Annual National Minimum Doctoral Stipend, currently £19,237 + £2000 London allowance for 2024/25. Doctoral stipends have been standardised across all the universities for as long as I have known (20+ years).

To be fair, Imperial is the best paying UK university by far. Postdoc positions at Imperial pay better than Lecturer/Senior Lecturer positions at other universities.

FYI you really don't need teaching experience to get a good academic job. The number one criteria is excellent publication record.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJEmE7IYoLk

Summary: colleges are way too selective today at the high end.

Boomers got into elite schools far more easily, although there were less schools.

It's a bit of a disingenuous argument however, because the huge increase of schools down the long long LONG pecking order of school "eliteness".

But the boomer thing is spot on.

> I was a bit annoyed that it singled out Oxford

Oxford singles itself out as elite, thus "good to be able to put 'Lecturer at Oxford' on it [the CV]!". They are being held to that standard.

Depends on the university. 25 years ago now but a number of the PhD students I worked with had mummy and daddy paying for everything. One enterprising guy had a side business selling cocaine. Most were slumming it in house shares and taking on casual work. Only the blessed had teaching appointments. I was blessed until I realised it was a curse.

> phd students love doing supervisions, they literally queue up around the block for the teaching experience and the tax free cash

Maybe they have no choice and are being exploited. PhD students current and former that I've spoken to definitely think they are being exploited.

As examples, look at the comments from actual PhD students and postdocs on this page.

> Down side: Your peers aren't as smart, and your peers are really what push you to work on interesting projects.

This outweighs pretty much everything else for me.

Your ego either inflates to infinity because you're a big fish in a small pond, or you get depressed being around really incompetent people.

Every lecture I have is booked for 300 people but only 20-40 people ever show up. And yet everyone complains that the courses are too hard.

Is it easy and low stress? Probably. But I feel like I'm being driven into mediocrity.

> Down side: Your peers aren't as smart, and your peers are really what push you to work on interesting projects.

You also don't have access to those interesting research projects to begin with. To be that's the biggest downside (if you're in the sciences / engineering).

I do generally agree with your post -- but I think it only works if you 1) apply yourself sufficiently despite not having peers pushing you (have to be able and willing to buck the tide; not everyone is), and 2) go to a top grad school (as you did), which requires point 1 to get accepted

If you really value faculty involvement etc, I might suggest focusing on finding out those statistics directly and getting a sense of what current student experiences are like. That's as opposed to relying on a proxy like student/faculty ratios, low rankings or being a state school. Each state runs its own state schools (and some cities like NY have their own) and have wildly different levels of funding and support for education. And being public does not make them immune from going the adjunct all the way route.

Student faculty ratios can be reported using "full time equivalent" faculty. Meaning, your class of less than 20 students might not have a more available professor, because they're actually also teaching at 2 other universities in the same system to make ends meet. It's not the ratio to the number of tenured faculty, adjuncts count.

For class size, you can have dozens of small classes nobody takes, and have giant lectures for the core intro classes everyone takes. Then the average class size of the classes offered is quite small, but the average class size of the classes you take is quite large.

Pro tip to anyone going to university (or has kids going to university). Find a highest ranked school that will have you; attend, pass, get good work experience, slap it on your CV a get a good job.

Thanks for your informative post. Related background on why that has happened by Dr. David Goodstein of Caltech from 1994: https://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html

    "The period 1950-1970 was a true golden age for American science. Young Ph.D's could choose among excellent jobs, and anyone with a decent scientific idea could be sure of getting funds to pursue it. The impressive successes of scientific projects during the Second World War had paved the way for the federal government to assume responsibility for the support of basic research. Moreover, much of the rest of the world was still crippled by the after-effects of the war. At the same time, the G.I. Bill of Rights sent a whole generation back to college transforming the United States from a nation of elite higher education to a nation of mass higher education. Before the war, about 8% of Americans went to college, a figure comparable to that in France or England. By now more than half of all Americans receive some sort of post-secondary education. The American academic enterprise grew explosively, especially in science and technology. The expanding academic world in 1950-1970 created posts for the exploding number of new science Ph.D.s, whose research led to the founding of journals, to the acquisition of prizes and awards, and to increases in every other measure of the size and quality of science. At the same time, great American corporations such as AT&T, IBM and others decided they needed to create or expand their central research laboratories to solve technological problems, and also to pursue basic research that would provide ideas for future developments. And the federal government itself established a network of excellent national laboratories that also became the source of jobs and opportunities for aspiring scientists. Even so, that explosive growth was merely a seamless continuation of a hundred years of exponential growth of American science. It seemed to one and all (with the notable exception of Derek da Solla Price) that these happy conditions would go on forever.

