It's a bit of a shame that the US doesn't really allow part time PhDs (at least not in any of the schools that I asked). If they did, conceivably a lot of these students could get a relatively well-paying job in engineering or a lab or something, and as such the schools could get away with paying less. Part of the reason that I didn't bother trying to pursue the CUNY PhD in mathematics was specifically because the stipend they were offering wouldn't be enough to cover my mortgage (~$2,000/month), and they didn't offer any kind of part-time plan.
Where is all this tuition even going to? Schools in the US charge an absurd amount of tuition compared to schools in Europe/Asia and yet these colleges are also systematically underpaying PhD students, Teaching Assistants, etc.
College Professors don't exactly make the big bucks either.
Yet, universities in the US have made put many Americans in lifelong debt.
These colleges are all "nonprofit" (and get significant tax benefits), so where is the money even going?
They definitely do in engineering - USC and UCLA had most of its PhD students working full time in industry and only part time in their PhD program and grad school generally. I know because I was one of them.
Tbf, if it's not a lab-based PhD, you'll usually manage to work on the side. I know several people who were in full-time employment throughout pretty much their whole PhD (aided by supportive employers and sabbaticals). Even at (elite) universities that had explicit rules against it, and cases where the university and the jobs were in different countries. I even know one guy who did a lab-based engineering PhD and continued doing a bit of consulting work for his old employer. It's not even that uncommon among people with prior work experience and skills that fit well with consulting/freelance work. You'll see it on LinkedIn. Internships are also common in many disciplines like Math and CS, and good advisors can even help you get them (I know a prof who sends at least one grad student to intern at Google every year).
It's not advertised and usually not recommended, but it's definitely possible. The key is to find a supervisor who's fine with it, don't even bother asking the administrators.
I don't really know how one does a part-time PhD. The kind of work that you produce during a PhD requires 4-6 years of full dedication. A part-time masters I could see.
A PhD is a full-time job, time-wise. I'm not sure how _really_ feasible a part-time PhD + part-time job really is. Maybe for some, but most likely not for most imho. Agreed that it would help financially though.
I believe that the stipulation of no part-time PhD is dependent on training grant requirements. I couldn't have a second job during graduate school and it would cause big problems for the department, and by extension, me, if I was found to have a second job. It might work differently in other fields, but this is at least my experience in a hospital-affiliated biology department.
when I was a phd student at Columbia, we had a student in our lab who was a full time employee at TJ Watson and his work at Watson was part and parcel of his phd. Basically supervised by both his IBM manager and my advisor.
When I was looking at programs, as I already had been working at a military lab since I was in HS, I asked every advisor I interviewed with if research work I was doing at the lab could be the basis of the phd if I wanted (i.e. to do the same thing as the labmate mentioned) and almost everyone I spoke to had zero issues with it, with the proviso that the work was appropriate for a phd.
At the end of the day, I did it all on campus (with many summers spent at labs or industry), but a good chunk of the work I did could easily have been done with proper guidance in an industry setting as well (though that's more in retrospect, I wouldn't have known how to sell the ideas to industry back then).
Engineering PhD candidates often have summer internships that pay extremely well. Most thesis advisors encourage their students to do this, since it helps ground research in real world problems (and conserves grant money, of course!)
I recently collected the first-year PhD stipends in computer science across 39 university departments, to have a real sense of the numbers. Basically to have a fair comparison, because a lot of reported stipends aren't clear whether they are 9-month or 12-month stipends, and stipends can different depending on the year/candidacy of the student.
The main conclusions I arrived at from this exercise is that 1) CS stipends vary quite a bit but have slowly been increasing, but NSF funding needs to catch up for them to go higher, 2) the 12-month stipend makes a big difference from the 9-month stipend, and I think universities should guarantee the 12-month stipend (which only half do), rather than making summer stipend dependent on availability of advisor funding or student jobs (like TAing).
It can be argued that the credential to land a PhD in CS in any of these university would have most of the time guaranteed a much much higher paying job in the industry, and potentially less stressful one at that.
Jeff, thanks so much for putting that stipend information together; I'm sure your list has started discussions amongst students and amongst faculty at many institutions. The variance in stipends was eye-opening to me, and clearly they all need to go up.
