The University of Hawaii, like universities everywhere in the US, has been facing major cuts. There seems to be zero support for higher education in this country, and every legislature sees a way to save their favorite perk for the rich by carving more dollars out of the university budget. Only now the cuts are reaching vital organs … like the faculty and students. One symptom is the abuse of graduate students.
Grad students in Hawaii are working under the very same salary they would have received over a decade ago, which is ridiculous. Pay at the university must adjust to circumstances, or you’re just building up to kill the institution.
One good corrective step is to give grad students the power to unionize and demand reasonable wages. The state legislature passed a bill to allow exactly that, but the governor now plans to veto it — Christie Wilcox gives a good summary of the situation.
This is nuts. I don’t even understand the logic behind refusing employees this basic right, so I thought I’d go looking for the other side of the story. And I found this nice article that, among other things, quotes UH Provost Linda Johnsrud extensively, explaining why the university opposes the legislation. Let’s take a look at their reasoning, shall we?
“Graduate assistants are unlike any other employees,” she wrote in testimony to the House labor committee. “They are students first, and employees second. Graduate assistants are student learners. They are at the university to learn as much about their fields of study as their time and talents will allow. A graduate assistantship is not a career or profession, but most similar to an on-the-job training or apprenticeship program.”
Oh. So the university is doing grad students a favor; they aren’t providing essential services, they are receiving them. That’s easy to test: then the university would be able to continue without interruption or decline in services if the grad students all went on strike.
No? The grad students teach most of the lab and discussion sections? You don’t think you can just insist that the tenured faculty instead teach all 10 sections of that introductory biology lab? Then I guess it’s a bit misleading to try and rank their roles. That responsibility as teaching employees is essential, essential to the university. Perhaps you shouldn’t denigrate their importance while dismissing their rights.
Furthermore, she testified, graduate assistants already receive hefty benefits for their work in the form of tuition waivers, and have also been protected from the same salary cuts other faculty members experienced in recent years.
That’s right. Graduate students are paid so little that part of their compensation involves not demanding that they pay for the privilege of working there. You barely pay them enough to feed, clothe, and house themselves, and you want credit for not also demanding that they pay up $34,000/year. Interesting.
It’s quite a racket. Your defense of low wages is that we’re supposed to imagine they’re benefitting by not being billed for being at the university. Try that with the faculty: tell them they’re getting a raise of $15,000/year (I assume they’re all residents of the state), but they’re also going to have to pay $15,000/year for getting all that classroom time.
And OMG, the students have been protected from the same salary cuts other faculty members experienced in recent years
? 1) I’m faculty at a university, so that argument gets no charity from me, and 2) telling us that you could be paying them even less is going to get no charity from the students.
“Even in the current fiscal climate, we have not precluded increase wages for graduate assistants,” she wrote, while other employees dealt with salary cuts — albeit with back pay for the years their salaries were reduced.
That’s amazing doublespeak. The university could increase wages, they haven’t ruled it out completely, they just haven’t ever increased wages. Give ’em credit for being able to maybe do something while not doing anything!
The cost implications of allowing graduate assistants to unionize could be huge for the state, she said. Under the current proposal, hours, conditions of employment and fringe benefits would all be subject to collective bargaining — in addition to the tuition waiver graduate assistants already receive, which can range from $458 to $725 per credit hour for residents and $1,116 to $1,381 per credit hour for non-residents.
Paying students what they deserve and need would cost the university more money! Shock horror! Yes, it would. The university is providing a service to the state and has the responsibility of supporting the execution of that service — and further, I would add, this is an obligation of the state government which, as is the case in so many states, the government is neglecting. Provost Johnsrud needs to stop trying to gouge coverage for their deficits out of the skins of their grad students, and instead confront the cowardly skinflints and ideologues of the legislature and get them to do their job.
That job is to provide for adequate educational opportunities for the citizens of your nation and state. Arguing for devious ways to undermine that educational mission and failing to provide that support means the problem is all yours.