    By now, in the 1990's, the situation has changed dramatically. With the Cold War over, National Security is rapidly losing its appeal as a means of generating support for scientific research. There are those who argue that research is essential for our economic future, but the managers of the economy know better. The great corporations have decided that central research laboratories were not such a good idea after all. Many of the national laboratories have lost their missions and have not found new ones. The economy has gradually transformed from manufacturing to service, and service industries like banking and insurance don't support much scientific research. To make matters worse, the country is almost 5 trillion dollars in debt, and scientific research is among the few items of discretionary spending left in the national budget. There is much wringing of hands about impending shortages of trained scientific talent to ensure the Nation's future competitiveness, especially since by now other countries have been restored to economic and scientific vigor, but in fact, jobs are scarce for recent graduates. Finally, it should be clear by now that with more than half the kids in America already going to college, academic expansion is finished forever.

    Actually, during the period since 1970, the expansion of American science has not stopped altogether. Federal funding of scientific research, in inflation-corrected dollars, doubled during that period, and by no coincidence at all, the number of academic researchers has also doubled. Such a controlled rate of growth (controlled only by the available funding, to be sure) is not, however, consistent with the lifestyle that academic researchers have evolved. The average American professor in a research university turns out about 15 Ph.D students in the course of a career. In a stable, steady-state world of science, only one of those 15 can go on to become another professor in a research university. In a steady-state world, it is mathematically obvious that the professor's only reproductive role is to produce one professor for the next generation. But the American Ph.D is basically training to become a research professor. It didn't take long for American students to catch on to what was happening. The number of the best American students who decided to go to graduate school started to decline around 1970, and it has been declining ever since. ..."

    "The picture so far is pretty bleak. The American academic scientist earns less than an airplane mechanic or child support profiteer, has less job security than a drummer in a boy band, and works longer hours than a Bolivian silver miner. ... Does this make sense as a career for anyone? Absolutely! Just get out your atlas. Imagine that you are a smart, but impoverished, young person in China. Your high IQ and hard work got you into one of the best undergraduate programs in China. The $1800 per month graduate stipend at University of Nebraska or University of Wisconsin will afford you a much higher standard of living than any job you could hope for in China. The desperate need for graduate student labor and lack of Americans who are interested in PhD programs in science and engineering means that you'll have no trouble getting a visa. When you finish your degree, a small amount of paperwork will suffice to ensure your continued place in the legal American work force. Science may be one of the lowest paid fields for high IQ people in the U.S., but it pays a lot better than most jobs in China or India. ..."

That said, like the lottery, the PhD system does work out for some people.

But in general, the PhD process is a deeply broken system that chews up most people who go through it. Freeman Dyson has written on this as well. One example: https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/freeman-dyson-phd-...

    ""Oh, yes. I’m very proud of not having a Ph.D. I think the Ph.D. system is an abomination. It was invented as a system for educating German professors in the 19th century, and it works well under those conditions. It’s good for a very small number of people who are going to spend their lives being professors. But it has become now a kind of union card that you have to have in order to have a job, whether it’s being a professor or other things, and it’s quite inappropriate for that. It forces people to waste years and years of their lives sort of pretending to do research for which they’re not at all well-suited. In the end, they have this piece of paper which says they’re qualified, but it really doesn’t mean anything. The Ph.D. takes far too long and discourages women from becoming scientists, which I consider a great tragedy. So I have opposed it all my life without any success at all.""

    "Here's an exciting career opportunity you won't see in the classified ads. For the first six to 10 years, it pays less than $20,000 and demands superhuman levels of commitment in a Dickensian environment. Forget about marriage, a mortgage, or even Thanksgiving dinners, as the focus of your entire life narrows to the production, to exacting specifications, of a 300-page document less than a dozen people will read. Then it's time for advancement: Apply to 50 far-flung, undesirable locations, with a 30 to 40 percent chance of being offered any position at all. You may end up living 100 miles from your spouse and commuting to three different work locations a week. You may end up $50,000 in debt, with no health insurance, feeding your kids with food stamps. If you are the luckiest out of every five entrants, you may win the profession's ultimate prize: A comfortable middle-class job, for the rest of your life, with summers off.

