As an undergraduate, I always felt like the money given to graduate students was just a tax on undergraduates. Whenever the graduate instructors wanted more money, they would raise the fees for undergraduate students.
The first step to addressing the college affordability crisis is to get the government out of student loans to attend private universities and colleges. If private lenders want to step in, that’s fine, but then they have to do an actual actuarial process to determine which students will be capable of repaying. Once the government is only involved in public education, they can start working on cost cutting, but that too has to start with cutting back on loans, because those just make tuition go up.
I get that guaranteed loans come from a place of wanting to make education more accessible and not just a part of the entrenched privilege of the wealthy, but guaranteed loans are one of those zombie policies that makes the situation worse rather than accomplishing its goal.
https://cardinalatwork.stanford.edu/benefits-rewards/compens...
I am not convinced that the value add to the undergrad environment will make up for it.
Cooks and waiters in restaurants don't work for free either. Programmers don't work for free and negotiate salary raises.
In my experience, graduate students aren't really that effective at research until several years in to their education. From a productivity standpoint, it is largely a loss. Many would prefer to hire post-docs instead. They end up being not much more expensive after everything else is taken into account, and they are ready to do good work from the get-go (which, for people who's livelihoods depend on getting tenure and/or grant money, is pretty dang important).
https://www.science.org/content/article/postdoc-union-reache...
Every university has numbers on their site claiming how awesome they are, it's meaningless
The point is that by any reasonable standard, HMC delivers very high quality undergraduate education without having a bunch of graduate students doing research and assisting with teaching. Therefore the point made by @CaveTech above is invalid.
https://www.hmc.edu/research/student-research-opportunities/
For that reason, they deserve to be paid, and I would argue given their role presently and for the future of the country, they should be paid at least enough to rent a 1 br apartment and cook their own meals.
I don't know if that's an unheard of arrangement or not, but it sounded totally weird to me.
1) The UC professor offered a remote postdoc because they did not have enough funding to pay the minimum UC postdoc salary, but could pay less to out of state employees
2) The UC professor offered a remote postdoc because the allowed UC postdoc salary was not sufficient to attract candidates given the area's cost of living
Someone else probably accepted, in her case she'd already taken a better opportunity elsewhere. I just thought it was strange for a grad student position to be so disconnected from the university campus.
But with the insane cost of living I guess it's not surprising.
Mind you, they are not paid a lot, but enough to be able to rent an apartment in the city the university is in.
In English, we have started calling them PhD "students" as well, which imo very much undermines the perceived position of these "students".
The research subsidizes the university, not the other way around as you somehow think. Most professors would love to spend more time on undergrad education, but that's not what keeps the lights on - research grants do.
The lab equipment, the computers, all of that comes from research grants. Professors are incentivized by the university to get more grant money (e.g. focus more on research), because that means the university gets more money. This isn't complicated.
The career-building part after getting my BS was an exercise in futility, but if I could go back in time and go straight into my trade at my current workplace, I wouldn't. Thankfully I had a scholarship that covered tuition, so loans weren't an issue.