Matt, why don't you talk about moral hazard in this post? For many people it is the #1 reason they don't support debt cancellation, and you haven't even mentioned it.
I think people are really underselling how much of an impact even $10K of forgiveness would have. I’ve met a few people who have been out of the workforce for decades because the garnishments on a small loan made it so a minimum wage job was not worth it. Some of the interest rates and penalties, especially from older loans (prior to feds take over under Obama) are downright predatory. A blanket forgiveness program takes out the administrative burden - and let’s learn from the Republicans. They increase admin burden to get people to give up (see Medicaid, welfare, etc.). Democrats should do the opposite - blanket programs, no admin burden, everyone gets the benefit and knows who it’s from.
I don’t understand why we need to get caught up in who deserves debt forgiveness and who doesn’t, even if we are arguing about people who are making high salaries. Higher ed is a public good, just like grade school. I think there’s a lot we can do to make education more applicable to the lives people actually lead after school but it’s good to get more education to more people. To me, debt forgiveness for everyone is an acknowledgement of that.
We also don’t know how many careers are changed by taking on all this debt. It’s possible we’d have more public defenders and doctors at clinics if these folks didn’t have so much debt to think about. We do have a program to forgive the debts of people who go into public service but there’s lots of uncertainty involved there.
I think we make a lot of assumptions (or, alternatively, skip over imp. questions) when we get in the weeds of targeting programs and end up acting like we have perfect answers. We don’t and sometimes it’s better to keep it simple. If higher ed should be debt free, let’s just forgive the debt.
So I'm not categorically opposed to this, but I have a question: I've 10 grandkids. Over the past 18 years, I've worked hard to put a modicum of money in 529 accounts for each of them. It's been a struggle. Their parents (our kids; blended family) are teachers, psychologists, etc., none with a great deal of money. The grandkids are just entering college, and they are finding it very expensive. Why are those with outstanding college debt right at this moment more deserving of help than coming generations of students who will confront the same financial challenges?
Why would forgiveness of present student debt preclude forgiveness of future student debt? I think if anything it would make it more likely. Especially if the trend continues of both parties being constrained in Congress and needing to focus on an agenda arising from executive power.
I’m just saying I don’t think “but what about people who don’t have debt yet?” is a sensible concern when the policy lever we’re talking about doesn’t really offer the means to do something like bend the cost curve downward in the long term. But I’m pretty sure President AOC will want to help out your grandkids, too.
One thing I think has been missing from this conversation is how limited the federal government's power is to cancel debt for people who attended expensive colleges. As far as I know, what is being proposed is forgiving student loans owned by the US government, and the Department of Education has a loan cap of $12k/year for undergrads and $20k/year for grad students (and $57k or $138k for undergrads or grad students total over the course of their degrees) (according to https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/loans/student-loans/much-borrow-college).
This means that, even if Biden didn't bother setting an income cap or a $10k per person cap, there's a limit to how much of their loans anyone could be forgiven. The people I know who took out loans for expensive private schools borrowed the vast majority from private lenders, since the tuition they paid was so much more expensive than $57k over four years.
Better higher education subsidies for the current generation of kids is a better policy and less controversial than debt forgiveness.
The culture war aspect matters a lot less than the commentators in this thread think. Right wing shills will find plenty to lie about regardless of what Biden does, and by the next election this will be a long forgotten debate.
Three issues - one, I think Matt is underestimating the fairness problem, where people who’ve either paid off or don’t have loans seeing this as robbing them to pay others. Two, what about future loan recipients? And three, regarding undergrad vs post grad debt - many grad school people consolidated their undergrad debt with their grad debt - under Matt’s plan, they don’t get the benefits of loan forgiveness, I don’t think.
I think you’re missing a more relevant example of the potential for backlash than the farmers: the second round of stimulus. The plan circulating now contains a lot of help for a lot of people but one thing it doesn’t contain is $1200 checks for everyone, and people are complaining about that. I doubt it’s because of a disinterested principled argument about the stimulative impact of UI and PPP alone.
One time loan-forgiveness can't stay one-time. You'll have to do it for every year's batch of graduating students.
