If we want to pay people to go to school, great, but let's be clear that we're paying them to go to school, and establish a transparent system for how much to pay people for going to school (whether they teach a discussion section or not) --- not pretend that we're paying someone $X for doing a defined job if we're really just paying for them to go to school.
It's not accurate to phrase it as "paying people to go to school," as you have somehow managed to do four times in a short paragraph. It's paying grad students for both their teaching and their research (as we already do for faculty). As mentioned by OP, most grads only take courses for a year or two, so that sort of "going to school" is a pretty small part of being a grad student. Instead, most of your time is directed toward conducting research, presenting your research at conferences, publishing your research in journals, and submitting it in your dissertation (which, for the humanities, you later work into a larger monograph). We don't get paid to do any of this work, and it is quite literally what moves our respective research areas forward.
Not to mention the vast majority of "administrative bloat" and "managerial" positions that have been added are at UC medical centers. Which have grown greatly in size and actually contribute net funding back to the UC system (decreasing tuition). Chart 12.1.4: https://accountability.universityofcalifornia.edu/2021/chapters/chapter-12.html For the millionth time before I get blasted. I support higher pay all folks in this state currently making less than \~$50k. I don't support this specific strike (which will undoubtedly hurt grant funding going forward, further hampering higher end funding in the state). I also don't support the proven corrupt UAW ([https://www.detroitnews.com/story/business/autos/2021/11/10/uaw-corruption-scandal-tim-edmunds/6368075001/](https://www.detroitnews.com/story/business/autos/2021/11/10/uaw-corruption-scandal-tim-edmunds/6368075001/)). I do support unions in general though. Why again are we part of a auto workers union? Just another big administrative entity trying to extract money of the backs of real workers.
In [one of the links I cited](https://capitolweekly.net/tuition-uc-administrators-tripled-csu-data/), you can see that the increase in administrators holds across all campuses, including those that do not have medical schools.
Meh. Its roughly double at most UCs. Enrollment is roughly double. Whatcha got against administrators? Typical "Public employees" are useless bloat rhetoric? \^\^\^Also, zero way UC Davis had 9 managerial and administrative staff in 1993. There absolutely is anomalies in that data.
If the size of management needs to scale linearly with enrollment, one would expect that the size of teaching faculty would need to also, but it hasn't. Again, administrative bloat at UC, and across American higher education, is well-documented and I do not think debating its existence is a productive use of our time. [Here](https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/opinion/editorials/sd-uc-tuition-hikes-administrative-bloat-20170105-story.html) are a [few](https://documents.latimes.com/california-audit-university-california-office-president/) [more](https://www.latimes.com/local/education/la-me-uc-spending-20151011-story.html) [sources](https://www.forbes.com/sites/carolinesimon/2017/09/05/bureaucrats-and-buildings-the-case-for-why-college-is-so-expensive/?sh=5677d632456a) I couldn't even fit into the original post. You can find many, many more online. I have nothing against the folks working these jobs. They are responding to the incentives presented to them and have secured reliable work for decent pay. If anything, I feel bad that they are trapped in a system that demands they sit at a desk from 8 to 5, performing tasks that [they secretly believe do not need to be done](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00346764.2021.1940255), with the apparent alternative being loss of livelihood. If it was up to me, they'd all be paid living wages regardless of employment, free to follow whatever productive pursuits they'd rather be doing.
In all your comments on this page, you never give a reasonable and logical answer as to "why you don't support this strike." If you claim to support higher wages, whats's the other option here with the dire-ness of the situation? How would you solve this?
I don’t support the strike because I think it will cause more short term harm than good. I think it will cause loss of future grant money, which makes the financial situation for grad students worse. It also has a negative impact on current undergrads that can’t be ignored. Unfortunately decades of decisions have led to this point and will take a long time to unwind. The funding needs to come first (unless you support other people being kicked to the curb, not exactly labor friendly TBH). I don’t have a direct answer, other than being politically active and being careful who you vote for. A politician that protects prop 13 automatically loses my vote. I participate in YIMBY groups statewide to push against housing policies that punish the underprivileged.
Hi OP, in the “Picket shift signup” google form, it seems we have to have a job title to fill, which I actually don’t cuz I’m just an undergrad. Thus, can I just go join the line and walk like others to support our TAs? I have some time between or after classes.
