They also charge tuition that doesn't exist for grad students. Your classes year 1 or two in most stem phd programs are going to basically be the professors from the department giving research talks trying to get you to join their lab. Then they end and you are doing research or TAing for the department for the next 3-however many years. Only the thing is, the school still makes you sign up for tuition units, for a special class that only has grad students in it, and when you look at your bill you are charged full tution for this nonexistant class that just exists on paper. Your funding, whether it be the from your professor in an RAship or from the department in a TAship or an outside fund like the NSF, has to pay for this nonexistant classes tuition. You might be a line item of 90k a year on the grant budget, but you only see 35k from the nonexistent tuition. The rest just poofs into smoke into the inner workings of the school bureaucracy.
It's basically money laundering with extra steps, and there is no way out because literally every school does this and too many people on academia have Stockholm syndrome.
asdff|4 years ago
It's basically money laundering with extra steps, and there is no way out because literally every school does this and too many people on academia have Stockholm syndrome.