If the government offers loan forgiveness of 10k, college tuition will rise by 10k to absorb the subsidy. It'll end up increasing tuition costs, effectively another subsidy (in addition to the ones that already exist) from non-college-educated taxpayers to colleges.
I think the win-win solution for Democrats is to go through Congress. Have the House pass a debt forgiveness bill that dies in McConnell's Senate. This will keep the young, college-educated Democratic base furious at Republicans and motivated to support Democrats yet not inflame the non-college population or those who *did* pay off their loans, because in the end nothing happened.
But if you want to *actually* help people with college debt, then you need to pass legislation in Congress that pairs help for them with aid to others who paid off their loans or could never afford to go to college in the first place.
And yes, none of this can pass now, and people will continue to bear heavy debt burdens, but sometimes you just have to wait for the right conditions to pass more comprehensive solutions than a one-time jury-rigged answer that will do damage to the body politic.
I think you have the political impact of a failed bill backwards. Favorability of a policy rises when people see real, tangible benefits from it. Hypothetical benefits from a failed bill don't get you much. Meanwhile, people oppose a policy when it's a partisan salience gets elevated by a high profile fight over it. So if the Democrats raise a bill and id doesn't get through, it becomes a culture war, Ds want to subsidize big-city-liberal-degrees issue and they don't get credit for it.
If Biden just does it, it's over. There's no fight to cover, it's done. The culture war moves on, it's not of any particular importance to anyone except the people who materially benefited.
This is besides the fact that on a policy level forgiving student debt is clearly higher impact than talking about student debt.
Rick Santelli's rant was one month into the Obama Administration. As I recall, Republicans -- fueled by this type of anger -- did pretty well in the midterms 21 months later.
I remember watching Santelli's rant live and the original "tea party" thing was about exactly this type of issue -- subsidizing other people's spending. It's one thing to rationalize a system going forward, it's another to rescue people from known consequences of their own choices.
Unpopular side opinion: What's with everyone distinguishing so much between interest and principal on loans? Unpaid interest is added to the principal (not a new idea) so there's no distinction with regards to owed amounts. How is this different from those credit card people who just make "minimum payments" (which are less than ongoing interest) and are then completely surprised that the balance doesn't shrink? A lot of people are acting like this is unfair or something but isn't that just how basically all debt works? Corporations follow the same rules when they take out bank loans for example and in fact often have to pay interest even on undrawn lines of credit...these are pretty standard terms of borrowing money for everyone.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the Obama administration did not lose the 2010 midterms because they did too much to help individuals who were underwater on their mortgages.
Like, Rick Santelli did in fact rant about that on a low ratings daytime business cable show, but:
A) The Obama administration did almost nothing for individual borrowers and it's been strongly argued they should have both on a policy and political level
B) This was not a thing that was at all salient during the midterms compared to the shitty economy, the very polarized fight over the ACA, and the basic thermostatic response of the electorate.
The fact that republican partisans organized around the phrase "tea party" afterwards doesn't change the fact that his substantive criticism of debt relief didn't go anywhere.
Certainly a lot of bad stuff went into the 2010 midterms debacle. But the Santelli rant kicked things off and, rather like kindling, helped build a roaring bonfire. One can't be overly-cautious and balk at doing anything for fear of what the opposition will do with it, but you also have to pursue smart, cost-benefit strategies. This may not be a black and white situation, but I'd be nervous about going all in on debt forgiveness.
I don't totally disagree, it's not at all obvious that the juice is worth the squeeze on debt relief. But if you're going to do it, do it. Make some people happy. Don't pick a fight in congress that you expect to lose.
Like, I'm not saying that I'm sold on this on a political or policy level, but it would materially improve the standing of voters in all states with no noticeable negative impact on anyone. (And suggesting that we should pick a fight over it in congress instead of just giving those voters the benefit is insane.)
If the Republicans would like to tell 1.5 million college-educated Georgians that they are bad undeserving people who should not have received the 10,000 dollars that Joe Biden just gave them, they are welcome to do so.
Obviously it's possible to workshop messaging against the measure, but if you assume that the Democrats have actually succeeded in providing actual benefits, it's not at all obvious that it's a winner for republicans. (See how healthcare spun around on them once they got down to brass tacks and put up a plan that would take it away from people.)
