My two cents on the UC strikes

As a politically adrift person, a skeptic of the left and right, I have mixed feelings about the strike at UC. 48,000 people are striking, which is a lot. I am not a member of the union, largely because of disagreements about the priorities of the union presented to me when they tried to get me to join. Nothing was said about pay, I might have joined if it was. The compensation structure of PhD grad students is as follows:

Graduate students are either paid as graduate student researchers (GSR), or as teaching assistants (TA). Graduate student researcher positions are better as you’re paid from a grant that your professor secured, without any teaching duties. Teaching assistants you’re paid to grade papers, teach, etc. while you are doing your research. There are more TA positions than GSR positions, and GSR positions are more common for STEM fields which get funding primarily though the NIH and NSF.

For both of these, the school is taking a big cut from every professor. For a few years students are being charged “tuition”. A professor has to pay the school $20k a year for you. You are charged “tuition” whether or not you are taking classes. As a graduate student whose primary focus is research, classes are almost without exception, a waste of time. You want to be taking the absolute minimum number of classes. Even if you are in no classes, you register for “independent research” to stay a full-time student, for which you are charged tuition. The school is also taking a cut before that, from the professors grant for “F&A”.

Because you’re technically a student you’re being paid part time. I am paid for less than 20 hours a week of research, I work about 45-50 hours a week on research. During the summer, if your professor has the funds they can increase you to full time, which doubles your pay.

Prior to earning a fellowship, my take home post tax pay was 2,200 a month, and during the 3 summer months it was 4,400. This totals to 33,000 a year. This is not a lot of money. I am working more hours than I worked in the biotech industry, I have about the same amount of independence, and fewer resources at my disposal. My total compensation is < 1/3 of what I’d be making if I quit today and went back to pharma. Assuming 45-hour weeks, this comes out to $14.10 per hour. Leaving tempts me often. I saw a dishwashing job at a bakery near me which paid $22.00.

If you are talented / lucky enough to win an external fellowship the school will try to pry it out of your hands. In STEM, the most common one is the NSF GRFP, you get this though an application about your research, and is supposed to support the next generation of talented scientists. This is paid directly to the school. If you’re lucky, the professor will give you about $5,000 a year out of the $50,000 a year. The school will take some, and the professor will take most. Often, you’ll get nothing. I was lucky enough to win a fellowship which few people get, where they negotiated with the school on my behalf to bring my pay up to 50,000 a year. Thank you, Yulian, you got that dawg in you.

The fellowship just kicked in a month ago it brings my pay up to half of what I could make outside of academia. This is a rare deal, and I’m better off than 98% of GSRs in my school. It makes a huge difference, last week my motorcycle’s tires got leaks, the brakes finally wore down, and my phone broke. Motorcycle cost me $900 to get fixed, and phone I’ll be paying off for two years. On the 34k my margins are razor thin, and I’d have been taking on debt. I spent all my savings from industry on buying and renovating my condo and was left living month to month with the goal of making money when I sell the place after my PhD. I pretty much expected this, but the 10% inflation this year is a 10% pay cut, and it brought the margins down to less than 0. I didn’t expect that. If I didn’t have the fellowship I’d be accumulating debt with no plan to pay it off until I finish my PhD.

The union is striking for some benefits, which are a small concession mostly, but the big sticking point is pay. They’re asking for people in my position to make 54k a year, which for many people would double their salaries. It’s largely irrelevant to me, as it should just switch where my money comes from. The fellowship is capped at 50k, so that stipend would go away and I’d get a small raise.

For all the talk of equity by the UC system, increasing the pay would be more effective than hiring any new dean for another $400k a year. There are more administrators than professors in the university, running an expense of hundreds of millions of dollars a year. It is absolutely mental how much universities spend on administration. No one knows what these people do all day.

I am fortunate enough to come from a family where if shit goes south I can ask for help. I feel ashamed doing it, and don’t, but I can. A smart person who doesn’t come from money would be insane to do a 5-year PhD where they make less than enough money to survive. They can’t help their family, and their family can’t help them. Not having money for almost a decade is not an option, debts spiral. Forget higher education, or even college, they should take that $22/hr dishwashing job and work to develop a stable practical skillset. Coding, maybe.

For science, a PhD is a credential mostly. You’re signing up to be exploited for five years so you can do science as a career. Most people in science PhD’s shouldn’t be there to be honest. If you ended up in a PhD because you couldn’t find a job, you messed up. For those who are good, hardworking, scientists you’re being exploited. There’s a reason most talented people don’t do PhD’s, they would rather be working an easy but meaningless job at facebook making $400k a year. You have to be a special kind of hard headed and self loathing for a PhD to be the right move. More money would let people with less means do PhDs, at the cost of fewer GSR positions.

For the humanities I have less empathy. Sorry. People doing a PhD in 16th century English literature don’t have many alternatives other than hoping to become a professor eventually. They can’t easily leave and make more money because their skillset isn’t suited to making money. Funding is scarcer. If the pay for TAs increases to 54k the departments will only be able to admit about half of what they do now, so there won’t be people to teach the classes. Fewer classes means fewer undergrads, and I think it’ll spiral downwards until it finds a smaller, more niche, equilibrium. I’m fine with that. I love books, essays, etc, but I don’t think PhD programs help produce that. A pay increase will long-term shrink these departments, but I think it’s for the best.

Overall, universities are a fucked up economic system that cannot exist without exploitation. For the longevity of universities, it would be better if they paid people more. At the same time, the money must come from somewhere. Suddenly doubling pay for a huge portion of grad students would mean a lot fewer grad students. I’m fine with that. Universities could fill some of the gap by slashing their bloated admin, but they won’t. The admins are responsible for making that decision.

The hypocrisy of the UC system bothers me. If you want to advance equity, and bring talented people who have been economically excluded from elite academia in: you have to pay them more. Otherwise it’s just an aesthetic preference where you let people from rich families in. I’m empathetic to the strikes, but I don’t think most people striking realize the consequences to the university if they fold. As someone who thinks academia should be smaller and more meritocratic, I’m all for it. Many of the strikers would disagree.