When I was a graduate student, I always thought I had a good deal, where I learn graduate degree for free, AND got a living stipend for me and my wife. The relationship between me and the university was two folded: I am a customer as a student and an employee at the same time. And I think student was my main role. And my advisor was mostly my teacher, instead of my work boss. I don't think you can turn this relationship into purely an employer-employee relationship.
You can separate the two relationships by making the university pay the whole salary, and then you pay the tuition from your bank account. You can ask for higher wage, but the university can ask for higher tuition. I think the low tuition has already having this factored in, otherwise how can you get a 2-year / 4-year work training program with such low price?
It's really an employee-employer relationship with on the job training. Specifically your final promotion is a certificate (Ph.D.) that has some industry wide accreditation.
The fact that they charge for tuition actually seems legally tenuous (akin to a company town) which is why I think they all have these tuition waivers for RA and TA positions.
The more I think about it, it seems like there is a bunch of legal issues. Maybe Congress has resolved those idk...
A big reason they charge tuition and then credit it is because it leads to more grants. There's a bunch of bizarre accounting between schools/departments/labs behind all this, but at the core my school "charges" tuition, then my department immediately "credits" the tution using NIH training grant money awarded to my program.
> It's really an employee-employer relationship with on the job training.
I don't think so. When I was a Ph.D. student, I spent most of the time doing my own thing (learning and research), a small portion of my time was spent on working. I imagine this could be different by field, and I know some other departments pay way higher stipend than my department.
I think the lowest paid graduate students belong to social sciences and humanities, but their "work" as graduate students also has lower value compared to other fields. They are also the ones with strongest push for unionization, because they (maybe for good reason) are the lowest paid and because their ideology.
Did you talk to students in biological or other lab sciences? At my PhD institution the materials science students were paid a lot more (and barely taught) because they essentially had a 9-5 job with plenty of overtime.
(Compared to the math department where people would surf between commitments.)
The thing is this is great if you and your advisor get along. If your advisor decides to blackball your academic career instead there’s nothing you can do.
At most US universities, graduate students who are serving as employees (ie, have stipends and perhaps assigned work in addition to coursework such as teaching) generally have tuition waivers too and don't pay tuition. So your formula about tuition vs compensation doesn't really apply in the individual case.
Anyway, depending on when you were a graduate student, it may currently be a lot harder than it used to be to survive financially as a grad student.
Also wanting things like reasonable health insurance and a modicum of days to take off on vacation or sick leave seem reasonable to me. This is not something all grad students at all universities/departments have.
In general, at many large universities, graduate students do most of the teaching (in terms of hours spent on instruction) -- what is bringing in a substantial amount of the university's revenue. And get treated terribly, at the whims of professors, in very financially precarious situations. It does not seem unreasonable to me to organize to try to get a more secure situation. If you look at the actual changes in university budgets, the amount spent on compensating those doing the teaching is a smaller and smaller portion over time, while the amount spent on administrators is higher and higher. So it might be just as accurate to consider money spent on compensating grad students as competing with administrator salaries as with tuition.
Most PhD “students” stop taking classes by the 2year mark (out of a five year PhD in CS, longer for other fields), and spend the rest of their time doing full-time research and teaching, without getting paid full time.
And while your advisor does not necessarily act like a boss, they have often even more power; they can withhold funding, which can stall or end your PhD, they can assign you dead-end/inconsequential projects, killing your career, etc. It does no service to anyone to not acknowledge the power differential that exists between advisors and advisees.
In general the current academic research model has positives and negatives for grad students, and it benefits no one to pretend the negatives don’t exist.
This is coming from a person who had a wonderful PhD experience and has received offers for TT positions from top universities in the US (I say this not to brag, but to ward off accusations of sour grapes)
You can separate the two relationships by making the university pay the whole salary, and then you pay the tuition from your bank account. You can ask for higher wage, but the university can ask for higher tuition. I think the low tuition has already having this factored in, otherwise how can you get a 2-year / 4-year work training program with such low price?