The posted numbers for my home institution, the University of Maryland, are a bit off; current offers are $25k for 9-month and up to $36k for 12-month, if funded on an RA over the summer. That RA summer funding is not guaranteed. Again, clearly, this needs to go up.
> universities should guarantee the 12-month stipend
I'm not sure how this would work in practice.
If you hand out 12-month contracts, you'll lose a ton of students, because they often want the summer for themselves (in many cases, they are from another country and want to travel home, or they have a spouse working somewhere else in the country).
If you give the students the option on an annual basis, a school like Columbia might have the money to cover unanticipated expenses, but mine does not.
> rather than making summer stipend dependent on availability of advisor funding or student jobs (like TAing)
I deferred joining a Bio lab out of undergrad after being pulled aside during my acceptance visit and given an 'academia life 101' from a postdoc. There were too many bio PhDs, too few academic positions, and too few opportunities in the business sector to have a lucrative and fulfilling career. Unless I was very lucky - according to this postdoc - I was making a poor decision. He advised me to go to industry a few years then reconsider.
I never looked back, and I often reflect on his intervention.
It saddens me greatly that many of my friends still in Bio have lived this prediction, while meanwhile academica's administrative staff counts (and salaries) balloon. For all the promise to human economy, bio is still astoundingly complex, difficult to monetize, and hard to justify increased budgets for. On the flip side, as essential to our planet and culture as understanding esoteric biological knowledge is (e.g. deep-sea fish behavior), nobody is willing to fund it at the scale needed before much of it disappears forever thanks to climate change.
Not sure how the wage issue can be solved, but more sources of funding towards hard research for research's sake (i.e. fact-finding in-vivo science) seems like it could help. So too, could forcing schools to obviously pay more by reducing the amount of admitted students. Less labor supply could give some leverage to often powerless grad students.
This led to me consulting during my PhD to supplement the stipend up to a reasonable salary. A lot of PhD students, especially if your work touches on computational sciences, are a lot more valuable than the university would like you to believe.
After moving to industry, I'm starting to realize how valuable the consulting experience was. The project management and scoping skills, and wearing multiple hats, were big benefits.
You may not know it, but the truth is more like "than the university is able to pay". These are non-profit institutions, typically. Consulting is a great idea for many reasons, not the least of which is building your network.
Note that this applies to biology PhD. Isn't a solution to reduce the amount of fellowship offered and increase the stipend. This would reduce the amount of publications, but potentially increase the average "quality" if more money means that students won't have to look for money on the side, and also if there is a more careful selection of the candidates.
While the article specifically calls out biology programs, at my university the CS department is similarly affected. (Stipends are set at a standard rate for all engineering depts.)
If your stipend is $19K, a single student's take-home pay is $16,734, less ~$1,600 in required departmental fees. So, you've got about $1261/mo to pay for everything. If you split a 1-bedroom for $2.2K (not including utilities), that means you've got $161 for electricity, food, phone, internet, fun, literally every other expense for the rest of the month.
The rapid rise in rents is the big killer here -- the difference between $500 and $1000 for a shared room is more than enough to break the bank.
3 years' of pain is worth it for many in computing, data science, and engineering, because it will definitely give candidates an edge for the rest of their careers.
But PhDs in some (not all) non-STEM fields almost seem like a blight on one's resume, and could make a PhD candidate's career harder, not easier.
Is that a signal there's an oversupply of PhDs in some disciplines? Possibly.
Interested to look into longitudinal studies of PhD students of different disciplines and where they end up 10 years' later..
In case some is curious about how it is in Europe: I'm a PhD student (physics) in Denmark and I get 2500$/month after tax. I save from 1000$ to 1500$ each month. Disclaimer: I bike everywhere and share a 1400$/month flat with partner. Also, the entire pay comes directly from the university, I never had to apply to get funding after getting accepted (this was the main reason to go to Denmark).
Here in France: I had a ~1 900€ salary after taxes (incl. income tax, 2 000€ otherwise) but because I was working in a company fulltime (the contract stated I was to devote myself 100% to my research, the reality was different but that's another topic).