Not the graduate students who are freakin’ doing the work.
By the way, is your football coach still the highest paid employee? How much do administrators get paid? Would you be willing or able to work on a grad student’s salary?
I guess I didn’t find Provost Johnsrud’s argument at all persuasive. Maybe she should instead try supporting the labor rights of the employees at her institution — after all, she’d be out of a job herself if the grad students gave up on the place.
Our adjuncts are trying to unionize. You should hear the horror stories the administration is telling us about what will happen–We’ll have to let all the non-tenure track faculty go! Your teaching loads will go up!
Of course, my Dean’s response to the grad students unionizing was to eliminate TAs in the College, so….
In Texas, where I was a graduate student, graduate assistants are not given tuition waivers; the state law prevents them from going to college for free. If they are out of state, they do get out of state tuition waived (this was my situation, and the only way I could hope to get a doctorate at an out of state school). Student workers still paid full tuition for the ability to work for the school. As a result, most of their student workers were out of state (and particularly international, because the ability to pay in state tuition was very important to them).
That school used more grad students than any school I ever attended. If you wanted a job, they would manage to get you one; in fact, in spite of the ease of getting a GA, they were always short of enough to cover the classes. What GAs didn’t teach, adjuncts did. If the grad students and adjuncts had walked out together, I don’t think there would have been a single freshman or sophomore level class covered in the science programs. In spite of that, the school was constantly moaning about how we had too many student workers, we needed to cut back. They refused to hire more professors, and it would have been much more expensive than keeping all the GAs.
I’m glad for the experience, and the ability to learn so much. But if my husband had not had a good job, I would not have been able to do more than pay my tuition on what I made. Living on it was not possible.
Our grad student TAs are unionized now. The sky didn’t fall. We all benefit from the jobs they do. If those services vanished, we’d have a gigantic problem.
On the plus side, in this universe our sports team coaches make salaries that are in line with sanity. No million dollar football coaches here.
Reminds me of the nonsense about student athletes being students first.
Oh, graduate assistants are apprentices now? Let’s compare:
Median US Salary of a GA: $20092
Median US apprentice plumber: $31056
Median US apprentice electrician: $31743
I guess I’m just not seeing it.
I was a graduate student at Penn State University while a unionization drive was going on. In general, I am highly supportive of labor — both my parents were career-long CWA members at Ma Bell and then their split-up companies. I thought carefully about the unionization drive and decided that, in my opinion, it would not be a good idea.
Background: when I was a graduate student I did have basically the standard setup: teaching some semesters, research for a few semesters (thank you to my advisor for the funding, so you can argue that I was a bit sheltered during part of my grad career if you want). We got a stipend and a tuition waiver.
I always felt like a student first. I always felt like my time in front of the classroom was part of my studies, since I intended to go into academia after grad school. I understand that this is not the case for all grad students.
One of the benefits of unionization at a commercial workplace is reduced turnover, but this doesn’t apply to a graduate school, where the goal is to graduate. A grad student isn’t looking to retire, he or she is looking for a diploma, a credential.
I am completely in agreement that graduate students ought to be paid a living wage during their time at the University. They should get decent health and family benefits. For the most part, I think this is a function of the fact that we ought to support public universities with state funding at a much higher lever than we have been over the past several years. Suppose the TAs strike for a higher wage. Okay, what part of the University budget are you willing to cut to pay for it?
Yes, okay, the football coach’s salary. He’s on contract for the next five years. The President’s? Let’s see, 700 TAs, a $700,000 salary, say she takes $1/year just for the honor of being President…
You see the point. I’d like grad students to get higher wages too. But in order to do it, more money needs to be coming in to the University, which calls for demanding legislative action. It’s not a company, where you can cut down the shareholder dividend. After wages, the most crucial issues are working conditions and benefits — and for such issues, an active graduate student association with a well-defined grievance process and a representative that the administration takes seriously works better, I think, than corporatizing the student-university relationship. While I was at Penn State we got ourselves a dental plan through the grad student association’s lobbying.
