A college degree is a lousy investment

[BarcaDeac]

Wow, you consider $50k "paltry" for someone in training?

well I never knew what the salary was, was just basing it on what my sister called it, and he already had the dental school loans. idk. cost of living in Shreveport is also super low.

 

[wakephan09]

Yeah the ratio of pay for the job you are doing comparatively to your peers doing the same job, actually typically less, but not in training might be the biggest gap there is.

I don't understand what this means

If your point is that the ratio between what the trainee will make once he finishes and what he makes now is what makes that salary "paltry" then I'd agree with that.

But also the whole point is that you're *not* doing the same job.

Regardless, I guess I'm just a poor and $50k seems like a lot to complain about, loans or not

 

[Louis Gossett Jr]

The person doing the same job as you and working less is making like 7-9 times what you are making even though you are making 50,000 which to some fields seems like a lot. So you make 25,000 as a T/A or something, finish, become an assistant professor or something making 75,000 it’s only like 3 times.

Yeah you got the point, and I think the bigger thing is that in almost any “training” position you are doing more work than you ever will be expected to later. Like chief resident, fuck me. It holds true though be it graduate student, post-doctoral student, fellowship and so forth. It’s a fucked up cheap labor system.

 

[Kory]

So you make 25,000 as a T/A or something

whoa that's a sweet TA gig!

 

[wakephan09]

The person doing the same job as you and working less is making like 7-9 times what you are making even though you are making 50,000 which to some fields seems like a lot. So you make 25,000 as a T/A or something, finish, become an assistant professor or something making 75,000 it’s only like 3 times.

So again, I agree with the basic premise here about relative salary.

But a resident is *not* doing the same job as an attending physician or a Fellow, for example.

A Teaching Assistant is not very useful analogy either because a Teaching Assistant doesn't do the same job as an "assistant professor or something". (And lol at $25k, I wish)

 

[Kory]

because a Teaching Assistant doesn't do the same job as an "assistant professor or something"

arguably they do more but maybe I feel that way because I've had to grade 80 papers in a week from the prof's section twice a semester while running four weekly labs for them

 

[wakephan09]

arguably they do more but maybe I feel that way because I've had to grade 80 papers in a week from the prof's section twice a semester while running four weekly labs for them

I can only speak for myself, obviously, but I do way more work now as junior faculty than I ever had to do as a graduate student.

But being a graduate student was harder and more stressful.

 

[Kory]

that's fair

 

[PhDeac]

I'm in a meeting about an assistant professor search right now. Some of the top candidates have 5+ publications, book, grants, etc. That's doing the work of an assistant professor. Kind of crazy and definitely makes me think we're asking way too much of graduate students in order to be competitive on the job market.

 

[Kory]

thanks i hate it

 

[wakephan09]

I'm in a meeting about an assistant professor search right now. Some of the top candidates have 5+ publications, book, grants, etc. That's doing the work of an assistant professor. Kind of crazy and definitely makes me think we're asking way too much of graduate students in order to be competitive on the job market.

I agree and I think it's useful to examine separately

"asking too much of graduate students" (e.g. Kory's 80 papers to grade in a week to support the "real work" of the phd)

and

"what graduate students have to do to be competitive on the job market" (i.e. publications, grants, book)

A lot of what makes candidates successful on the job market is additional to, or even extraneous to, the *requirements* of finishing graduate school. The professionalizing of comps we talked about the other day is a step in the right direction.

In my field, it's difficult to deny that future professors will still need, for example, the language training, broad and deep reading in the field, a good grasp on the critical tradition, etc. But also the majority of graduate students we train won't get faculty jobs and some of this time and resources could be better spent on making them more competitive for certain kinds of careers, some of them non-faculty.

 

[birdman]

I'm in a meeting about an assistant professor search right now. Some of the top candidates have 5+ publications, book, grants, etc. That's doing the work of an assistant professor. Kind of crazy and definitely makes me think we're asking way too much of graduate students in order to be competitive on the job market.

This is very true.

Though, the work of a faculty adds the complexity of budget management, grant applications, teaching courses, that phd students and post-docs don't really do.

 

[wakephan09]

This is very true.

Though, the work of a faculty adds the complexity of budget management, grant applications, teaching courses, that phd students and post-docs don't really do.

Some disciplinary-specific context: as graduate students, we did a lot of teaching as "instructors of record". At some (in my opinion exploitative) places, the graduate students do more teaching than the faculty -- at FSU, they're teaching 3-3s!

Also there's no lab structure in the humanities so all of the intellectual labor and framing is on the graduate student alone. That's why it takes an average of nine years in my dummy field.

But yes to budgets and service and administration and hiring and faculty governance and stuff that graduate students remain blissfully innocent of.

 

[Biff Tannen]

Wow, you consider $50k "paltry" for someone in training?

Maybe you should check out some starting salaries for graduating seniors.

You can make $17/hour at Chik-fil-A these days, which equates to $34,000 a year if you work full time.

 

[wakephan09]

Maybe you should check out some starting salaries for graduating seniors.

You can make $17/hour at Chik-fil-A these days, which equates to $34,000 a year if you work full time.

I've sacrificed a lot to improve the quality of word usage on this board

 

[WRS]

a lot of the anger stems from him making campaign promises around student debt that he has backed down from

I guess that makes sense and it was a stupid promise to make in the first place. Politicians though.

 

[PhDeac]

This is very true.

Though, the work of a faculty adds the complexity of budget management, grant applications, teaching courses, that phd students and post-docs don't really do.

True. I had a good conversation at the ACCCG with an old friend who is faculty member at another institution. We were talking about how as junior tenure-track faculty you kind of get through into having to do everything (teaching, research, service) and do it pretty well. Once you get tenure, you can kind of pick what you enjoy doing and try to figure out how to devote your energy to that. What specific element of teaching, research, and/or service do you want to do?

All in all, there are stages of development and we need to do a better job as faculty preparing graduate students for different jobs than just baseline academic jobs. One thing I like about our program is that we emphasize teaching and we place a lot of students at private liberal arts colleges and regional public universities that have a 4-4 load. We also emphasize qualitative methods, so our students have a unique research skill set as well. They also have plenty of opportunities for service through department, college, and university leadership.

 

[birdman]

Some disciplinary-specific context: as graduate students, we did a lot of teaching as "instructors of record". At some (in my opinion exploitative) places, the graduate students do more teaching than the faculty -- at FSU, they're teaching 3-3s!

Also there's no lab structure in the humanities so all of the intellectual labor and framing is on the graduate student alone. That's why it takes an average of nine years in my dummy field.

But yes to budgets and service and administration and hiring and faculty governance and stuff that graduate students remain blissfully innocent of.

Yeah, that's a lot more than your average TA work load in ecology. We do sometimes have late stage PhD students serve as the instructor of record on courses, to actually pad their CV, but about 80-90% of the lecture prep and lab material was developed by a faculty member that originally designed the course and it is given to the student to implement.

 

[PhDeac]

Our PhD students teach their own courses and generally get better student evaluations than faculty. We’ve actually had to tell them to chill out on the course workload they give themselves with respect to grading too many assignments.

 

[plama]

ITT: People in Academia who spend 5 hours a day on the board talking about being overworked