My partner, on the other hand, has a public contract (with teaching charge), she gets around 1 400€ after taxes. Living with this in Paris is not easy (1 studio of 15m² will cost around 650-700€)
I think the PhD is overrated, and along with that I think a lot of university education is overrated; note this is someone with two BA's and a Masters. Unless you're teaching, or doing some hard core research, I don't see that the PhD is necessary or even a good investment. That time could have been spent gaining experience, which IMHO, is extremely valuable.
Part of the annoyance there is that most research gigs are gatekept behind doctorates. I cannot tell you how many times I've been declined from Microsoft Research, despite having a bachelors degree and more than a decade of industry experience, specifically because I'm "not qualified enough" for a research engineer experience.
> That time could have been spent gaining experience, which IMHO, is extremely valuable.
I certainly agree that if your goal is to maximize earning potential, than there's no question that industry experience is substantially more valuable than a PhD.
I don’t think anyone does grad school expecting that it’s going to be a good investment. Most people I know do it because they can’t imagine themselves doing anything other than research. Is it a waste if afterwards you just get some 9-5 software or finance gig? Definitely. That said, there’s few other ways you get to spend several years becoming a world expert *in a topic of your choice*
A PhD has never been about economics. It is about impacting the type of work you do and how much control you have over the direction of that work. Want to work in a major research lab? Get a PhD. Want to be a professor building a research program in an area of your choosing (assuming available funding)? PhD required.
I know biology and many other STEM stipends are very low.
As someone in a business field with a very high stipend (32k), I am also feeling the pinch. My wife and I keep a relatively strict budget and I track with YNAB, and gas alone is pretty damaging to our spare income. And I am lucky to be at an institution in a college town with a relatively low cost of living. I don't know how my peers in cities like Boston do it.
Have you considered a used bicycle for transportation? Hobbyists refurbish old steel frames that last forever and work as well as they did on day one, and they're usually $100-$300 depending on your desired comfort level.
Not all STEM is created equal. While there may not be thousands and thousands of jobs for a biology PhD, there are over 1 million open software/IT jobs. The good paying jobs are focused on what we value as a society. Clearly we value tweets and tiktoks and apps on mobile. We don't value teachers and nurses and lots of other essential jobs. If we want change, that is where we need to focus; find a way to value contributors to society.
Is it just me or is the rampant abuse of the H1B system absolutely prolific but a sort of hush topic in SV? The more I see the hiring from the inside the more obvious the exploitation seems. I would really like some context from someone with a more positive view of the subject as it is really souring me to current management methodologies from a nationalistic perspective at least within my filter bubble.
I'm a CS PhD student in a place where rents are really high, but I pay no rent because I have an RA position in an undergrad dorm. It's not very much additional work, and saves me a lot of money. If you're a cash-strapped PhD student and your university allows grad student RAs, you owe it to yourself to apply.
While I agree that PhD students don't get enough cash on a weekly basis to get buy, they are certainly compensated well above what is quoted in the article.
International PhD students by law cannot work more than 20 hours a week. Most institutions cap paid responsibilities at 20 hours a week. Most have 9 month appointments, most likely get the full cost of their tuition and fees waved. Most of the time waved costs such as tuition are not counted as compensation so are tax free. Most likely get healthcare.
A PhD student at U-FL has an effective compensation package well above 75k per year even though they only directly see 18k in pay.
There's not a line in this that makes any sense. Sure, maybe you're only TA'ing 20 hrs a week max, but you're also doing research work well beyond those 20 hrs regardless of whether your advisor has enough grant money to let you escape the TA time sink by putting you on the clock as an RA for work you were already going to do.
And it's a joke to pretend that you should owe tuition. That's nothing but a tax dodge for the university so they can pay you even less (pre-tax) for the same post-tax take-home.
What are you even talking about? Are you counting the bullshit known as “tuition” in the compensation? PhD candidates are really employees, not students.
Even a Princeton postdoc’s comp doesn’t reach 75k. A bit more than 50k actually in the physics department (might have risen a bit in the past few years, not sure).
Thinking in this way has always been very toxic. Some professors think this way and will accidentally state how PhD students are overpaid and underworked... Any sane analysis would note that PhDs are valid added to society, we want PhDs, and pipelines into industry for them. Using your analysis there would never be another PhD student.
I believe that FunnyBadger is pointing out that people have been pointing this out for a long time and is frustrated that nobody has paid attention to it until it became a crisis. You know, kind of like how we treat every other problem we have.