I'm in favor of loan forgiveness if the politics can be managed. Matt is rather blase about the problem of envy, but I think he writes it off too quickly. Yes, he cites a poll which shows that a (small) majority of the public is OK with it within limits but as Kevin Drum has pointed out, small favorable majorities tend to disappear when the polarizing debate on the issue really kicks into gear. You can't take this rather abstract poll to the bank.
The problem of envy is real. Remember the Rick Santelli rant on CNBC that kicked off the tea party movement. Who was his target? Not really Obama and the Democrats. It was instead the "losers" who took on too much mortgage. As he put it, "How many of you people want to pay for your neighbor’s mortgage that has an extra bathroom and can’t pay their bills?"
Of course, that kind of stuff is unfair. But it also worked like a charm. And the Democrats have to be prepared for that kind of counterattack. The question is likely to be: why are we punishing the folks who were responsible and made their student loan payments every month and paid off the whole amount? Why don't we reward their industry and discipline instead of the people who took on too much student debt pursuing some worthless degree? (And maybe not even sticking around to get it?)
A smart policy has to offer *something* to those people who were able to pay off their loans, if only to drain the envy argument of some of its power. And it *is* powerfull!
Persuasive piece! Wondering if Matt has any thoughts on the merits of setting the cap at 50k per the Warren/Schumer proposal or at 10k. If we're just looking at forgiving undergraduate student loans rather than graduate loans, how should we think about the upper bound here?
I am all for subsidized undergraduate education, but I would prefer that Congress act on this, rather than just another executive order. I am tired of the tit-for-tat with executive orders. It's unconstitutional. To be clear, I would really like the outcome here. But I would respect Biden a lot more if he would divest the presidency of some of its corrosive power.
This post seems like a good illustration of the degree to which left-of-center people underestimate how central concepts of horizontal equity are to mainstream peoples' view of what's fair and appropriate, even if there's no collective downside.
It's a bad way to go through life, imo, but very, very common. Republican propaganda inflaming the issue won't help, of course.
Good argument. It is doable so do it in the least regressive way possible. I must add that I found one aspect of that initial chart quite frightening based on what isn't there. (Which happens to be something of a professional duty of mine.) Nowhere in those debt statistics are categories for advanced or even basic science degrees outside of health care. (Excepting biology) Nothing on advanced science or engineering degrees. Presumably, if they were significant categories, they would have been included. Most comprehensive universities have whole faculties and sub-faculties devoted to these subjects.
Please tell me that was an abbreviated chart. Because if it isn't I suspect I know why anticipated technological leaps forward might be a bit slow in coming.
Twenty years ago, at least, the rule was in most PhD programs worth doing is that tuition was waived/subsidized, and in fact the grad students survived on a little bit of wage for doing work for the university. So essentially the university paid you, and the main cost was opportunity cost.
Don't know if that's still true, but if so would explain why STEM PhD's aren't on the chart.
pretty much every STEM PhD is paid for. And if you're not getting paid for it, you shouldn't be going there. At my university, STEM PhDs also typically are paid more than the minimum GRA/GTA stipend.
But they are still paid below what one would say a BS is nominally worth (typically $25-30k, I think), and the situation is similar for postdocs getting paid less than what a PhD should be worth (around $45-55k depending on field). (BTW your dog is so cute!)
Ha, yes, we are presently very much underpaid. The argument the university makes is that my compensation package goes beyond my stipend:
1. My advisor pays for 85% of my health insurance premiums
2. My advisor pays for my tuition
3. I (technically) only have to work for my advisor for 20 hours a week as a GRA, and the rest of my time can be spent researching as I please.
4. My advisor pays for conference-related expenses (travel, lodging, registration)
5. My advisor pays for all of the equipment and other materials needed for my research beyond what I do for her.
Do I think I should be paid more? Yes! But the position held by the university is that my compensation package is probably closer to $70-80k. So it is what it is.
That being said, postdocs get absolutely robbed. Many of the above items don't apply to them. But given the number of PhDs who are willing to wade into the postdoc reservoir while they await a chance at a faculty position... that won't change any time soon. A postdoc is a great deal for a faculty member: cheaper than a PhD student *and* more productive.