The key objection to this position, I think, is that unionization can address all these concerns with the additional power of the strike and of legal negotiating rights. But this is only a concern if the administration is so inattentive to graduate student complaints that the issue is deeper than just the TAs, I would say.
I don’t think it would be the end of the world if the grad students at a non-profit and/or public university unionized. There are plenty where they have, and frankly some endemic mumbling about unionization probably lights a few fires. I just don’t think it’s as useful in a public university setting as it is in the for-profit sector, and I think there are costs to introducing an adversarial element into the relationship which outweigh the benefits. The exception is for-profit universities, which are already corporate and frankly I don’t think are as good at their job in general as non-profit and public universities anyway.
Should have also said that in our universe there’s no such thing as a tuition waiver for grad students. Everybody pays, no matter how much financial support they have, or where those dollars come from. Paid GTA positions are a must for most students in order to have enough to survive.
inflection, you make some points that would be good, if this were a universe where the upper level positions were not inflated and excessive. When the university where I was a GA put a hiring freeze on professors, they continued to hire administrators – 17 new administrative positions in one year, all but one of them in the six figure salaries, while $40,000 a year professors were not being hired and classes were being cancelled. While the classes were being cancelled, people were agitating to ensure that students were able to graduate in four years. This is nearly impossible if the classes you require to graduate are cancelled for lack of teaching staff.
My general point being that there is more than enough fat that could be trimmed, as there is tremendous redundancy at the top. And don’t give me anything about the importance of these positions to the university; the work they do got done as well and much better in many cases when there were fewer administrators.
Here’s another possible effect of grad students unionizing: they start making noise about abusive advisors (including, of course, the ones who are unabashedly racist and sexist). Some things aren’t protected by tenure, right? If the grad student union makes enough noise and has the power to back it up the university might be forced to do something about Dr. McGrabby.
I think of grad student unionization as a good thing for other reasons. There’s already a flood of grad students supplying the cheap labor underpinning university reliance on adjuncts and part-time faculty. If this makes paying for grad students more expensive, leading the university to accept fewer of them, then at least would-be grad students will face the Point of Failure after finishing an undergrad degree rather than after spending years on a graduate degree only to face a shitty academic job market.
@PZ Myers
Not likely, sadly. Hawaii already has some of the highest tax rates out of any state, including the second-highest top marginal rate at 11%. The state already pushed through a tax hike a few years back over a veto – I doubt there’s much appetite to do that again.
And this is one of the big reasons I went overseas for my PhD.
inflection:
Workers don’t care much about turnover anyway. If anybody cares, it’s the people who own/manage the corporation. But in many cases they’re evidently okay with that too.
Although they’re not looking to retire (or to have a long career as grad students), they still do have an interest, like any worker does, in being able to assemble themselves in an organized way, to address any problems they have with their employers, pay, working conditions, etc. And they should still care what others’ experiences are going to be like after they leave, even if things don’t change quickly enough to have a direct impact on them personally.
So it’s always going to be a concern. That’s because administrators, however much they may try to be empathetic or cooperative, have no special access to the needs of grad students (or anybody else working there), whereas the grad students themselves do know stuff about their own lives.
I don’t consider unionization to be introducing “an adversarial element,” at least not one which wasn’t already there. One single grad student at a time complains (adversarially) to administrators/trustees/whatever, about how awful things are for each one of them — and nothing gets done about each one of them. Or they do such things collectively, and can use their leverage to actually get some things done. That can certainly be cooperative instead of adversarial. The reason why it’s not cooperative is because one side in that relationship (not generally the side with the workers who may or may not be unionized) didn’t want to cooperate in the first place. And that element was introduced a long time ago.
What are these costs supposed to be, which outweigh the rights people have to assemble themselves, to get acceptable compensation for their work, in a fair/safe/humane working environment, etc.? I don’t see where you mentioned any actual costs, much less ones that would outweigh all of that somehow….