I was accepted into a Chem PhD program in the early 80's, but knew it would pay crap for years, so I figured I could work as a programmer for a couple years and save some money. 40 years later - I never went back to the PhD.
I'm a software developer in a large german city and I'm facing this issue. Rent is very high, around 50% of my net income. Food gets more expensive by the day and the war in the Ukraine isn't even factored in yet. I can't live outside the city since I need to go to the office 2-3 times per week just for the privilege to stare at my monitor there, just like at home.
If the action is having everyone else (including many who never attended college) pay off their debt, that seems like a bad idea. This just seems like a bad decision on the PhD student's part.
As far as I can tell what he did is more or less common business in high speed currency trading (and part of the reason the EU originally planed to ban it, until lobby corruption happened).
If your trading bot (here the "algorithm of the index") messes up you are deep in problems because other bots and people will find it and will use it to their advantage.
Pop quiz: In what countries does it cost a full day's wages or more to fill a car's gas tank?
US minimum wage is $7.25/hr. As of this writing, US gas prices average $4.71/gal. For a typical car the gas tank holds about 15 gallons. Even a small car would have a 12 gallon tank.
I was a little skeptical of this because of the impact of state-level minimum wage laws that are higher than the federal, so I pulled up the data on how many people are paid the US federal minimum wage.
Turns out that 1.1 million people have jobs that pay the federal minimum wage or less. But that number does not include tips, and about 60% of those people work in restaurants or bars. It's hard to say how much in the way of tips they get, but it's fair to say that there are at least 440,000 people who are earning no more than the federal minimum wage and don't get tips to make up for it.
That's about 0.6% of the hourly workforce. For them, filling a 15 gallon tank of gas would take 10 hours of labor, or even more after deducting employee taxes.
Also, while the federal minimum wage demographic skews young, about half of the 1.1m figure above are over the age of 25.
Pair it with the fact that by-and-by, apartments are extremely expensive, and in short supply, so that service jobs are often not near where people are forced to live, and that you have to pair the cost of a car with the cost of gas, and rent. Public transit is a joke, a hollow underfunded mess in most cities.
It is absolutely brutal out there, and the response is inhumane.
I don't want to discredit the experience of grad students. I've known more than a few Grad students (anecdote warning), and they are also stuck in a special kind of hell. As the article mentions, they often can't seek other employment, so they're stuck with what the university pays. But even if they could, they can't - universities may stipulate that they expect X number of hours a week, but that's a joke. Every task given over to graduate students comes with piles of mandatory overtime under crap conditions that are unpaid.
The university may talk about 'valuable experience that will pay dividends' (conveniently not paid out by the university), but grad students often deal with losing proof of that experience when their work or ideas appear under the byline of their advisor. What do you do? Your relationship with your advisor is crucial to graduating.
Suffer all that, and _maybe_ you'll get your PhD. I've met a couple of phD students who dropped out simply because their advisors were intolerable, or really disinterested in any part of the advising process except squeezing work from their student workers.
Looking from the outside in, there's a weird sorta hazing elitist mindset going on. Professors say, "My PhD program sucked, so now I'm going to make it suck for you. Can't hack it? Well, you probably don't 'belong'".
> Pop quiz: In what countries does it cost a full day's wages or more to fill a car's gas tank?
Most of them? If you're looking at minimum wages, Luxembourg with the highest at $14.91[1] comes out to about $120 daily. Gasoline is at or above 2€/l in Europe now, a typical gas tank holds about 60 liters, so about 120€ to fill the tank. Which is more than $120.
You don't need to fill the tank daily, at least I'd hope not.
> Pop quiz: In what countries does it cost a full day's wages or more to fill a car's gas tank?
i'm going to guess "most of them" if you're using minimum wage.
i just checked britain and came up with 107.31 pounds for an average tank, whereas 8 hours at their minimum wage will get you 76 pounds.
so what's the point? grad students are usually salaried in my experience, and can get housing near enough to the university that they walk, not drive, even in the US.
Pop Quiz: How many people in the US are working for the Federal Minimum wage right now today...
I am willing to bet it is very few given what I have seen advertised for traditional minimum wage jobs.
