Graduate student employees at the University of Washington are on strike today. Represented by the United Auto Workers local 4121, the students have formed a picket line not far from my office window. I can hear cars honking their horns in support, each honk arousing a cheer from the strikers.
I've written before about the quirky nature of accounting in graduate education. There's another quirk that pertains to their employment.
Suppose I, as a University faculty member, wish to hire a graduate student for research assistant work. This happens all the time, and RA work is a key component of graduate training. Let me walk you through what it costs me to hire an RA.
Anytime you hire an employee, you've got to pay salary and benefits. In the current academic year, the standard RA salary at the University of Washington is $2,650 a month, or $23,850 over nine months. Federal regulations stipulate that students may work no more than 20 hours per week, so if you work this out on a per-hour basis it's a rate of $31.80 per hour.
I'm required to pay 18.4% fringe benefits on that. So tack on another $4,388.
I'm also required to pay the student's tuition for them. That's another $14,751 for the academic year. You might think of this as additional compensation for the student, but doctoral students typically don't pay tuition out of pocket so it's closer to the truth to say this is the University skimming money off the top for its own benefit.
The grand total: $42,989 for half-time work over 9 months, or roughly $57.32 per hour. Granted, the student only sees just over half of that money, but that's what I (or more precisely, the sponsor funding my research) has to pay.
Compare this to hiring a research analyst who is not a student. To hire that sort of employee my grant would be charged salary and 32.5% fringe benefit rate. I could offer a salary as high as $86,520 for full-time year-round work and still have per-hour costs below those of hiring a grad student. But I wouldn't need to. A salary offer well below that, even in an expensive market like Seattle, would attract highly qualified applicants.
Why would you hire a grad student when you can get an equally qualified full-time worker for less? That's a question I've asked, and been asked, many times. Faculty often face administrative pressure to steer their dollars toward hiring students.
With research funding becoming harder to come by, universities facing increasing fiscal pressure, and grad students facing increasing costs of their own, it's not a pretty situation.
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