Fuck all this bullshit. I’m a graduate student at the University of Oregon who just this winter finished participating in the longest legal strike in Oregon’s history and the statements from the UH provost are the exact same self serving shit that the university was spewing to the students every day via email. I have not taken a class in over a year and I plan on being here for two more years without enrolling in any credits besides research. That universities have the gall to claim that they are doing grad students a favor by not charging tens of thousands of dollars just for the privilege of coming in to work is appalling. Especially when the work that I and other graduate students do is vitally important in securing grants for the university that can be up to hundreds of thousands if not millions dollars.
The way universities treat their grad students only makes me more certain that it is important for grad students to have the ability to unionize. Even without a union the system is already adversarial because the workers want better conditions and the university wants to spend as little as possible. It just doesn’t look adversarial from the outside because without a way to bargain collectively, individual graduate students’ voices are to quiet to hear.
inflection @ 6
Could you explain what ‘corporatizing’ a relationship means? I guess I’m having trouble what the core differences are between your GSA and a grad student union. Providing a well-defined grievance process and a representative that higher-ups need to take seriously are two of the things that the unions I’m personally familiar with do. From how I’m reading your post, it sounds like the main difference is that unions can back this up with strikes (or the threat of strikes) if necessary. Nothing prevents a grad student union use the same lobbying tactics that your grad student association’s lobbying did.
As for how to pay for this; that’s both a fair and an unfair question. Money doesn’t come from nowhere, and so the budget needs to be allocated for this somehow. That said, not knowing how the budget pie is currently being sliced – and considering that every college has its own unique budget – I can’t simply say “Remove $X from Y, $Z from Q, and it’s all paid off!” Additionally, I’d imagine every group that gets a slice of the budget pie – departments, administration, grounds, athletics, etc – they’d also like a larger slice, and they tell this to the people who make the budget. Why shouldn’t grad students get to do the same?
inflection @ 6:
What planet do you live on, and how do I get there?
Because “introducing an adversarial element” sounds like you think there aren’t opposed interests at play already. Which rather sounds to me like you don’t really even know where unions came from.
My fiancee’s school has a Union for grad students, and I’d wish she’d join, because they need it especially. The grad students are treated like shit and are afraid of retaliation. Or they think that’s just how it’s supposed to be.
I heard from one person that their boss (a professor I liked and was disappointed to hear about) wouldn’t give them time off before going to a new job to visit family because “when I was at that point in my, I didn’t get to see my family.”
Yeah, why should you be motivated to make other people’s lives less shitty than yours was? /s
Abstinence only education. Don’t talk about where unions come from, because then people may want to have unions.
I guess I was fortunate. My mother had a stroke three weeks after I started my first TA job. They offered to let me go to Michigan for as long as I needed. I didn’t, because I wanted to make sure if she got more serious I would be able to leave easily. She got better, but I was glad to know I had the option. Because without leave time, it can be difficult to deal with family tragedies.
I’ve been there, in another non-union job, when I needed sick leave (which I was entitled to) and my boss wouldn’t allow it. Then she chewed me out because I had severe bronchitis and was coughing which disturbed the people who were taking licensing tests in the room near my cubicle. Then I ended up in the hospital with a severe asthma attack, and she wrote me up for abuse of leave.
Unions are important for everybody.
iknklast @ 8: I 100% agree. I did my undergrad at UT-Austin and just checked the figures at Wikipedia: 50,000 students between both grad and undergrad; 3,000 academic staff…
…21,000 administrative staff.
Yeah, a 1:2.5 ratio of administrators to students is way too overblown.
iknklast @ 17: Damn. I’ve rarely seen a comment thread go from polite to slime faster than one participant can even reply. Don’t you dare tell me I don’t know what a union is or what it’s for. I said in my original post that my family have been involved with labor unions for decades and that I’m supportive of unions in for-profit workplaces. My county Democratic Party, with me as an officer, is supporting the workers of the big local construction company in a major Bacon-Davis wage theft issue. We recently became a right-to-work state and I know exactly what we lost, and why (the intersection of business and political interests in the Republican Party). I know exactly what unions are for and where they come from. Unions are the stiff rails of the law, equalizing the playing field between capital and labor, and both sides deserve them.