I am not sure how pointing to what the legal minimum wage is holds any value in the conversation, that matters is the current market rate for labor, we should not be looking to government as the basis of our economic worldview
> Pop quiz: In what countries does it cost a full day's wages or more to fill a car's gas tank?
In most of them, I'd bet. Just for example, in Czech Republic we're currently at $7/US gal. Our median (NOT minimum) income is around $8.5 per hour. So this is 1.5 working days for your 15 gallon tank for the average worker.
I got an ebike and filling that up costs me very little. Not to mention the savings on insurance, registration, parking, smog, maintenance and they can be cheap to buy if you know where to look
Who needs to buy 15 gallons of gasoline daily (unless in the transit industry or doing a long road trip)? Seems like a mismatch between frequency of earning (days), and car filling.
Most people fill their car weekly or less. Heck, since the pando, I do it less than once a month.
tombert|3 years ago
LewisVerstappen|3 years ago
College Professors don't exactly make the big bucks either.
Yet, universities in the US have made put many Americans in lifelong debt.
These colleges are all "nonprofit" (and get significant tax benefits), so where is the money even going?
FunnyBadger|3 years ago
t_mann|3 years ago
It's not advertised and usually not recommended, but it's definitely possible. The key is to find a supervisor who's fine with it, don't even bother asking the administrators.
gaze|3 years ago
georgeburdell|3 years ago
twobitshifter|3 years ago
the_svd_doctor|3 years ago
abcc8|3 years ago
compsciphd|3 years ago
When I was looking at programs, as I already had been working at a military lab since I was in HS, I asked every advisor I interviewed with if research work I was doing at the lab could be the basis of the phd if I wanted (i.e. to do the same thing as the labmate mentioned) and almost everyone I spoke to had zero issues with it, with the proviso that the work was appropriate for a phd.
At the end of the day, I did it all on campus (with many summers spent at labs or industry), but a good chunk of the work I did could easily have been done with proper guidance in an industry setting as well (though that's more in retrospect, I wouldn't have known how to sell the ideas to industry back then).
unknown|3 years ago
[deleted]
hedora|3 years ago
unknown|3 years ago
[deleted]
lazyjeff|3 years ago
Data: https://jeffhuang.com/computer-science-open-data/#verified-c...
The main conclusions I arrived at from this exercise is that 1) CS stipends vary quite a bit but have slowly been increasing, but NSF funding needs to catch up for them to go higher, 2) the 12-month stipend makes a big difference from the 9-month stipend, and I think universities should guarantee the 12-month stipend (which only half do), rather than making summer stipend dependent on availability of advisor funding or student jobs (like TAing).
Aperocky|3 years ago
JohnPDickerson|3 years ago
The posted numbers for my home institution, the University of Maryland, are a bit off; current offers are $25k for 9-month and up to $36k for 12-month, if funded on an RA over the summer. That RA summer funding is not guaranteed. Again, clearly, this needs to go up.
bachmeier|3 years ago
I'm not sure how this would work in practice.
If you hand out 12-month contracts, you'll lose a ton of students, because they often want the summer for themselves (in many cases, they are from another country and want to travel home, or they have a spouse working somewhere else in the country).
If you give the students the option on an annual basis, a school like Columbia might have the money to cover unanticipated expenses, but mine does not.
> rather than making summer stipend dependent on availability of advisor funding or student jobs (like TAing)
The money has to come from somewhere.
sbarbarian|3 years ago
I never looked back, and I often reflect on his intervention.
It saddens me greatly that many of my friends still in Bio have lived this prediction, while meanwhile academica's administrative staff counts (and salaries) balloon. For all the promise to human economy, bio is still astoundingly complex, difficult to monetize, and hard to justify increased budgets for. On the flip side, as essential to our planet and culture as understanding esoteric biological knowledge is (e.g. deep-sea fish behavior), nobody is willing to fund it at the scale needed before much of it disappears forever thanks to climate change.
Not sure how the wage issue can be solved, but more sources of funding towards hard research for research's sake (i.e. fact-finding in-vivo science) seems like it could help. So too, could forcing schools to obviously pay more by reducing the amount of admitted students. Less labor supply could give some leverage to often powerless grad students.
boldlybold|3 years ago
After moving to industry, I'm starting to realize how valuable the consulting experience was. The project management and scoping skills, and wearing multiple hats, were big benefits.
lupire|3 years ago
Category error. Correction: You have the ability to do outside work that pays more than anything the University needs.