I greatly enjoyed my time in grad school, so I don't want to say it's all bad! And travel is one of the great perks of being in science. Flexible schedules is another, although good luck using that 20 hours/week line! My advisor once tried to argue (joking...I think?) that my thesis work didn't count in that!
From the other side of the equation, I really resent that I have to pay tuition for students out of my grants - it's just yet another money grab by the university. Let's see, we write the grants, I train the students, we do the work and they...create bureaucratic roadblocks and pay the electric bill (for now!). And for that, they take ~60% on top of the grant (indirect costs) plus things like "tuition".
haha none of that is my position! it's the university's. I don't think there's a grad student in the country that would get away with the 20 hr/week defense.
It really is insane that the university skims money off the top of everything faculty bring in. But hey, they have to have money for the new rock climbing wall at the rec center or whatever. After we're done with graded courses, you still have to pay our tuition for "research credits", right? And then there was the time it took multiple weeks for me to buy a pdf of a textbook chapter because of all of the administrative hoops to jump through... Good luck with all of that! I'm sure it's particularly frustrating in the age of covid.
It is still true - no PhD student in the sciences should be paying for their degree (at least not in up-front dollars, opportunity cost is a different matter! :)
There are well reasoned arguments out there that we are training too many people in science, which depresses the wages of grad students and postdocs, most of whom don't have great future prospects in academia anyway. But those depressed wages are precisely why NIH (and NSF) can get more "bang for their buck" when giving out grants.
Now, if the claim was "we should fund more science, thereby encouraging more people to do science and supporting them accordingly", you won't get any argument from this scientist. :)
Matt, why don't you talk about moral hazard in this post? For many people it is the #1 reason they don't support debt cancellation, and you haven't even mentioned it.
I think people are really underselling how much of an impact even $10K of forgiveness would have. I’ve met a few people who have been out of the workforce for decades because the garnishments on a small loan made it so a minimum wage job was not worth it. Some of the interest rates and penalties, especially from older loans (prior to feds take over under Obama) are downright predatory. A blanket forgiveness program takes out the administrative burden - and let’s learn from the Republicans. They increase admin burden to get people to give up (see Medicaid, welfare, etc.). Democrats should do the opposite - blanket programs, no admin burden, everyone gets the benefit and knows who it’s from.
I don’t understand why we need to get caught up in who deserves debt forgiveness and who doesn’t, even if we are arguing about people who are making high salaries. Higher ed is a public good, just like grade school. I think there’s a lot we can do to make education more applicable to the lives people actually lead after school but it’s good to get more education to more people. To me, debt forgiveness for everyone is an acknowledgement of that.
We also don’t know how many careers are changed by taking on all this debt. It’s possible we’d have more public defenders and doctors at clinics if these folks didn’t have so much debt to think about. We do have a program to forgive the debts of people who go into public service but there’s lots of uncertainty involved there.
I think we make a lot of assumptions (or, alternatively, skip over imp. questions) when we get in the weeds of targeting programs and end up acting like we have perfect answers. We don’t and sometimes it’s better to keep it simple. If higher ed should be debt free, let’s just forgive the debt.
So I'm not categorically opposed to this, but I have a question: I've 10 grandkids. Over the past 18 years, I've worked hard to put a modicum of money in 529 accounts for each of them. It's been a struggle. Their parents (our kids; blended family) are teachers, psychologists, etc., none with a great deal of money. The grandkids are just entering college, and they are finding it very expensive. Why are those with outstanding college debt right at this moment more deserving of help than coming generations of students who will confront the same financial challenges?
I don’t think it’s either/or. It could be a first step to making higher ed debt free.
Why would forgiveness of present student debt preclude forgiveness of future student debt? I think if anything it would make it more likely. Especially if the trend continues of both parties being constrained in Congress and needing to focus on an agenda arising from executive power.
I’ve not seen a proposal that models this.
I’m just saying I don’t think “but what about people who don’t have debt yet?” is a sensible concern when the policy lever we’re talking about doesn’t really offer the means to do something like bend the cost curve downward in the long term. But I’m pretty sure President AOC will want to help out your grandkids, too.