To the rest of you: the planet I live on is named Ivory Tower. I work in academia. I very much wish to usher a series of graduate students toward a valuable diploma along with the skills to contribute to my field, and unless they tell me otherwise I consider this their main goal while they are at my university. I may supervise some of their work but I am not their employer and do not wish to be.
Although strikes no longer typically devolve into violence, the word displays its mechanism. A strike hits the bottom line of the very company paying a worker’s salary (although at a University, the customers are students, who cannot easily take their purchasing power elsewhere). It is, at the root, a tactic of desperation. If the graduate students at my university got desperate I would, with misgivings, support their right to unionize. I would do everything in my power to prevent this situation from arising in the first place, however, because the strike is the concealed handgun in the room.
At a for-profit workplace, the company’s goal is profit. That’s it. At a university, administrators certainly hav ea budget to keep and wages are a substantial chunk of that budget, but — if they have not completely degenerated into B-school drones with a football program — they have other goals for the University, which the graduate students share: for instance, educating graduate students. You seem to suggest that it is fantasy to want this relationship to be governed by rules other than those that reign on a Ford assembly line. I choose to pursue that goal.
Capital deserves nothing; it does nothing, and turns a profit solely because the state uses violence – indeed, historically plenty of lethal violence against strikers – to uphold theft.
The very fact that you talk about strikes devolving into violence – as if historically, striker violence against employers was even noticeable next to police and National Guard violence against strikers tells me you haven’t a clue. Which, considering no early-industrialised country has a labour history quite as blood-stained as the US, must count as impressive.
Unions do not, and never have, existed for the sole purpose of strikes. Indeed, the introduction of collective bargaining typically coincides with reduced labour unrest. And despite high-flown rhetoric about shared goals and yadda, the fact of the matter is this: Administrations cut wages paid to teaching staff beyond sustainability, causing serious hardship for student teachers, adjuncts, and non-tenure staff before then cannibalising the situation of the tenured staff. They do this because it is easier to do than stand up to the politicians who are running the schools into the ground. This is not a question of two possibilities (no unions and school survives, union and school suffers) but three: Unions and admin together fight defunding is also a possibility.
Really, the only question here is this: “Is it excusable to exploit people to perpetuate this institution?” If you answer no, then unions are a no-brainer, and the problem is not with grad students wanting more than is reasonable, but of funding not sufficing to run the school.
And if you answer yes, it’s hard to figure out how that’s not okay on a Ford assembly line, but it is okay in an educational setting. Educations are more important than cars, so we have to crack some eggs to make that omelet? Is that the only idea we’re working with?
(To be clear, inflection, you are apparently for such unions if things were so desperate, but not for them when things are not yet abysmal…. Not sure how that works or why it should be so bad before that’s an option. I mean, we’re not talking about the nuclear option here. They’re just unions, and they’re useful even in relatively good times. I have no clue what there is to be afraid of or have “misgivings” about.)
Does it have anything to do with this weird association you’re apparently making between unionization and for-profit institutions? If not… what the hell is that about? It’s not as if unions would turn your precious Ivory Towers into University of Phoenix franchises, or whatever the fuck that’s about. If I’m reading things into that somehow, then I don’t see how most of those points are relevant — when you’re apparently contrasting profit-making enterprises and the functions of an educational institution — since they both still have workers in them who have rights, freedoms, needs, interests, etc.
inflection:
I didn’t tell you that. That is from an earlier post by someone else, and I simply made an abstinence education joke about it.
And we lowly RAs who rely on soft money are shit out of luck. Unionization means TAs get to hold education hostage. But us? “Give us a living wage or you’ll never find out the truth about lobster mating habits!”