It's not the university's fault if you want to do a low value research job at the university.
lnwlebjel|3 years ago
You may not know it, but the truth is more like "than the university is able to pay". These are non-profit institutions, typically. Consulting is a great idea for many reasons, not the least of which is building your network.
IMTDb|3 years ago
hwbehrens|3 years ago
While the article specifically calls out biology programs, at my university the CS department is similarly affected. (Stipends are set at a standard rate for all engineering depts.)
If your stipend is $19K, a single student's take-home pay is $16,734, less ~$1,600 in required departmental fees. So, you've got about $1261/mo to pay for everything. If you split a 1-bedroom for $2.2K (not including utilities), that means you've got $161 for electricity, food, phone, internet, fun, literally every other expense for the rest of the month.
The rapid rise in rents is the big killer here -- the difference between $500 and $1000 for a shared room is more than enough to break the bank.
nomilk|3 years ago
But PhDs in some (not all) non-STEM fields almost seem like a blight on one's resume, and could make a PhD candidate's career harder, not easier.
Is that a signal there's an oversupply of PhDs in some disciplines? Possibly.
Interested to look into longitudinal studies of PhD students of different disciplines and where they end up 10 years' later..
mrfox321|3 years ago
lightweightbaby|3 years ago
plopilop|3 years ago
My partner, on the other hand, has a public contract (with teaching charge), she gets around 1 400€ after taxes. Living with this in Paris is not easy (1 studio of 15m² will cost around 650-700€)
Overtonwindow|3 years ago
tombert|3 years ago
> That time could have been spent gaining experience, which IMHO, is extremely valuable.
I certainly agree that if your goal is to maximize earning potential, than there's no question that industry experience is substantially more valuable than a PhD.
s1dev|3 years ago
dev_tty01|3 years ago
Kevin_S|3 years ago
As someone in a business field with a very high stipend (32k), I am also feeling the pinch. My wife and I keep a relatively strict budget and I track with YNAB, and gas alone is pretty damaging to our spare income. And I am lucky to be at an institution in a college town with a relatively low cost of living. I don't know how my peers in cities like Boston do it.
uoaei|3 years ago
natly|3 years ago
snarf21|3 years ago
arminiusreturns|3 years ago
throwaway956373|3 years ago
AtlasBarfed|3 years ago
Look at the endowments.
Look at the tuition costs.
Look at the grants.
Where is the money going? As usual in the US, not to the people doing the work.
debacle|3 years ago
uberman|3 years ago
International PhD students by law cannot work more than 20 hours a week. Most institutions cap paid responsibilities at 20 hours a week. Most have 9 month appointments, most likely get the full cost of their tuition and fees waved. Most of the time waved costs such as tuition are not counted as compensation so are tax free. Most likely get healthcare.
A PhD student at U-FL has an effective compensation package well above 75k per year even though they only directly see 18k in pay.
yxwvut|3 years ago
And it's a joke to pretend that you should owe tuition. That's nothing but a tax dodge for the university so they can pay you even less (pre-tax) for the same post-tax take-home.
oefrha|3 years ago
What are you even talking about? Are you counting the bullshit known as “tuition” in the compensation? PhD candidates are really employees, not students.
Even a Princeton postdoc’s comp doesn’t reach 75k. A bit more than 50k actually in the physics department (might have risen a bit in the past few years, not sure).
the_svd_doctor|3 years ago
While most teaching (and research) assistanships might indeed be technically 20h/week, I can assure you most/all PhD students work >20h/week total.