    Welcome to the world of the humanities Ph.D. student, 2004, where promises mean little and revolt is in the air. In the past week, Columbia's graduate teaching assistants went on strike and temporary, or adjunct, faculty at New York University narrowly avoided one. Columbia's Graduate Student Employees United seeks recognition, over the administration's appeals, of a two-year-old vote that would make it the second officially recognized union at a private university. NYU's adjuncts, who won their union in 2002, reached an eleventh-hour agreement for health care and office space, among other amenities.

    Grad students have always resigned themselves to relative poverty in anticipation of a cushy, tenured payoff. But in the past decade, the rules of the game have changed. Budget pressures have spurred universities' increasing dependence on so-called "casual labor," which damages both the working conditions of graduate students and their job prospects. Over half of the classroom time at major universities is now logged by non-tenure-track teachers, both graduate teaching assistants—known as TAs—and adjuncts. At community colleges, part-timers make up 60 percent of the faculties. ..."

    "Who are you going to be? That is the question.

    In this riveting book about the world of professional work, Jeff Schmidt demonstrates that the workplace is a battleground for the very identity of the individual, as is graduate school, where professionals are trained. He shows that professional work is inherently political, and that professionals are hired to subordinate their own vision and maintain strict "ideological discipline."

    The hidden root of much career dissatisfaction, argues Schmidt, is the professional's lack of control over the political component of his or her creative work. Many professionals set out to make a contribution to society and add meaning to their lives. Yet our system of professional education and employment abusively inculcates an acceptance of politically subordinate roles in which professionals typically do not make a significant difference, undermining the creative potential of individuals, organizations and even democracy.

    Schmidt details the battle one must fight to be an independent thinker and to pursue one's own social vision in today's corporate society. He shows how an honest reassessment of what it really means to be a professional employee can be remarkably liberating. After reading this brutally frank book, no one who works for a living will ever think the same way about his or her job."

Anyway, having passed through three PhD programs (in Industrial Engineering, Civil Engineering, and Ecology and Evolution plus essentially visiting another in Computing/Robotics for about a year), there is a lot more I could say on this (and have elsewhere).

they do; the average resident salary is $64K, and given the number of hours in many cases they're being paid less than minimum wage / hour

it's basically free labor for the hospitals

How did you get that job? I've read similar stories a couple of times here on HN yet I'm struggling to do the same. My main road block: not really having acquired the right skill set for industry after having focused for year to fine-tune my CV for academic positions. This is now kind of biting me in my rear side: I cannot do the rat wheel of academia any more, am not exactly young any more either, am sort of highly skilled in CS academia but not really suitable for a lot of CS industry positions.

I wouldn't say this is the case, though it probably looks like this at a superficial level, and is a trendy soundbyte that seems to have gotten a life of its own lately. Plus a lot of what you call 'industry' is in fact driven by universities, e.g. via collaborations or spin-out companies. Deepmind, e.g., a notable example when people point to Google as a research lead in the field, was effectively almost exclusively driven by Oxford academics through their university positions (at least in the beginning, I haven't kept up).

The bigger problem is universities (are forced to?) behave like corporations more and more as opposed to academic institutions, in order to survive silly politics (national and not) but without having the requisite corporate infrastructure and corresponding personnel. Instead, all jobs are offloaded to academics, and made part of their "progress and development report" or whatnot as the main driving factor. Which then dilutes the quality of both teaching and research, cuts down on creative time and replaces it with mountains of bureaucracy and counterproductive deadlines, forces people to cut corners just to keep up with it all, and eventually burns them out.

Example: we have recently been asked to enter a cleaning rota for the office, because management fired the cleaners. And I think it's ridiculous and a sign of things to come, but I do it anyway. I don't know if refusing to clean will somehow find its way on your probation record as "not good academic citizenship", but it's not something I'll refuse to do anyway because I know everyone's in the same boat and I don't want to cause trouble for my team. But, then this behaviour gets normalised, and honestly, at this point academics might as well start mowing the lawn and cleaning the toilets too.

But academia still has better structures / people built around attacking the more 'creative', less profit-driven problems, whereas industry is has different incentives, which seriously constrains where that research can go in its own way. And a lot of the time, when you look under the hood, industry claims are little more than hot air trying to get a quick buck, or they're the last little brick building on years of academic work and then going full PR and taking all the credit; whereas academia does things "slow" and steady for a reason.