Politicians have bad enough foresight about education, let alone the benefit of research being done in their locality, be it state or country.
I think grad student unions are a good thing. So are postdoc and adunct unions. Our university has a very strong grad student union. But it’s also important that the union have good leadership, its mere existence isn’t going to be enough. For instance, when our department asked for incoming grad students to have a 15 hour training on how to be effective TAs, that was vetoed as being too onerous. But some research advisers have their grad students working in lab 60+ hours a week, and there’s nary a peep about that.
inflection
I don’t like that line of argument. I don’t like it at all.
Because it always gets flung at people who work in the public sector, telling them that they should essentially work for less. They always whine that they don’t have money and can’t do anything about it so would you please shut up? Getting more money into the education system is something union can actually help with.
Skatje Myers
They are not holding anything hostage, that’s highly inappropriate language framing a strike as a violent crime against innocent vcitims. They are threatening to go on strike. The simple, time honoured right and weapon of the worker. They don’t owe people their work. Yes, it sucks that some groups have more power in this than others because their work is immediatly impacting people. But that doesn’t mean they’re wrong to use it.
The solution is not for the TAs not to form unions and to fight for better wages because the RAs can’t, but to work together. Keyword solidarity.
What does a grad student get paid, net per month, in the US? Do you get paid more in states without a tuition waiver? I did all of my education in Europe, where grad students get paid very little, but I never seem to be able to pin down a direct comparison to the US when it comes to the stipends. Saying “we get paid crap” or “we get paid well” is all a matter of perspective, and I have heard both coming out of the States, without getting an idea as to how it compares to Europe.
I know the stipends can vary enormously, as they do here, but the basic stipends from state Unis, without additional grants coming from outside for a specific project, are pretty much the same throughout the country, and of course you get paid more if you work in a private institute.
I did my PhD in Italy, and I was paid a little over 1000 euro per month, after taxes and everything. However, in Italy, you ONLY do research for this money, no teaching. If you want to teach, you get paid extra, and on a lab-by-lab basis, a few hundred euro to teach a lab and run the experiments necessary for the students to get their results, if I’m not mistaken. We also didn’t get a tuition waiver, but the “tuition” is a school tax that amounts to 300-400euro/year. Also, Italy is one of the European countries that pays its grad students less, now I live in Germany and the net monthly stipend of a PhD student is closer to 1400 euro, also without any teaching, TA or other obligations, just research.
So I wonder, how does that compare to the States? Once again, I am referring to the absolute lowest base pay you can get, no external grants, Marie Curie projects or private institute money.
What’s this “allowing them to unionise” rubbish? Unions shouldn’t ask permission to exist, the answer will always be no.
The forces of darkness are privatising the lynch pins of civil society: education, roads, power, water, communications. If that’s the case then its back to the good old days of unions galore and industrial and civil unrest. Its like physics.
crys – when I did my grad student teaching, I taught 3 classes and got $1200 a month with no tuition waver (they did waive out of state tuition, and I was out of state, so that did help). My tuition ran about $1300 per month with fees. I also had to pay for housing and books.
When I took an RA, for a brief time I made pretty good money because I kept my TA. Then the school cracked down on the RAs who were also TAs, and cut down on the amount of hours we could be paid. My RA paid more per hour but did not come with an out of state tuition waver or insurance benefits, both of which were essential for me to survive, so I had to cut down the hours counted (but not the hours worked) in the higher paying position in order to retain the much needed benefits.
I don’t know how that compares; I don’t follow the exchange rates very closely.
