#AcademicChatter #AstroDon budgeting gripe of the day: Trying to stretch my tiny budgets to take care of students, but we have to pay $$$ for grad student's tuition all year. Why?! WTF kind of "benefit" is my covering 10credits of ASTR800? Who gets that $? Not me, a research prof. I get $0 to support students, ever.
"The $ goes, roundabout, towards paying faculty!" I mean, that's kind of true, given the # of teaching/adjunct vs TT faculty... But for soft-$ faculty (me), its just extra bloat on my grants. None of it works its way to me. Zilch.
"This is just grant overhead". This is actually on TOP of the ~55% overhead rate the Uni collects. Those fees are supposed to support the University, building, operations, etc. I suppose a tiny amount of that keeps my building powered? If I were NASA/NSF, I'd be pissed.
"A chunk of this goes back to departments, which helps you". Except my dept, like many, have almost no other source of flexible $ (Our dept can barely pay for weekly pizza). Grant return primarily pays for startups & retentions for (you guessed it) TT...
"Grad students should be grateful we cover their tuition as part of their pay/benefits"... I mean, MAYBE if that $ actually went towards something they could see? And those of us trying to scrap together $ to support students? We just get to be grateful I guess
@jradavenport Oh buddy, you've officially rustled my jimmies with this one.
The university claims to pay us X dollars which includes the so-called "tuition waiver"; however, we never see this money and STILL have to pay fees for tuition (it doesn't even cover all of it) even when I'm an in-state vs out-of-state student. Thus, in the past I was making "60k" as an out of state graduate student (take home pay was equivalent), whereas now I only make "26k" since I lived in the state for long enough to qualify, and yet I still have to pay the same out of pocket "tuition" fees as everyone else.
Secondly our health insurance is bloody atrocious which I suppose is a uniquely American problem, but still, you'd think a university with a multi-billion dollar endowment and nearly 50000 total students on campus could negotiate better plans.
But the best part, the absolute *best* part, was when they had the audacity to tell me that because of a registration error (which was not under my control) that the burar's office was going to claw back every red cent that they paid me and invalidate any insurance claims, despite not a single person informing me about the apparent credit discrepancy impacting my "full time student status" despite working well over the number of hours I would need to qualify in terms of credit hours. And, of course, this was the same year they accidentally fired me.
I value my education, and I appreciate my advisor and his funding of a majority of my work immensely, but the university money vacuum is a cancer on the ass of society and I want it fixed yesterday.
