Your university must be a very bad one. The PhD I got and the ones I advised definitely were big educational experiences, where the student received lots of benefit -- formal courses, technical lectures, personal advising, resources, experience, publishing support, etc. As for TA work, one may debate whether the amount was enough, whether there should have been workers benefit, etc, but the university did explicitly pay for the work. >>
>> As for the papers and research, while they benefited the university, the advisor, and hopefully humanity, they were much more valuable for the student -- and they would not have been published without much work and advice from the advisor, and the univ's resources.
In fact, in public and non-profit univs, the main benefit that the university gets from papers by PhD students is the ability to get more grant money to pay the students and buy equipment for them. >>
@JorgeStolfi @Hellawyn You’re making a hell of a lot of assumptions here… and I respectfully disagree with a lot of them. And of course publications help the authors. That applies to most researchers, from PhD students to profs. Same for benefiting from university resources 🤷🏼♀️ Of course PhD students are still learning, but they contribute a lot more than you’re acknowledging
@anne_kreft @JorgeStolfi
@academicchatter
The situation of a PhD candidate is indeed very special and leads to passionate debate.
Ignoring either of the aspects, "student being entitled to some form of tuition" and "employee with production objectives and associated rights" leads to serious problems: if students only, the risk is exploitation and financial struggle, if only employee, the risk is to forget that they are learning to become researchers and should be supervised adequately.
1/n
@jocelyn_etienne @JorgeStolfi @academicchatter Fair point! But I object to someone coming in and saying "your university must be a very bad one." Sweden, Norway and a few other countries have a very successful PhD education system where student are state employees (at 100%). Attrition is extremely low, compared to e.g. the US, publication output very high, and research funding *and supervision* were excellent for me. People need to inform themselves before making such blanket statements
@anne_kreft @jocelyn_etienne @JorgeStolfi @academicchatter
i can only secund that.
Simple fact is, Ph.D.'s work.
And more than 40h a week if they'd like a career. Wether for their own benefits—a later career, which many won't have in professional academia because of the cut-down of fixed positions at universities— or those of their supervisors, and institutions—how to get 20+ papers a year without having 5+ Ph.D.'s working *for* you?
You work, you're employed. No discussion needed.
@grimmiges @anne_kreft @jocelyn_etienne @JorgeStolfi @academicchatter
As you say "if they'd like a career". The PhD students decide to be in the institution to be educated i.e. PhD students work to learn not to be paid
@Xna_NaJu @grimmiges @anne_kreft @jocelyn_etienne @JorgeStolfi @academicchatter this discussion has revealed a lot of ignorance about variations in PhDs between disciplines & countries. For example, a UK humanities or social sciences PhD is unlikely to involve working under a PI on someone else's project &, unless funded, there will only be teaching if the student successfully applies for it (for which they'll be paid). Doing a PhD isn't regarded as a job for those reasons.
@SteveCooke @Xna_NaJu @grimmiges @jocelyn_etienne @JorgeStolfi @academicchatter Why would working under a PI be "a job" and working independently on your project (as I did, as a social scientist in Sweden) not be a job though? Like you say, there are variations, and some countries like Sweden or Norway have successfully instituted a model in which all PhD students (whether parts of projects or not) are state employees. And I personally think that's the way it should be
@anne_kreft @Xna_NaJu @grimmiges @jocelyn_etienne @JorgeStolfi @academicchatter because you're studying primarily for a qualification, not labouring to produce an something for someone whose being paid for it.
@SteveCooke @anne_kreft @Xna_NaJu @jocelyn_etienne @JorgeStolfi @academicchatter
And I have to add: If we only would pay for actual "labour that produces", humanities would not be the first thing that springs to my mind that could be scrapped.
Also: a PhD thesis is literally a "product". Sometimes quite a big one (espec. in humanities). I don't know about the UK but in Germany and Sweden, it must also must be made accessible to anyone, hence, is a public product.
@grimmiges @SteveCooke @Xna_NaJu @jocelyn_etienne @JorgeStolfi @academicchatter All of this! Plus, in our department, PhD students were almost as productive as many more senior scholars and more productive than some, in terms of publications, i.e. in terms of "producing" something and contribution to the advancement of knowledge. I can't wrap my head around people saying that's not a job tbh
@anne_kreft @grimmiges @Xna_NaJu @jocelyn_etienne @JorgeStolfi @academicchatter I assume you don't want to claim that all PhD's must be funded or that everyone who wants to do a PhD should be accepted. So we'd still have competition for limited funded places. So this argument seems to boil down to a disagreement over whether funded PhDs should be described as jobs or not. I'm not sure whether that's a substantive change or mere semantics.
@SteveCooke @grimmiges @Xna_NaJu @jocelyn_etienne @JorgeStolfi @academicchatter Yes, I do indeed very much support full funding of all PhD positions, which (again) is the standard in Scandinavian countries. And the implication of that is that not everyone who wants to do a PhD will be able to do one. Same as not everyone who wants to be a physician or an engineer or whatever else can be one because there are a limited number of positions. And it forces institutions to secure funding for PhDs
@anne_kreft @SteveCooke @grimmiges @Xna_NaJu @jocelyn_etienne @JorgeStolfi @academicchatter In line with that, it's a scam to offer huge numbers of PhD positions to people who heavily overestimate the likelihood there'll be (good) academic jobs for them. Fewer but properly funded PhD positions pushes some of that bottleneck forward, in a much more decent and pro-quality way IMO - the only people who are disadvantaged are those building their career on the backs of naive PhD students.
@TEG @SteveCooke @grimmiges @Xna_NaJu @jocelyn_etienne @JorgeStolfi @academicchatter Couldn't agree more! The academic job market (at least in Political Science) has been absolutely ridiculous the last few years
@anne_kreft @TEG @SteveCooke @grimmiges @Xna_NaJu @jocelyn_etienne @JorgeStolfi @academicchatter But unis aren't not (or ought not be) educating PhDs just to meet the needs of the HE sector. There's probably much to improve in that regard, but universities shouldn't be the only or even the predominant job market for PhDs.
@johank76 @TEG @SteveCooke @grimmiges @Xna_NaJu @jocelyn_etienne @JorgeStolfi @academicchatter Agree! There are always those who'd like to stay in academia and don't manage too. But there are also those who know from the start they don't want to go the academic route. The problem is that often the latter are treated with suspicion or even neglect by some supervisors (though not by all, of course!)
@anne_kreft @johank76 @TEG @SteveCooke @grimmiges @Xna_NaJu @jocelyn_etienne @JorgeStolfi @academicchatter I I always tell prospective Ph.D. students to present the "I want to be a faculty just like you" narrative regardless of their actual goal. In private and safe spaces you can say otherwise, because you are so right.
