Temple University Graduate Students Go on Strike after Year of Unsuccessful Negotiations
inquirer.comSubmitted by BigxMac t3_10q0zu8 in philadelphia
Submitted by BigxMac t3_10q0zu8 in philadelphia
It’s also among the more basic and universal things PhD students get. If a school isn’t offering tuition remission to PhD students they use for labor, then they’re doing something very, very unusual or it’s a program where graduate work is structured very differently than most disciplines.
Its not something to brag about. It’s probably the most bare minimum form of compensation for working PhD students in higher education.
Most are working extremely long hours for a very small stipend. It's essentially low cost highly skilled labor for universities. It's absolutely criminal that this system has persisted for so long.
You’re right. And it’s still better paying than adjunct work, which is where most of these students will wind up.
Half my job as an adjunct was talking students out of the field. The other half was spent getting myself out.
I’m a big proponent of higher ed as an experience, but absolutely everything about its current financial model is disastrously unsustainable and predatory to almost everyone involved.
I hate when people bring up endowments when talking about higher ed like they are some magical pool of money that can be dipped into at any point in time for any reason. Endowment numbers that the public sees are an aggregate number of the value of all of the endowed (IE: invested funds created to sustain a specific thing) funds.
An endowed fund isn’t easily fungible. In order for money to be removed from an endowed fund, the donor who began the endowed fund would have to amend their agreement with the university. Most donors are extremely hesitant to do so because they specifically want their money to go towards a program they have a passion for and have chosen to endow a fund to help sustain that program in perpetuity. Even then, the maximum withdrawal rate that is typically allowed is 4-10% per year.
Endowments have no place in this discussion unless there are specific endowed funds that fund graduate stipends/salary, which I am sure exist. It’s a red herring. The money that should be discussed is the general budget. I am extremely curious as to where the $400m plus surplus from 2021-22 went.
Right, but Princeton endowment was 37 billion in 2021, so six years ago at 4% they were generating 1.5 billion in interest every year. They simply have an order of magnatude more money to fund what they please.
And the interest earned from those accounts goes straight back into those accounts. That’s the whole point of endowing them. They are typically programs that wouldn’t exist without the endowed fund, or scholarship/financial aid dollars (in Princeton’s case, entirely need based financial aid since they don’t do scholarships). The endowment is wholly irrelevant to this discussion.
Where other university’s thrive is unrestricted giving (IE: Here’s a check made out to Temple for $400,000, do what you want with it). Temple is really bad at getting unrestricted donors, especially with the amount of alumni out there. That’s why the majority of Temple’s revenue is from tuition. .
Very interesting, thanks for the explanation. TIL.
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I think I read their maternity leave policy is like 4-5 days. Absolutely insane
This is true. It is insane.
Imagine delivering a child on Monday and being expected to teach a lesson or grade 80 papers by Friday EOD. The audacity. I have been following TUGSA for the last several months and TU has also threatened their international grad students with deportations and housing security if they gotten involved in the strike.
Glad to hear you're following us. These are indeed some of the highlights of the Temple Admin Worst Of reel. We're glad to have your support!
Another bad look for the university
They deserve all the bad press they get. Temple is a nightmare
Does anyone know if the raises are pegged to inflation, or are those 3% raises just ignoring the 6.5% inflation we experienced in 2022?
edit: correcting incorrect inflation figure
It’s reasonable to assume the raises aren’t pegged to inflation
I guess I was just hoping that it wasn't actually as bad as I knew it was.
Union member here, They are not pegged to inflation, so the average stipend would be a 3% increase from $19.5k.
What company is matching inflation? I may need to jump ship
I just graduated in December. Guess how much salary increase I had in 2022!
Lol where are you getting 9.6%? CPI year over year in Dec was 6.4% or 6.5% depending on the seasonal adjustment.
Would you believe that I mistyped? Oops
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.
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.
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.
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".
