Although graduate students today tend to have much longer programs of study than undergraduates (see Reason 4), and therefore remain on campus much longer than undergraduates, they represent a smaller proportion of the student body. Furthermore, at any given time, a large proportion of graduate students are receiving funding from the university, rather than paying tuition to it. They will represent a far smaller share of the university’s alumni, and because most of them will presumably go into academe, they can’t be counted on to produce much in the way of alumni donations. There is little incentive for the university to pay much attention to the graduate student experience, so it typically doesn’t. As employees, teaching assistants (like adjunct professors) are impermanent, and thus are not among the university's stake-holding employees. It is an interesting experience to spend years of your life as an ancillary part of an institution designed to serve the 18-year olds who surround you every day.
Another weird "reason". Yes, you are more like a low paid faculty member than a student. That's true. The problem is the pay. Not anything else really.
ReplyDeleteMy first couple of years as a graduate student, I naively believed that the university indeed was there for my sake. I believed that the goal of a university is to provide a good education for its students, and I was one of those students. Then, after two years of feeling I was part of the department as a grad student and TA, I found out (from a brief, impersonal email from the department chair) that I was not being offered any funding for my third year. That was a wake up call. Now I know that universities need to make money in order to survive, and when a department budget is tight, TAs are easily disposable. Universities survive in part by taking money from tuition-paying undergraduates, not by financially supporting graduate students.
ReplyDeletem00m, grad students are nothing like low-paid faculty members. That's what this post is saying. They're not as lucrative as the undergrads and not as invested in the institution as permanent faculty or staff. Instead, grad students are temporary members of the University that, in the view of the administration, use more resources than they give back. This scenario doesn't work in their favor.
ReplyDeleteI'd change this to "universities exist on the backs of graduate students." In order to promote a "cost-effective" approach to education, universities increasingly rely on grad students to teach classes -- wow, they're even cheaper than lecturers! Frankly,I think teaching the grind classes no one else wants to teach is a pretty damned big contribution; it certainly deserves a living wage, regardless of what the grad students are supposedly taking from the uni.
ReplyDeleteBut yes, because there's a seemingly endless supply of cheap labor, the universities don't have any reason to invest in grad students.
I just want to say that this blog is great. Keep up the posts (and the discussions!)
ReplyDeleteThat depends on the school. My university had more grad students in total than undergrads (although it treated them so badly there were protests every year).
ReplyDeleteAnd your youth and your vulnerability.
ReplyDeleteRecent Ph.D., I greatly appreciate your contributions to the discussion. As someone who recently graduated with a Master's in English, but who has decided to pursue a second Master's in Library Science instead of a Ph.D., this blog and the user discussion have helped vindicate my decision. Thank you, all, for making me confident about an otherwise difficult decision.
ReplyDeleteAlso, don't forget that at some institutions you still get your crappy stipend even though you are probably teaching a class (and therefore spending more than your allotted time for the pay you receive) and your students won't listen to you or respect you very much because you are a grad student (even if you do have your MA).
ReplyDeleteAlso, kudos to this website. I was in my second year of getting my Sociology MA and hating it when stumbling across your website made me realize I didn't need it. You gave me the courage to leave and I thank you for that.
ReplyDeleteejjury, where did you attend to?
ReplyDeleteI would rather not say in public. email me at mihoshiliz at aol d.o.t com and I will answer your question.
ReplyDeleteSadly, I suspect that graduate students and adjuncts (lower down on the social tier than junior faculty but slightly above grad students) have treated as cheap teaching labour by admiistrators once they've finished their courses or even.
ReplyDeleteThanks, I just remembered I need to warn my young cousins about this. School is a business and will toss you out despite paying tuition! Graduate students get this first hand, as well as naive undergrads.
ReplyDelete