One thing I think has been missing from this conversation is how limited the federal government's power is to cancel debt for people who attended expensive colleges. As far as I know, what is being proposed is forgiving student loans owned by the US government, and the Department of Education has a loan cap of $12k/year for undergrads and $20k/year for grad students (and $57k or $138k for undergrads or grad students total over the course of their degrees) (according to https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/loans/student-loans/much-borrow-college).
This means that, even if Biden didn't bother setting an income cap or a $10k per person cap, there's a limit to how much of their loans anyone could be forgiven. The people I know who took out loans for expensive private schools borrowed the vast majority from private lenders, since the tuition they paid was so much more expensive than $57k over four years.
Better higher education subsidies for the current generation of kids is a better policy and less controversial than debt forgiveness.
The culture war aspect matters a lot less than the commentators in this thread think. Right wing shills will find plenty to lie about regardless of what Biden does, and by the next election this will be a long forgotten debate.
Three issues - one, I think Matt is underestimating the fairness problem, where people who’ve either paid off or don’t have loans seeing this as robbing them to pay others. Two, what about future loan recipients? And three, regarding undergrad vs post grad debt - many grad school people consolidated their undergrad debt with their grad debt - under Matt’s plan, they don’t get the benefits of loan forgiveness, I don’t think.
Anyone else notice the comments here versus Twitter. There was very few of the young in debt college active as crowd in these comments.
I’m going to guess, that you fellow commenters are much more of a representative of average voters.
Definitely a more adult crowd.
Fwiw, I'm 33, paid off my debt, am against debt forgiveness, and do not use twitter.
I'm not on Twitter. Doesn't sound like I'm missing anything then?
I think you’re missing a more relevant example of the potential for backlash than the farmers: the second round of stimulus. The plan circulating now contains a lot of help for a lot of people but one thing it doesn’t contain is $1200 checks for everyone, and people are complaining about that. I doubt it’s because of a disinterested principled argument about the stimulative impact of UI and PPP alone.
One time loan-forgiveness can't stay one-time. You'll have to do it for every year's batch of graduating students.
If the government offers loan forgiveness of 10k, college tuition will rise by 10k to absorb the subsidy. It'll end up increasing tuition costs, effectively another subsidy (in addition to the ones that already exist) from non-college-educated taxpayers to colleges.
I think the win-win solution for Democrats is to go through Congress. Have the House pass a debt forgiveness bill that dies in McConnell's Senate. This will keep the young, college-educated Democratic base furious at Republicans and motivated to support Democrats yet not inflame the non-college population or those who *did* pay off their loans, because in the end nothing happened.
But if you want to *actually* help people with college debt, then you need to pass legislation in Congress that pairs help for them with aid to others who paid off their loans or could never afford to go to college in the first place.
And yes, none of this can pass now, and people will continue to bear heavy debt burdens, but sometimes you just have to wait for the right conditions to pass more comprehensive solutions than a one-time jury-rigged answer that will do damage to the body politic.
I think you have the political impact of a failed bill backwards. Favorability of a policy rises when people see real, tangible benefits from it. Hypothetical benefits from a failed bill don't get you much. Meanwhile, people oppose a policy when it's a partisan salience gets elevated by a high profile fight over it. So if the Democrats raise a bill and id doesn't get through, it becomes a culture war, Ds want to subsidize big-city-liberal-degrees issue and they don't get credit for it.
If Biden just does it, it's over. There's no fight to cover, it's done. The culture war moves on, it's not of any particular importance to anyone except the people who materially benefited.
This is besides the fact that on a policy level forgiving student debt is clearly higher impact than talking about student debt.
Rick Santelli's rant was one month into the Obama Administration. As I recall, Republicans -- fueled by this type of anger -- did pretty well in the midterms 21 months later.
I remember watching Santelli's rant live and the original "tea party" thing was about exactly this type of issue -- subsidizing other people's spending. It's one thing to rationalize a system going forward, it's another to rescue people from known consequences of their own choices.