Temple university has some terribly underpaid PhD students, even by PhD student stipends. I know of a student that got into their PhD program, was told they would be making 20k a year in engineer and then they rescinded their stipend after getting ready to enter the program. Absolutely horrendous for any institution
Does anyone know the standard rate for PhD stipends? What about at a place like Penn? I’m totally unfamiliar
It varies by cost of living more than school. When I was a PhD student in the Midwest I was making mid 20s (this is back in the oughts.) Not a lot, but comfortable in a midwestern college town. I came to Philly after graduation and I remember some of the Penn students I was around were in the 30s.
I did my PhD at UD. We were at 30k when I left. Philly is more expensive than delaware so paying 2/3s the rate is laughable
The average hard science PhD stipend has floated around $25-30,000 per year, but hard sciences essentially always include tuition coverage. Not all fields cover the tuition for PhD candidates.
The stipend available is also largely dependent on the grants the lab is able to acquire and Covid supply chain issues utterly wrecked the grants organizations were willing to give out.
I’m not surprised at all by this because the university only foots so much of the stipend. Without grants increasing with inflation, and they’re absolutely not, PhD stipends can’t without shorting staff
We’re talking pay PhD student $4000 more per year by using your funds normally allocated for an undergraduate. So you’re getting higher pay but you now have to convince an undergrad to volunteer for 40 hours a week during their summer or you’re doing a lot of extra menial work without an undergrad around
I don’t remember what mine was way back when (20 years ago?). It wasn’t so much that I could afford to not work during the summer.
Not all grad students get offered summer work, especially in the first stretch, so until I was getting summer classes, I was definitely scrambling for odd jobs come May, and had to set aside some of my school year pay to cover basics May- September.
But I was making enough to comfortably afford my own apartment. It was in a weird building in an unfashionable neighborhood of a low-tier city, but it was safe, and I didn’t have to find a roommate, and about a 15-minute drive to campus.
There were no vacations, and I had to budget, and if something big came up, like my car dying, or one of my summer jobs or classes falling through, I’d have to supplement with a student loan. But on like, a week to week basis, I was doing ok.
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The article mentions a few recent new stipends. Not sure about averages though.
In case anyone is curious, I will post the email that students received from Dean Mandel this morning:
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To the Temple community,
The Temple University Graduate Student Association (TUGSA) has decided to go on strike after failing to successfully negotiate a new collective bargaining agreement with Temple University. Our students’ education is our top priority, and we have plans to keep their learning experiences moving forward during any work stoppage. If a graduate student instructor chooses to strike, the university will assign alternative instructors.
Temple is committed to reaching a fair and reasonable agreement and has repeatedly demonstrated an interest in continuing productive discussions. Temple has proposed significant annual pay increases (3% each year for four years) that are in line with what other Temple full-time bargaining units have accepted, and offered one-time payments of up to $500 (depending on an individual’s appointment terms). The university also offered to double the parental leave and provide additional bereavement leave for these part-time employees. In addition, the university would continue to provide healthcare benefits coverage to graduate student employees across the entire calendar year, with no contribution required from the employee. Every other Temple employee contributes part of their salary toward healthcare and prescription insurance. TUGSA members would continue to receive free tuition for their programs of study, on average, valued at about $20,000.
These pay increases, one-time payments and the cost-free benefit package would allow the university to continue to attract and retain outstanding graduate students while also responsibly managing a budget primarily funded by tuition dollars during a time of declining enrollment. This compensation package is valued at more than $40,000 per year for a nine-month commitment of working 20 hours per week while providing 12 full months of free health coverage.
In order to keep you apprised of developments, our colleges and schools each have a designated contact person for questions and information related to this matter. Schools and colleges will provide these details to you.
Absolute joke. From what I heard some of the contact people are spreading misinformation to try to turn the undergrad student body against them but so far the student body has been too smart
All higher ed is an economic bubble
I agree, but that is an entirely different convo within higher ed. Putting yourself into more debt on top of undergrad debt with zero work experience in your field of study is insane to me. I have some friends and family who went right into grad programs and their resumes are all sh*t as a result.
So it doesn’t help to go right from undergrad to masters or above? What do they want to see instead? Work experience?
The one thing that I hate getting is certifications though..
It depends dramatically on the field.
