"A Stanford professor"... Please make sure to attach names specifically for such bullshit views, it seems this is Jonathan Berk, you can only find the cowards name in what looks like footnotes.
Edit: he is by the way Professor of Finance, which makes him and his opinion even more unlikeable. Also got his PhD in 1990! Just to give some context to his idiotic intro here talking about how wondrous it was he got paid for doing a PhD.
Berk
Tea-drinker slang for "fool". The name fits.
Is tea drinking a big enough deal to have its own slang?
Another rich kid from South Africa acting like he did it all on his own.
More like Bonathan Jerk
Calling them "students" is not helping, the work is often part of their professors' output. Maybe should be called research apprentices/assistants/interns or just PhD candidates.
This is the issue with how this whole thing is framed.
Of course the university doesn't owe grad students anything besides an education.
But, being a grad student need not involve any teaching or professor research support. That's labor. It's customary labor that may be exchanged for education, but it is indeed an exchange of value for labor and subject to everything that entails.
Source: got a real grad degree without any of that BS just paid tuition (partially via my employers tuition reimbursement:)
You could owe them both in one of the most expensive places in the US to live. Teaching the lower division courses you won’t touch should at least afford rent, groceries, and gas.
Oh and Berk also objects to DEI, how surprising coming from an Apartheid-era relic. He’s just another conservative, tenured piece of shit who likes riling up the student body.
He's another South African who grew up in the Apartheid era, and left South Africa around the time Apartheid ended. You can taste the vile Apartheid poison in all his work.
So a fascist. Not suprising.
The Stanford University endowment includes real estate and other investments valued at $36.5 billion as of August 31, 2023,[1] and is one of the four largest academic endowments in the United States.[2] The endowment consists of $29.9 billion in a merged pool of assets and $6.6 billion of real estate near the main campus. Along with Stanford's pension assets, working capital, and non-cash gifts, the endowment is managed by Stanford Management Company (SMC), a Stanford-owned investment management company.[3]
The same Stanford that charges $62k per year in tuition and is located in one of the most expensive areas in the U.S.? Maybe the grad students should commute from Wyoming in order to teach Professor Dickweed's classes for him so they can afford rent? The disconnect from reality is ridiculous.
Weird. Here I thought having to work a full time job came at the expense of education. I have coworkers who only take once course per semester, because they literally have no time for more.
Then again, our mistake was being born into the working class. We should’ve tried being born into rich families that could provide for us during school instead.
There's plenty of working class families that have and continue to put their children through college. If you select with respect to cost, it is especially not hard.
That's not to say college isn't incredibly overpriced these days, but 2 year community colleges offer a great budget pathway
Ah, you sinned the original sin.
Born broke.
I finished my Biochem PhD in 2023 and the only way I survived the 6 years of indentured servitude was by working from 2014 to mid 2017 in the pharmaceutical industry. I saved and invested every penny I could, then moved to Pittsburgh where the $23,500 pre tax stipend went a bit further. Also, graduate student in my department were banned from having any other jobs, and yes it was enforced. One of my cohort had got in serious trouble working at the museum and one had minor issues when they picked up a faculty member while driving Uber.
Wait, PhD students still pay a tuition?
He's arguing that the tuition waiver is their income and they're choosing to spend it in tuition. It's an idiotic argument.
Hazing is the reason I decided not to become a doctor or an academic or a frat bro. Well, that and bad grades.
I think you may be taking this wrong. The problem is that universities are severely underfunded and always have been. They simply don't have the money to pay a living wage to grad students. When forced to do so, some universities have simply dissolved student positions as a response.
The problem isn't the university or this professor. The problem is why we aren't funding these better so that they can pay a reasonable wage.
It’s an endowment, they can’t just empty that pool of money they take around 4% of the money each year that they get from investments which ends up being around 10% of their budget
That's still 1.4B a year. They get $1.1 B in tuition a year. That's $2.5B. They have 2300 professors. At $200k salary that's only $0.4B of the $2.5B.
They also have 12.8 square miles of campus to maintain… which requires a lot more than just the 2300 professors. They also have adjunct professors, lab managers, researcher techs, facilities, and a ton of other expenses that are required from an R1 research university.
The grad students while they don’t get a “livable wage” do get their tuition comped and get a housing stipend. Like we can always do better but undergrad students are being done much dirtier than grad students as they are going into huge amounts of debt to try and even afford tuition
adjunct professors, lab managers, researcher techs
Those all fall into the underpaid category too. Adjunct professor is particularly abused.
$2.5B from tuition and endowment, $2.2B in sponsors and $1.6B in donations. $6.3B a year income. 27.4k total employees. If each and every employee was paid $100k, that's $2.7B for salaries.
You know you can just look at their budget right?
Great link. Thanks!
There are interesting expenses in there. Like $178M spent for travel and food. I wonder how many teaching assistants and adjunct professors get private jets and private chefs like the President and his executive staff and all the Deans and their staff. I had a friend 10 ago who applied for the job to be the private chef for a dean in a medium college.
https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Professionalism/Stanford_Research_Scandal
Those perks didn't end when the scandal was exposed. They only changed to take the money for perks from tuition instead of the government.
They get regularly audited which is why the scandal was caught, they still can’t misuse tuition funds either. Travel and food expenses mimics gsa travel expenses but then they also have multiple dining halls and catering. Why are you trying so hard to make mountains out of mole hills it’s like you are begging for everything to be a giant conspiracy
Dining halls isn't "food expense". Student dining halls are paid for by meal plans.
Catering private parties with private chefs is a big part of management in acedemia. That's part of the reason why they can't afford to give raises. The deans want their galas.
Why are you trying so hard to make mountains out of mole
Why are you ignoring that the income vs salary doesn't add up? Private chefs isn't something regular low level executives get outside of acedemia.
giant conspiracy
It's not a giant conspiracy when it's documented.
They are paid for by meal plans that count as income and are paid out as an expense… that’s how a budget works
After you mentioned the private chefs I tried searching for private chefs at Stanford and there was no prior job histories for it or current job openings for it. They have an executive chef but that is a dining hall position.
They aren’t hosting constant galas and most schools have contracts with companies like Sysco that require all catering events on campus to be supplied by Sysco so it’s not like it’s super high quality food either
You and I are the only people in this thread with actual experience at a university. The rest are just looking for places to project their anger and general malaise.
I worked at a university, did research at a university and was a student. There is obviously waste and definitely some amount of grift but the auditing requirements in place to prevent grift are arguably so strict that they cause as much or more waste as they save in grift.
That's great, these sound like basic details that their budget should take into account when considering how many people they can employ!
This statement is not based on any facts.
The problem is definitely all things mentioned.
I agree that there's no right to a living wage, or any job at all. What there is a right to is basic income, whether it's in the form of negative taxes, jobs programs, or other means.
Universally even.
A place to discuss positive changes that can make work more equitable, and to vent about current practices. We are NOT against work; we just want the fruits of our labor to be recognized better.
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