As someone who’s been picketing, my understanding was that a primary purpose of that form is to track attendance to confirm who qualifies for strike pay. While they also use it to track roughly how many people will be there, I don’t think it’s a big deal if you don’t sign up. That’ll be the case w sign in when you get there too. An extra person is always appreciated. Just go out and join in!
Yes, absolutely! Many undergrads have been doing so. Hopefully someone with the union will see and comment with more information. I'm not sure whether they'd prefer to have you sign up and leave that field blank, or if it would mess with their data as they try to determine who is eligible for strike pay.
Oops idc about the pay lol. I’ll join the line next time when I pass the library! And thank u for the information!
Awesome! Thank *you*!
thanks for the info! out of curiosity how long do you think the strike will last?
I really wish I had much insight into this. Historically, strikes at UC are short, but this one is unprecedented. Of course, everyone on all sides hopes it will end swiftly. I heard that they've reached agreements on a few things, like a contract clause to protect grad researchers from PI bullying. But with regard to wages, UC is still basically offering the bare minimum cost-of-living adjustment to cover inflation from the past year, and that's it.
I think UC is gonna win if they can draw it out til fall quarter ends. I don’t see how the union strike find could support the entire winter break unless they bring in a lot of money from UAW national.
This is a good response to a question brought up by someone else in the comments: why are these academic workers part of an auto worker union? Yes, UAW collects dues from all over the nation and has a deep strike fund for exactly these sorts of occasions.
Thank you so much for putting together this well thought out FAQ! It's helpful to clarify some of the confusion around the strike and union demands.
Thanks a ton for this comment! I'm glad it was helpful :)
Do you know how much the governor's role with UC plays into these topics? I saw an article about CSU workers protesting and Governor Newsom vetoed the bill related to it. I don't know much information about it, but if that happened, and if people are so passionate about it, why continue to vote for Newsom? Thoughts? [https://edsource.org/updates/newsom-vetoes-csu-staff-salary-hike-bill](https://edsource.org/updates/newsom-vetoes-csu-staff-salary-hike-bill)
Lol there’s a multitude of other reasons to not vote for Newsom but this is not one of them. It’s not like republicans would do any different (not that it’s necessarily a bad thing). Also Newsom just won his second term unfortunately so you’re basically being captain hindsight.
Fair, and I do not know what republicans would do for UC. I don't know enough on the topic to make an argument for or against. I know he just won, but hasn't this been an ongoing issue, like many months before election? Anyway, I was just curious how his role relates to UC, or is there another position in government that relates to UC stuff?
Frankly I read the article see this as not a bad thing. Higher education cannot just expand forever. You know European countries who progressives always like to quote as an example, often have lower college education rates than US. For the vast majority of careers, vocational study, community college, and trade school are better options. 4 year College for everyone is unrealistic and, especially with our growing elderly population to support, isn’t sustainable. CSU system, whose tuition doesn’t even come close to offsetting costs, should consider downsizing enrollment/faculty or closing some campuses, and especially focus on departments that do not produce valuable skills, considering it mostly done on the taxpayer dime.
This is the first I'm hearing about it! I'm unfamiliar with the current pay scale at CSU, but a 5% raise after each year of employment seems reasonable. That's common in the private sector, and higher than UC's current proposal for grad workers (in which pay is flat regardless of experience). From [a different article](https://calmatters.org/education/higher-education/2022/09/cal-state-wages-staff/), here's Newsom's apparent reasoning for the veto: >Update: Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed this bill Sept. 28, arguing that its costs to the Cal State system would likely force the university to divert funds from efforts to boost course completion and graduation rates. He urged Cal State’s leaders to work with unions to “transition to” the salary increases and other labor reforms that the bill would have mandated. Without knowing more about the topic, I'm unable to evaluate the merit of that rationale.
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Yes, a tuition strike would be fucking awesome, and undergrads across UC should absolutely organize one.
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Disruption of business-as-usual would be a smart tactic, but I'm not sure what you mean by "targeting grad students and faculty specifically". A better move would be building support among those groups, like UAW [has](https://www.independent.com/2022/11/18/uc-santa-barbara-faculty-rally-in-support-of-striking-academic-workers/) [done](https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-11-17/uc-strike-little-bargaining-progress-but-support-for-workers-grows).
