{"id":8639,"date":"2018-02-27T22:22:48","date_gmt":"2018-02-28T04:22:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/?p=8639"},"modified":"2018-02-27T22:22:48","modified_gmt":"2018-02-28T04:22:48","slug":"much-grad-student-worth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/2018\/02\/much-grad-student-worth.html","title":{"rendered":"How much is a grad student worth?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\"\"<\/p>\n

The graduate students at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign are striking<\/a>.\u00a0 Not the STEM students working in labs on grants, but the teaching assistants who work running discussion sections for the large lecture courses, or teaching introductory classes.\u00a0 \u00a0They are upset that, in the new contract, the university proposes to remove the rock-solid guarantee that, once provided with a tuition waiver, students will keep that level of waiver except for cases of poor performance.\u00a0 What\u2019s more, they are asking for 8% immediate, then 4% annual raises for the remainder of the 5 year contract, a more generous health insurance benefit, and subsidies for child care.\u00a0 This is a big, big ask, for a university that is struggling to keep its tuition level in order to keep its enrollment stable, in the face of large numbers of students leaving Illinois and its budget crises in the dust (though, to be sure, their situation isn\u2019t as perilous as other Illinois public universities<\/a>, where enrollment drops have been devastating).<\/p>\n

For reference, the existing contract<\/a> provides for pay of $16,281 for a half-time (20 hour\/week, 9 month) work appointment, plus 24 vacation days, if appointed on a 12-month basis, 13 sick days, and subsidized health, dental and vision benefits.\u00a0 As an hourly pay rate, this works out to about $21 per hour.<\/p>\n

How does this compare with college professors, or, more precisely, the sort of non-tenure-track, non-research instructors that they\u2019re most closely comparable to?\u00a0\u00a0Could a university simply hire more non-tenure-track instructors (or non-research-track) instructors? Cost-wise, it might be a wash, when you compare the salaries for grad students, adjusted to full-time basis, and add in the tuition grants and the time professors spend supervising their TA work (assuming they provide such supervision rather than leaving them to their own devices).<\/p>\n

Conveniently enough, the entirely faculty\u2019s salary is available online<\/a>, and the salary that lecturers earn seems to start at $43,000, and going up as high as about $55,000 for senior lecturers.\u00a0 If you assume that they likewise work on a 9-month basis, then their pay (not considering any ancillary benefits) is about $10,000 higher than the pay of grad students.<\/p>\n

It\u2019d be better for the students, to have experienced instructors, rather than learning from grad students who are themselves just figuring out for themselves how to lead a discussion effectively, or what grades to assign to papers.\u00a0 (The Math Myth<\/em><\/a> had a heavy dose of criticism for universities using T.A.s for math classes, boosting the degree to which students would struggle to learn the material.)\u00a0 It would remedy the imbalance between grad students and jobs available, by reducing the former and increasing the latter.\u00a0 And it would save the university money, assuming that the net cost of the tuition waiver exceeds $10,000.<\/p>\n

But is grad student education a net \u201ccost\u201d for a university?\u00a0 One suspects that there would be significant pressure from the professors themselves to retain a graduate program in their departments, and keep it at its current size, because of the benefits they receive \u2014 it\u2019s preferable to teach a small graduate student seminar than a large undergraduate class, for one, and having graduate students to advise and whose dissertations one supervises, is a benefit in that it bestows prestige and recognition, as well as being, among the job responsibilities, one of the more attractive ones.\u00a0 It would not be easy to get professors to accept replacing graduate student-related activities with undergraduate teaching, as long as they have the power, within the university\u2019s governance structure, to prevent it, or as long as they are able to \u201cvote with their feet\u201d \u2014 that is, if a university feared an exodus of professors, unless a move to replacing at least some T.A.s with instructors were to occur fairly uniformly across the nation\u2019s universities.\u00a0 If a university can\u2019t feasibly reduce its graduate programs, then it\u2019s a whole different story altogether.<\/p>\n

Which suggests that it\u2019ll be much more difficult for universities to evolve than to be replaced by other teaching models.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Image:\u00a0 a teacher\u2019s strike.\u00a0https:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org\/wiki\/File%3AFair_Contract_Now.jpg; By Brad Perkins (Flickr: Fair Contract Now) [CC BY-SA 2.0 (https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-sa\/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The graduate students at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign are striking.\u00a0 Not the STEM students working in labs on grants, but the teaching assistants who work running discussion sections for the large lecture courses, or teaching introductory classes.\u00a0 \u00a0They are upset that, in the new contract, the university proposes to remove the rock-solid guarantee […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2209,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[118,896,899,100],"class_list":["post-8639","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-adjunct-professors","tag-graduate-students","tag-unions","tag-universities"],"yoast_head":"\nHow much is a grad student worth?<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"The graduate students at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign are striking.\u00a0 Not 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