Unpopular side opinion: What's with everyone distinguishing so much between interest and principal on loans? Unpaid interest is added to the principal (not a new idea) so there's no distinction with regards to owed amounts. How is this different from those credit card people who just make "minimum payments" (which are less than ongoing interest) and are then completely surprised that the balance doesn't shrink? A lot of people are acting like this is unfair or something but isn't that just how basically all debt works? Corporations follow the same rules when they take out bank loans for example and in fact often have to pay interest even on undrawn lines of credit...these are pretty standard terms of borrowing money for everyone.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the Obama administration did not lose the 2010 midterms because they did too much to help individuals who were underwater on their mortgages.
Like, Rick Santelli did in fact rant about that on a low ratings daytime business cable show, but:
A) The Obama administration did almost nothing for individual borrowers and it's been strongly argued they should have both on a policy and political level
B) This was not a thing that was at all salient during the midterms compared to the shitty economy, the very polarized fight over the ACA, and the basic thermostatic response of the electorate.
The fact that republican partisans organized around the phrase "tea party" afterwards doesn't change the fact that his substantive criticism of debt relief didn't go anywhere.
Certainly a lot of bad stuff went into the 2010 midterms debacle. But the Santelli rant kicked things off and, rather like kindling, helped build a roaring bonfire. One can't be overly-cautious and balk at doing anything for fear of what the opposition will do with it, but you also have to pursue smart, cost-benefit strategies. This may not be a black and white situation, but I'd be nervous about going all in on debt forgiveness.
I don't totally disagree, it's not at all obvious that the juice is worth the squeeze on debt relief. But if you're going to do it, do it. Make some people happy. Don't pick a fight in congress that you expect to lose.
There's a very weird idea in all of this that only baristas in 'coastal' cities have college debt.
https://educationdata.org/student-loan-debt-by-state#georgia
https://educationdata.org/student-loan-debt-by-state#florida
https://educationdata.org/student-loan-debt-by-state#texas
https://educationdata.org/student-loan-debt-by-state#arizona
https://educationdata.org/student-loan-debt-by-state#ohio
Like, I'm not saying that I'm sold on this on a political or policy level, but it would materially improve the standing of voters in all states with no noticeable negative impact on anyone. (And suggesting that we should pick a fight over it in congress instead of just giving those voters the benefit is insane.)
Sure. That's not what Marc advocated above.
If the Republicans would like to tell 1.5 million college-educated Georgians that they are bad undeserving people who should not have received the 10,000 dollars that Joe Biden just gave them, they are welcome to do so.
Obviously it's possible to workshop messaging against the measure, but if you assume that the Democrats have actually succeeded in providing actual benefits, it's not at all obvious that it's a winner for republicans. (See how healthcare spun around on them once they got down to brass tacks and put up a plan that would take it away from people.)
I'm in favor of loan forgiveness if the politics can be managed. Matt is rather blase about the problem of envy, but I think he writes it off too quickly. Yes, he cites a poll which shows that a (small) majority of the public is OK with it within limits but as Kevin Drum has pointed out, small favorable majorities tend to disappear when the polarizing debate on the issue really kicks into gear. You can't take this rather abstract poll to the bank.
The problem of envy is real. Remember the Rick Santelli rant on CNBC that kicked off the tea party movement. Who was his target? Not really Obama and the Democrats. It was instead the "losers" who took on too much mortgage. As he put it, "How many of you people want to pay for your neighbor’s mortgage that has an extra bathroom and can’t pay their bills?"
Of course, that kind of stuff is unfair. But it also worked like a charm. And the Democrats have to be prepared for that kind of counterattack. The question is likely to be: why are we punishing the folks who were responsible and made their student loan payments every month and paid off the whole amount? Why don't we reward their industry and discipline instead of the people who took on too much student debt pursuing some worthless degree? (And maybe not even sticking around to get it?)
A smart policy has to offer *something* to those people who were able to pay off their loans, if only to drain the envy argument of some of its power. And it *is* powerfull!
Persuasive piece! Wondering if Matt has any thoughts on the merits of setting the cap at 50k per the Warren/Schumer proposal or at 10k. If we're just looking at forgiving undergraduate student loans rather than graduate loans, how should we think about the upper bound here?
I am all for subsidized undergraduate education, but I would prefer that Congress act on this, rather than just another executive order. I am tired of the tit-for-tat with executive orders. It's unconstitutional. To be clear, I would really like the outcome here. But I would respect Biden a lot more if he would divest the presidency of some of its corrosive power.