I think there’s gotta be a balance between education and a person’s finances, and it comes down to making a really tough decision. Ideally, I would have loved to go to law school right out of undergrad, but I just had/still have bills to pay and I can’t afford to leave my current career to study full time as a law student. It sucks that life is like this but I had to choose work experience over academia and my pockets and living situation are a lot better now, but now I’m missing out on grad programs/law school. It’s not too late to go back but I would have to give up my pay check. It’s a really tough decision to make for low income and middle class folks — being confined by class barriers
If you want to be a lawyer, you have to go to law school. Costs won’t go down and getting a job as an attorney isn’t easy. Many law jobs don’t pay enough to justify the cost so be really sure that is what you want in life.
Costs ain’t the issue, quitting my job to study full time is lol public service work covers legal costs and stops the payments but you have to invest 10 years of your life to get student loans forgiven. It’s something I’m contemplating. Haven’t decided to commit to anything yet
I’m investing 10 years as IT database support for brain research. 3 years to go. Lucked into this job and trying to keep it because I didn’t pay much at all on my undergrad, kept kicking the can…
Law student here. Best advice I can give is that you should only go if 1. you have enough money saved to not go into substantial debt or 2. you get significant scholarship money. I know kids with between $150k and $200k in just law school debt. The jobs pay really well but its really just not worth it to take on all of that debt. Also, I generally advise people not to go until they have experience in a professional legal environment of some sort. There is no way to know you won't hate it any other way.
Thanks for the tips. I have worked for a legal firm for 1.5 years and gained experience in civil law as a paralegal and I really enjoyed the convos/relations with lawyers, clients, etc. it’s something I would love to continue to do as an attorney, but I’m also a big believer in financial freedom and I have obtained that currently. Went to community college first and transferred to an accepted 4 yr uni. Graduated undergrad with virtually zero debt and I have a lot of financial freedom as a result and idk if I am okay with being broke again for 4-6 years as I try to get through law school. It’s really hard to put yourself back into the trenches once you have moved up, you know? That’s where my conflict lies :/
I was a paralegal for two years before I went to law school. taking the time was totally worth it. Had a head start on a lot of the language and procedural stuff you learn in law school especially at the beginning. Its good you have that experience.
I get your point, though. Being broke is hard, and law students are mostly broke. Its been tough living off loans for three whole years. It has not gone by quick, but I have a job lined up that I really enjoy and I have learned a lot. No matter what you do, it will work out if you make measured and reasonable decisions like it seems as though you have thus far. good luck, whichever way you decide to go.
Your indecisiveness is the primary issue. You have to really want to be an attorney and it doesn’t sound like your heart is into it. It’s OK.
Nah you misread my post. You sound like every other white attorney trying to dissuade a young Black man from breaking barriers lol it’s a take from white lawyers that I HATE
I think you know as much about me as I know about you. Do you know what I hate? Prejudice and stereotyping. Good luck YB.
Oh yeah, you’re definitely white 😂 it’s alright, no hard feelings. Just try to learn how to share your opinions without coming across as condescending or talking down to POC. Let people tell you how they feel, vs you trying to tell people what their issues are. A lot of our dreams and aspirations have constantly been put down by folks in the spaces we are trying to enter. 4.5% of all lawyers in the US are Black.
I’m not black or white. I wish the best for you and yours.
Thanks, you too.
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It’s causally related. How valuable is a grad student/career academic to society? How much are they worth to an institution? At some point, people have to get paid what they’re worth.
It’s an obvious point, but how much value a profession adds to society and how much money a profession can extract from society are not 1:1 translations.
A hot teenager with rich, connected parents can make more in a month selling diarrhea tea to high school kids on the internet than most k-12 schoolteachers.
The market dictates what something is worth. It’s a fact confirmed by your illustration. I made no allusions to what is right, but rather how it is.
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sneeze-slayer t1_j6npg0s wrote
Yikes. I get that they don't have as big of an endowment as some of the universities listed in the article, but saying that PhD students get tuition remission is a little bonkers, since most are doing research for the university or even teaching courses.