Also, please don’t take my experience as the norm. I know it varies a lot from place to place. (And I was making about $900 a month when I started, so that $1200 was after 4 years)
@Giliell, professional cynic -Ilk-
Nothing I said implies that I think TAs shouldn’t unionize.
cyrs,
When I was in graduate school, I got $21,000 per annum to be a TA. I was not charged tuition, but I was charged fees, which typically ran $900 a year. I also had to buy my textbooks, which ran about $300 or $400 a semester. After my second year of graduate school, per policy, I stopped being a TA and did research full-time. I was supported by my PI’s grants and got a stipend of $23,000. I was still charged fees, which were about the same, and was not charged tuition. I was able to get by largely because within a few blocks of campus there was a glut of housing that – as it catered to students – was affordable (I paid between $350 and $600 a month, depending on utilities) and because I didn’t have a car or other money-sucking items. That said, after 4.5 years of graduate school, I’d accumulated $7,000 in credit card debt.
Our grad student union covers both TAs and RAs. It did gain affordable health insurance for grad students, but main reason for it wasn’t money, it was working conditions. GAs are supposed to be working only 20 hours a week so they can do classwork and research, and that is what the union was fighting for.
Several years ago, when I was in grad school, we were unionized. We still didn’t get amazing salaries, but it was livable. The good things about being unionized was that we got a great insurance plan for pretty cheap and that teaching assistants had to be paid for the hours they actually put in, so they couldn’t pay you for 20 hours a week, but expect 60 out of you.
I was a unionized grad student 25 yrs ago. At the time, only a couple universities in Ontario didn’t have unionized grad students and, now, I don’t think any university is non-unionized. The sky hasn’t fallen in Ontario and we still have excellent universities.
Grad students are in a terribly precarious situation. Your education, career and current job are all controlled by the same person. Your intellectual property is regularly stolen and you end up teaching more of the course than the professor who is being paid to do it.
I’m a trade unionist myself. I don’t understand the hatred unions inspire in people. Why is power in the hands of working people a bad thing?
Because mumble mumble corruption mumble Jimmy Hoffa mumble class warfare mumble mumble right to work mumble communism mumble mumble, that’s why.
(Because they are inconvenient to the owners of capital.)
PZ, I’m mostly on board, but this is seriously unfair:
Really? I work at a public university as a bureaucrat. If I want to take graduate courses, I have to pay for them at the rate of about $1000 per credit (and that’s resident tuition; $1800 per credit non-resident). That pays for building maintenance, lab equipment, computers, faculty or ad hoc instructors to teach me, and support service staff (like me!) to make the whole thing go; they’re not paying for the privilege to work here, they’re paying for that stuff. The fact that I’m providing an essential service to the university doesn’t mean I’m not demanding additional resources by being a student versus not, resources for which someone has to pay. Tuition waivers are worth exactly the amount of tuition one then doesn’t have to pay, receiving the services and equipment access for which others do have to pay. The problem isn’t that tuition remission is counted as part of pay, the problem is that tuition is so high for everyone that counting it as part of pay actually winds up constituting a substantial part of one’s pay.Graduate students are definitely exploited most places, but this isn’t one of the ways in which they are actually exploited, at least no more so than any/all students or employees.
John Horstman, 35
In addition to research, teaching, thesis/dissertation work, and other work in the lab/class, two common conditions of many graduate assistant positions are: 1) taking a full-time course load (16 hours per semester; some schools have grad-level ‘filler’/’research’/’teaching’ courses to drop it down to 1~2 actual classes per semester instead of 3~6 classes) and 2) maintaining at least a 3.0 GPA (on 4.0 scale). If the number of credit hours or the GPA drop below those thresholds, then the grad student would be on the hook for at least the last semester’s tuition that was waived in addition to losing the research/teaching position and/or being booted from the grad school. Requiring full-time student status to acquire a graduate assistant position and not providing a tuition waiver means the person would literally have to pay for the privilege of working as a graduate assistant (“tuition and fees required to keep position” is often much greater than “position’s pay”).
Does your position as a bureaucrat require you to take a large number of costly credits/classes in addition to your other work so that you can keep your job as a bureaucrat? Do professors or undergraduate students have to take a certain number of credits/classes to keep their jobs? Professors can take courses to sharpen their skills and broaden their knowledge base in addition to teaching and research, but where is it required?