This post seems like a good illustration of the degree to which left-of-center people underestimate how central concepts of horizontal equity are to mainstream peoples' view of what's fair and appropriate, even if there's no collective downside.
It's a bad way to go through life, imo, but very, very common. Republican propaganda inflaming the issue won't help, of course.
Good argument. It is doable so do it in the least regressive way possible. I must add that I found one aspect of that initial chart quite frightening based on what isn't there. (Which happens to be something of a professional duty of mine.) Nowhere in those debt statistics are categories for advanced or even basic science degrees outside of health care. (Excepting biology) Nothing on advanced science or engineering degrees. Presumably, if they were significant categories, they would have been included. Most comprehensive universities have whole faculties and sub-faculties devoted to these subjects.
Please tell me that was an abbreviated chart. Because if it isn't I suspect I know why anticipated technological leaps forward might be a bit slow in coming.
Twenty years ago, at least, the rule was in most PhD programs worth doing is that tuition was waived/subsidized, and in fact the grad students survived on a little bit of wage for doing work for the university. So essentially the university paid you, and the main cost was opportunity cost.
Don't know if that's still true, but if so would explain why STEM PhD's aren't on the chart.
pretty much every STEM PhD is paid for. And if you're not getting paid for it, you shouldn't be going there. At my university, STEM PhDs also typically are paid more than the minimum GRA/GTA stipend.
But they are still paid below what one would say a BS is nominally worth (typically $25-30k, I think), and the situation is similar for postdocs getting paid less than what a PhD should be worth (around $45-55k depending on field). (BTW your dog is so cute!)
Ha, yes, we are presently very much underpaid. The argument the university makes is that my compensation package goes beyond my stipend:
1. My advisor pays for 85% of my health insurance premiums
2. My advisor pays for my tuition
3. I (technically) only have to work for my advisor for 20 hours a week as a GRA, and the rest of my time can be spent researching as I please.
4. My advisor pays for conference-related expenses (travel, lodging, registration)
5. My advisor pays for all of the equipment and other materials needed for my research beyond what I do for her.
Do I think I should be paid more? Yes! But the position held by the university is that my compensation package is probably closer to $70-80k. So it is what it is.
That being said, postdocs get absolutely robbed. Many of the above items don't apply to them. But given the number of PhDs who are willing to wade into the postdoc reservoir while they await a chance at a faculty position... that won't change any time soon. A postdoc is a great deal for a faculty member: cheaper than a PhD student *and* more productive.
And thank you :)
I greatly enjoyed my time in grad school, so I don't want to say it's all bad! And travel is one of the great perks of being in science. Flexible schedules is another, although good luck using that 20 hours/week line! My advisor once tried to argue (joking...I think?) that my thesis work didn't count in that!
From the other side of the equation, I really resent that I have to pay tuition for students out of my grants - it's just yet another money grab by the university. Let's see, we write the grants, I train the students, we do the work and they...create bureaucratic roadblocks and pay the electric bill (for now!). And for that, they take ~60% on top of the grant (indirect costs) plus things like "tuition".
haha none of that is my position! it's the university's. I don't think there's a grad student in the country that would get away with the 20 hr/week defense.
It really is insane that the university skims money off the top of everything faculty bring in. But hey, they have to have money for the new rock climbing wall at the rec center or whatever. After we're done with graded courses, you still have to pay our tuition for "research credits", right? And then there was the time it took multiple weeks for me to buy a pdf of a textbook chapter because of all of the administrative hoops to jump through... Good luck with all of that! I'm sure it's particularly frustrating in the age of covid.
It is still true - no PhD student in the sciences should be paying for their degree (at least not in up-front dollars, opportunity cost is a different matter! :)
It’s not every program. But yes we would do well to have more people learning science and fewer lawyers.
There are well reasoned arguments out there that we are training too many people in science, which depresses the wages of grad students and postdocs, most of whom don't have great future prospects in academia anyway. But those depressed wages are precisely why NIH (and NSF) can get more "bang for their buck" when giving out grants.
Now, if the claim was "we should fund more science, thereby encouraging more people to do science and supporting them accordingly", you won't get any argument from this scientist. :)