You still need to do your research on the side. If you RA and your PhD research align, nice. If it doesn't, tough luck.
mbauman|3 years ago
Wat. Citation needed.
voxl|3 years ago
pastor_bob|3 years ago
FunnyBadger|3 years ago
Hint: it's not.
sudden_dystopia|3 years ago
fny|3 years ago
coldcode|3 years ago
muh_gradle|3 years ago
kingkawn|3 years ago
Hint: No.
unknown|3 years ago
[deleted]
tpoacher|3 years ago
DickieStarshine|3 years ago
unknown|3 years ago
[deleted]
miked85|3 years ago
If the action is having everyone else (including many who never attended college) pay off their debt, that seems like a bad idea. This just seems like a bad decision on the PhD student's part.
dathinab|3 years ago
If your trading bot (here the "algorithm of the index") messes up you are deep in problems because other bots and people will find it and will use it to their advantage.
jnash|3 years ago
29athrowaway|3 years ago
kyle_martin1|3 years ago
[deleted]
cratermoon|3 years ago
Pop quiz: In what countries does it cost a full day's wages or more to fill a car's gas tank?
US minimum wage is $7.25/hr. As of this writing, US gas prices average $4.71/gal. For a typical car the gas tank holds about 15 gallons. Even a small car would have a 12 gallon tank.
mediaman|3 years ago
Turns out that 1.1 million people have jobs that pay the federal minimum wage or less. But that number does not include tips, and about 60% of those people work in restaurants or bars. It's hard to say how much in the way of tips they get, but it's fair to say that there are at least 440,000 people who are earning no more than the federal minimum wage and don't get tips to make up for it.
That's about 0.6% of the hourly workforce. For them, filling a 15 gallon tank of gas would take 10 hours of labor, or even more after deducting employee taxes.
Also, while the federal minimum wage demographic skews young, about half of the 1.1m figure above are over the age of 25.
Above data is per the BLS.
NullInvictus|3 years ago
It is absolutely brutal out there, and the response is inhumane.
I don't want to discredit the experience of grad students. I've known more than a few Grad students (anecdote warning), and they are also stuck in a special kind of hell. As the article mentions, they often can't seek other employment, so they're stuck with what the university pays. But even if they could, they can't - universities may stipulate that they expect X number of hours a week, but that's a joke. Every task given over to graduate students comes with piles of mandatory overtime under crap conditions that are unpaid.
The university may talk about 'valuable experience that will pay dividends' (conveniently not paid out by the university), but grad students often deal with losing proof of that experience when their work or ideas appear under the byline of their advisor. What do you do? Your relationship with your advisor is crucial to graduating.
Suffer all that, and _maybe_ you'll get your PhD. I've met a couple of phD students who dropped out simply because their advisors were intolerable, or really disinterested in any part of the advising process except squeezing work from their student workers.
Looking from the outside in, there's a weird sorta hazing elitist mindset going on. Professors say, "My PhD program sucked, so now I'm going to make it suck for you. Can't hack it? Well, you probably don't 'belong'".
pilsetnieks|3 years ago
Most of them? If you're looking at minimum wages, Luxembourg with the highest at $14.91[1] comes out to about $120 daily. Gasoline is at or above 2€/l in Europe now, a typical gas tank holds about 60 liters, so about 120€ to fill the tank. Which is more than $120.
You don't need to fill the tank daily, at least I'd hope not.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_minimum_w...
chrisseaton|3 years ago
Most countries.
bsagdiyev|3 years ago
sigstoat|3 years ago
i'm going to guess "most of them" if you're using minimum wage.
i just checked britain and came up with 107.31 pounds for an average tank, whereas 8 hours at their minimum wage will get you 76 pounds.
so what's the point? grad students are usually salaried in my experience, and can get housing near enough to the university that they walk, not drive, even in the US.
phpisthebest|3 years ago
I am willing to bet it is very few given what I have seen advertised for traditional minimum wage jobs.
I am not sure how pointing to what the legal minimum wage is holds any value in the conversation, that matters is the current market rate for labor, we should not be looking to government as the basis of our economic worldview
jhgb|3 years ago
In most of them, I'd bet. Just for example, in Czech Republic we're currently at $7/US gal. Our median (NOT minimum) income is around $8.5 per hour. So this is 1.5 working days for your 15 gallon tank for the average worker.
BTW, someone already did the relevant calculations: https://www.globalpetrolprices.com/articles/85/ -- feel free to compare the situation in the US to other countries.
midhhhthrow|3 years ago
908B64B197|3 years ago
I would assume most of the countries that have months of backlog for US Visas consular appointments?
vangelis|3 years ago
twistedpair|3 years ago
Most people fill their car weekly or less. Heck, since the pando, I do it less than once a month.
umeshunni|3 years ago