Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments

classicrockchick t1_j6ok6on wrote

Good for them. I was a PhD student at Temple from 2010 to 2015 and it sucked back then. I got health insurance, tuition remission and a $1500/month stipend. And I get it from the standpoint of the university, tuition remission is a lot of money but it's also not paying anyone's rent. For me, it was a stretch for one person to live in a not-completely-dangerous neighborhood and afford food and heat off of that. Now? Good luck studying for your comprehensive examinations with undergrads partying all around you because off-campus undergraduate housing is all you're going to be able to afford on that.

And specifically the program I was in (though I assume others are like this too), the faculty really do not like it if you get a job to try and supplement that stipend. They won't stop you, but you will get the hell judged out of you. Have your commitment to your studies questioned. Be asked if you realize this is not just another job but a vocation, a calling. And if these are being questioned, then no one is going to want to give you a nice grant-funded RA position that will get you off "academic welfare" as I've heard stipends so rudely referred to as.

Temple is free to leave things as they are, but they're not going to attract the talent they want to their graduate education. Like sure, a $1600/month (just looked on their website) is going to be fine for the really young wunderkinds that are fine living hand-to-mouth while they complete their studies because they don't know any better because this is just a leveling up of undergrad for them. And the downside to only pumping those kind of people out is that they are not going to be academics who can't function in the real world. They're going to be the embodiment of the stereotypical academic that every practitioner hates; arrogant, ignorant and socially inept. And there's only so many tenure track positions to hide those kinds of people in.

42

CattlemensSteakhouse t1_j6oxrxm wrote

Fucking professors who got their PhD 15-50 years ago. They have no idea how different higher ed is now. They have no idea how barren the job field is, they can not grasp how little these PhD students get paid compared to cost of living.

And the old ones are the fucking worst. They don’t realize that they have lived/are living perhaps the most charmed existence of any humans who have ever lived. They got to study some obscure field that is their passion and live comfortably while doing so. They existed in this complete sweet spot of American history; while the U.S. and state governments were still funding universities adequately and these institutions weren’t overfilled with frat boy business majors and shitty professional degrees. And when you explain that, no, I can’t do this unpaid summer internship because I get paid like 20,000 a year and need to work a restaurant job so that I can afford rent and have food in the refrigerator, they act you you just stabbed their mother in front of them. And not to mention they’re hanging on to their jobs until their 80s, when their field, the technology, and the academy has passed them by and then they’re kicking the ladder out from behind them. l could go on for hours about these old fucks.

Edit: Not to mention how easy these people got jobs. I was talking to an older faculty member in my grad program and he mentioned that he was hired ABD to a tenure track job at an R1 Big Ten university back in the late 70s. Same guy couldn’t grasp why we would get pissed that his seminars went 30-45 minutes over schedule every week.

31

Party_Plenty_820 t1_j6p9ajm wrote

Gotta push back on tuition remission being done heroic thing. It’s not. PhD “students” are really employees who contribute to the universities’ research outputs and often sign away their rights to IP. PhD students need $75k MINIMUM, as well as rights to royalties on their IP.

10

classicrockchick t1_j6pfp3u wrote

Oh I didn't mean to imply that it's especially awesome or anything of Temple (or any university) to do that. Like another commenter in this post said, it's the bare minimum. I just put it in there so someone wouldn't go "well ACK-SHOO-A-LEE you were making your stipend plus whatever you would have paid in tuition".

4