Not sure what the timeline on that is, but the University of Washington had housing specifically for PhD students with families in the 60s/70s IIRC

Schwab. I worked across from it in the reclaimed basement of Toyon like some sort of hidden Brazil ductwork steampunk menagerie for workers. Their IT department was well-regarded because each department did their own thing, which was inherently efficient in flexibility, control, and service but not in cost of delivery. I was an obsessive control freak, wannabe computer science researcher, and LTT-like PC putter-togetherer masquerading as a Windows sysadmin playing with a $100k budget trying to get barcodes on every single cable, every single asset tagged, inventoried, and reporting basic info 24x7, having everything racked in a real datacenter rather than the housing draw NetBSD "server" desktop going brrrr behind my head, and adopting DR/BCP so that the organization could survive another semi-malicious Microsoft RCE worm or maybe a building fire (the datacenter had FM200).

Not quite sure what point you're making, but it brings to mind what my academic friend often says which is that the economic faculty staff are the worst when it comes to contributing to the general tasks the whole set of academic staff has to do. It's almost like they feel the need to justify their constant advocating that being a shitty person is the rational thing to do, but of course it only ever works because other people pick up the chores.

Academia can be criticized as unsustainable as the OP does because the number of graduate students exceeds the number of secure employment positions available after one defends one’s dissertation or does a postdoc. However, the American model of PhD students being impoverished while studying isn’t the only one. In several European countries, the norm is for PhD students to be university employees under contract that receive a pretty standard middle-class salary. In various other countries, decent middle-class funding may have to come from outside the university, but it’s a semi-automatic process for anyone whose research plan was solid enough to get accepted as a PhD student in the first place.

I've had similar experiences on a with various ideas for compilers and for C++ debugging.

Although I'm my case, the other people were mostly at FAANG companies, rather than academia.

And who gets, uh, takes the credit when one of the PhD students "breaks through"?

I’m not really beating around the bush. A university cannot normalize the prices of all of their majors around outlier majors that have more market demand. They cannot also bundle a “premium” package of the college experience (which evidently now involves indentured servitude, which I’m guessing comes after premium room and board pricing?). Check the whole bill, everything is out of whack.

Drop the prices of 90% of majors, that one should be obvious.

Sharing the wealth should be obvious too, but that one isn’t either apparently. So they overcharge, and then don’t pay their own.

It’s massive pricing issue mired in severe levels of piety and self importance. No one wants to replace universities, they want them to stop scamming.

Both British universities (I do not know about globally) and the Catholic Church have expanded rapidly in recent decades.

I never said “professors” or “deans”. I mentioned higher education specifically, as an industry. It’s the same as the wedding industry, they don’t give a fuck that they sell so much stuff around the romanticism of weddings regardless of its true value.

Behold the romanticization of the diamond ring.

You just, I don’t know, you convince people in their vulnerability, in love, hey, this is what love really is, an expensive ring, venue, etc

Higher education at this point preys on the dreams of the parent/child via a financial vector.

It’s highly pathetic that such a highly regarded element of society has the same business model as a movie theater, which is roughly “now that we found the people that want the real movie experience, we get to charge them $10 for popcorn and $7 for a soda”.

Then the family walks out of the movie theater “hey we’re broke, but you really showed us the value of a real movie going experience, we’ll cherish forever”. I guess? What is this nonsense?

Part of any good experience involves not getting ripped off, on any level.

'Academics' probably have less trust and authority among the general public today than they've ever had. They're as a far away from the priest class of old as you could get.

Truth was replaced with authority

This is probably closer to the mark, but authority no longer rests with academics.

New? The churches created many of the oldest universities and many of them had a job of training future preachers. It's not a new idea.

not with that attitude. how much time does it take to manage a portfolio? people who work for charities do it, many of them part time. if professors were given responsibility to manage some portion of the endowment and paid as a percentage on the return they generated from it they could do a lot better.

I was raised in this institutional class that had contempt for "trade" and it's a cover for meekness, envy, and a smallness that justifies some pretty terrible worldviews. I love brilliant people, but someone with the mind to be an academic is only ever poor becuause of their own fatuous snootery. they do it to themselves and they moralize their envy by blaming "systemic" factors while affecting an unworldly out of touchness that makes them repellent to anyone with responsibility.

perhaps I have a bit of a chip from being outside of it, but having managed some personal success in spite of it, the problems of bureaucracy are the problems of children to me.