Harvard Tells Grad Students to Get Food Stamps
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Archived version: https://archive.is/KLjzg
Far too often, strict cross-department salary bands often end up doing exactly that, which is ironic given that most humanities PhDs typically come from more affluent backgrounds than STEM PhDs (at least at Harvard). It breaks trust with the STEM departments - and is a large part of the reason graduate student unions, including the HGSU, typically do not win the majority of the vote from STEM department graduate students.
Where do you get this from?
See educational background of humanities PhDs, see also the proportion of international students from developing nations like China or India in each department.
It’s also just been obviously true from my anecdotal interactions with many PhD students at Harvard.
1) This is only looking at PhD recipients, not all grad students. (PhD completion rates can be low.)
2) It's questionable to proxy socioeconomic background from educational attainment of the parents, especially when we're talking about the humanities. I haven't read the document fully yet; does it even say whether or not humanities PhDs tend to come from humanities parents? I have a Masters in philosophy, which wouldn't even get me a job in a coffee shop. At best, a humanities PhD gets you a professorship, and humanities professors are not particularly affluent compared to people in say, business or tech. You're probably better off with a BS in CompSci than with any humanities degree.
Not to mention that in general, STEM grad students tend to be vastly better funded in school than humanities grad students.
Which was my original claim?
> It's questionable to proxy socioeconomic background from educational attainment of the parents
I agree it is not ironclad, but it jives with both my anecdotal experience and also most of the stats I can find.
> Not to mention that in general, STEM grad students tend to be vastly better funded in school than humanities grad students
Which is my precise point? And irrelevant to lethe familial background of PhDs
> Which was my original claim?
But the subject is grad student salaries, and grad students by definition do not yet have a PhD, or else they wouldn't be students anymore and wouldn't get grad student salaries.
>> Not to mention that in general, STEM grad students tend to be vastly better funded in school than humanities grad students
> Which is my precise point? And irrelevant to lethe familial background of PhDs
I don't understand how you can now say familial background is irrelevant when you're the very one who attempted to make it relevant? Your argument seemed to be that "any efforts to raise salaries should be careful to ensure that salary money isn't simply being redirected from STEM PhDs to humanities PhDs" because "most humanities PhDs typically come from more affluent backgrounds than STEM PhDs".
> I don't understand how you can now say familial background is irrelevant
I am saying that the funding of current PhD students is irrelevant to whether their family is wealthy, not that familial background is irrelevant.
I don't think it's correct to equate having a graduate degree with being "wealthy", especially depending on which degree it is specifically. In any case, graduate student salaries aren't means-tested at all, and the weird form of backdoor familial means-testing that you're suggesting, i.e., don't raise the funding for humanities students, seems quite bizarre and extremely imperfect. Unless you're claiming, absurdly, that there are no STEM grad students of affluent background, I don't see that this form of means-testing has any place in union negotiations. The document you cited just shows averages, but individual graduate students of all fields clearly have parents with every different kind of educational attainment.
On a personal note, I was a grad student in the humanities, neither of my parents has a college degree, and they certainly weren't affluent. Moreover, they didn't pay a dime for my grad school. I would have loved if there were means testing, because I would have benefitted, but it didn't exist. So it's difficult to avoid taking this personally when humanities students are wrongly stereotyped.
I noticed the same thing when I was in college though. Those of us trying to climb the ladder mostly took engineering or science things lol.
It looks a bit like it doesn't have to be that way, it just is.
Famously djb complained about this at uic though apparently it has improved.
In STEM, well, really hard science, engineering, and CS, you and your advisor are tightly coupled. PhD students do the bulk of the hard work, while the advisor acts as some combination of directing long-term research thrusts, managing the capabilities of the lab (both in terms of human and equipment), and a veteran with expertise that can chip in when they have time. How that balance shakes out depends on the advisor, field, and group members, but they often do some amount of each in order of appearance. Most PhD students I have known are thus funded through grants their advisor wrote with little to no involvement from students directly (the second most common source is those funded through a few programs like the NSF GRFP, but in the cases I know, their advisor had money lined up for them in the event they weren’t awarded the grant). The application and reward both break down funding in terms of students, equipment, discretionary funds, etc., and are often large enough to fund multiple students. Even if a professor didn’t write much of an article or do the bench work, their name goes on there for guiding the overall project and procuring the funds (and hopefully at least giving revisions on manuscript drafts).
Very big schools (e.g., some in California) have high drop out rates because they admit more students than professors can fund and the weaker ones get cut because they can’t find an advisor to take them after their first year or two. Smaller schools tend to have professors more involved up front and admit students only if at least one professor is interested in them joining their group, so the filtering happens much earlier.
In the humanities and, from what I’ve heard by friends in the social sciences the dynamic is very different. Your “advisor” and you interact very infrequently because there is no research group being run. They might give you some high level advice but that’s it unless you seek more out. Your money, then, needs to come from an external fellowship to which you applied or a departmental fellowship. I know at least one department whose students are all funded via the interest on a massive donation made decades ago for this explicit purpose (but only for students in that department, the money can’t be used elsewhere). For those students in that prestigious department, life is easy. For students at famous schools, the department often has more fellowship funding and they are more competitive when seeking external grants For students at less famous places, resources are scarce.
They have also had to cut spending on students and faculty to ensure this surplus.
It's distasteful that Walmart likely has many employees on SNAP but at least they make up for it by paying corporate income taxes (although perhaps this is debatable as to what degree).
But Harvard is a non-profit and therefore is not even paying its share into the system but benefitting fairly directly from the SNAP program.
“the education industry” -> You mean research industry?
We are paying for a system that rewards the few rich and strings along the many in a system of poverty and pain.
So, let's fix the incentives and stop doing that. What could possibly be _more_ relevant?
According to the Massachusetts SNAP eligibility site, a grad student earning the minimum Harvard grad student salary would have to be in a household of 3 people with neither of the other 2 working to qualify for SNAP.
If your household has you and one other person working, and that other person is working half time earning Massachusetts minimum wage, you'd need to have 4 people in your household. The the other person who works is working full time you'd need to have 5 people in your household.
If both people working are Harvard grad students they would need 6 people in their household to qualify.
So a grad student with two kids? Or a spouse on mat leave + a newborn? Or two elderly parents? Pretty much any Harvard grad student that isn't single or cohabitating with a fully-employed person would fit under this criterion.
If the board and the CEO collude, they can set the CEO's salary at the expected difference between revenue and expenses. Result: no profit!