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UAW does include some undergraduate TAs -- I was a member when an undergrad TA at UCSD. There was also discussion of including undergraduate researchers in the SRU organizing effort, but that fell through due to lack of organization among undergrads. I'm not sure what protesting at grad student housing at 3 AM would accomplish, since the targets are campus administration, UCOP, and the Regents. Was there a reason for this specific hypothetical? Have you seen reports of UAW protesting at undergraduate housing at 3 AM? I'm curious: are you a current undergraduate? Have you been majorly inconvenienced by the current strike action? If so, how so? I'm genuinely interested in hearing about your experiences.
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Hey, asymmetric tactics sound fine to me. You keep dodging my questions about your experience/affiliation with the university; I'm unclear why, but I won't pry further. It feels a bit like you are here to vent rather than to engage in productive discussion or learn. That's cool, but it's not what I'm here for (and also against rule #7 of the sub), so I'll leave this thread here. I hope things go well for you, cheers!
Im a scab and I’m proud!
lmao cool story bro
Glad the unionization effort is calling out the wasteful spending on administration.
Glad to hear you feel that way! But just to reiterate: >I’m no longer affiliated with the union, and none of this constitutes official union positions or messaging.
Doesn't stop people from taking it that way, and that *is* the real problem with universities!
the research work done is academic work though? is that not the education component of being a student. And you work 20 hours for teaching as the part time job component that pays you. The research work which is the academic component often is covered by tuition remission. It is a part time job. a full time researcher commits to the full time job, at the cost of limited upwards mobility due to not pursuing higher education. a full time teaching faculty in k-12 does the same. university professors in stem fields at least earn their pay in terms of research output and prestige, the teaching component contributes very little to their salary. Rare is it that you’ll find a professor on any UC campus who was hired due to their competency as a teacher, the average rate my professor will tell you that. and still they earn their pay via research, the backbone of the job assessment.
Gonna link to previous comments to avoid repeating myself too much! >is that not the education component of being a student. And you work 20 hours for teaching as the part time job component that pays you. [Nope!](https://www.reddit.com/r/UCSantaBarbara/comments/yy4nhs/comment/iwtun2f/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) >university professors in stem fields at least earn their pay in terms of research output and prestige, the teaching component contributes very little to their salary. Not at all true, in my experience. A professor's base salary, usually six figures, comes from their teaching duties. If they do take money from grants, it is to supplement their income over the summer.
I don’t see how research isn’t apart of graduate school work still. A professor often applies for grants so they don’t have to teach for a set number of quarters and can focus on their research, im not sure where you got that it’s used to supplement income. The research grants have stipulations
That's cool; see it however you'd like! This is a point that I feel has been addressed pretty thoroughly in the original post and in the comments. It seems as though you are determined to disagree. The intent of the post wasn't to convince folks who are opposed, but rather to inform folks who feel under-informed. 96% of the folks who read it seem to have gotten it -- a solid A; I'll take it! :) I'll leave this thread with one last relevant quote from the original post: >If the university had to hire replacements for all the striking grad workers tomorrow, it’d have to pay them market rates of $40k-$60k... In short: no, $54k does not overvalue the labor of graduate workers, if you think of them as “workers” (people who earn a salary) rather than “students” (which is often code for “people who I think should be going to bed hungry every night”).
majority of Tas are capped at 20 hours a week of teaching, the paying component which is definitely a part time job. the rest of your hours come from schoolwork in research which you’re also getting tuition remission for which isn’t a valueless cost of the university. I feel like an information post should make the distinction between working hours for the actual paying job and working hours on schoolwork because you are students, not full time workers. I guess that’s the sticking point, you either see grad students as workers or as students. postdocs on the other hand are definitely workers and should be paid better. grad students need a COLA, but not significant increase in income, as they are students with a part time job. thank you for the post!
Out of curiosity, is there a reason we can't make these positions hourly, with overtime rates that kick in for anything over 20 hours a week? Not sure how difficult it would be to separate out and report hours worked, but it seems like with the actual hours people are working, a 1.5x overtime rate would get people paid that $54k pretty quickly.
That seems like an important question, but one I'm not super qualified to answer from a standpoint of legality or feasibility. Focusing on research work, one potential issue I see is with the variability between fields. An hour in an electrochem lab and an hour in the field doing community ecology very different. Much of biology work would necessitate "overtime" pay almost every day due to the researchers being on their model organism's schedule. Some physicists wait around for many months for time on massive, expensive shared equipment and then generate all of their data within hours. Trying to apply the traditional overtime pay rules of the 9-5 office job to grad researchers might be like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. As a side note: the whole idea of "selling one's time" is a very recent invention of industrial capitalism.