All UK universities do this. Not necessarily a bad thing unlike how the article portrays it. PhD students (and depending on the institution, postdocs) in the UK get a stipend that has no mandated teaching hours. Teaching allows PhD students to earn some extra income within the university.
We certainly still have a compensation problem in academia. Bright STEM PhD grads don't want to earn £30-40k as a postdoc when earning £150k+ in big tech or finance isn't unusual. However, PhD students earning a little side income by marking lab reports or programming assessments isn't necessarily bad.
When I read the article when it came out, I was a bit annoyed that it singled out Oxford as it's the same at all the universities. It's also been that for a long time - I earned comparable amounts as a DPhil student and post-doc teaching at Oxford and another UK university. More recently I've worked as a tutor for The Open University and the pay for that has felt in a similar ballpark once you take into account all the marking and prep you need to do.
When I did it, I had my DPhil grant/post-doc salary and it felt like side money rather than being my 'job' and I was partly doing for the experience, for my CV (good to be able to put 'Lecturer at Oxford' on it!) and partly because I enjoyed it. I felt quite lucky to be offered tutoring jobs at Oxford as they were much sought-after by DPhil students.
I think it's also worth pointing out that not all Oxford colleges are 'rich' and many have buildings and grounds that are expensive to maintain. I don't think most of them are better placed to pay more than other UK universities.
There's an argument to be made that people teaching at universities should be paid more, but it does feel unfair to single out Oxford.
When I was a postdoc in Cambridge, the problem was that there were too many PhD students and postdocs who wanted to teach. Not because of the compensation but for the experience. A lot of people wanted to try a career in the academia, and they needed teaching experience for that. But there were not enough undergraduates for them all to teach.
> 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"
Ehn, it really doesn't.
Harvard admits significantly less undergrads than Penn or Columbia, and in personal experience, the "Ivy" cachet doesn't really help that much in most industries outside of High Finance (which itself tends to targets Penn+Columbia instead of Harvard). Harvard was historically overrepresented in MBB+Management Consulting, but that industry is dying now that Accountancies and Implementation firms are bundling MC, and companies increasingly do strategy in-house.
Prestige is a finicky thing. 30 years ago UChicago was not viewed as "prestigious" compared to Harvard (it was Claremont McKenna with snow back then), but ask high schoolers today and UChicago has a strong brand value.
Also, ime, I just don't bump into Harvard grads anymore at high level positions (Director and above). Harvard historically overindexed on MBB and Boutique Consulting recruiting while Penn+Columbia targeted Wall Street and Stanford+Cal targeted Sand Hill and YC. Consulting slowly started withering away, so recruiting is tough.
That said, Harvard does very well in China (largely thanks to John Fairbanks and Roderick MacFarquhar in the 1970s-90s), but they aren't as driven as UPenn has been in trying to diversify their international presence.
Was about to say the same. Haven't PhD students usually done tutorials and supervised labs to undergraduates for the extra cash. Certainly was the case in my electronics undergrad course a few decades ago.
> in 2023-24 one in five tutorials (20%) were taught by hourly-paid tutors – typically PhD students or academics at the start of their career.
is this news? this sounds like every university in the US, which uses underpaid adjuncts to do most of the teaching and underpaid phd candidates and postdocs to do most of the research
not saying this is right -- adjuncts and postdocs absolutely need to be paid more commensurately with the value they provide -- but it has been the status quo for a long time; the bigger problem is that it used to be a temporary stepping stone to professorship, whereas now universities are perpetually and increasingly relying on this cheap labor to cut costs, making the path for academia an increasingly tortuous one. It's highly counter productive because who wants to go through all that instead if you can get a job in industry that values you much more? The result is that you don't get the best and brightest educating the next generation, except maybe at a few universities - Oxford, Stanford, Harvard, MIT, etc. - where the prestige itself is enough of a draw.
Throwaway account. Yes that is exactly what happened to me. Figured I'd do a PhD so took a research / part time teaching position after masters. Terrible money, demanding job, knee deep in politics. After about 12 months I said fuck it and went and got a job for 4x the money and a 35 hour week. No regrets.
Or even research experience. In many fields industry is now years ahead and academia lacks the funds and the man power to compete. AI and biotech are two examples.
I think traditionally it was for people who were unmarried. Hence its connection to the church. So expecting enough to raise a family is a relatively new idea.
What do you mean "accused of"? This has been the official and government-wanted policy for years in some countries, so much so that there are specific laws that ensure young academics by default cannot expect a long-term career in academia.
Yup. They deliberately overload the front of the pipeline. It can attract smart people from overseas and also save plenty of money. They usually openly argue that the university's job is training for the rest of the economy so it only makes sense that they don't have enough long-term positions for people.
I took a position at a prominent London university to teach one of their courses and I did it for the love of it, because it was less than two days contracting for an entire term of lecturing and marking. Forget that coming into college to teach was effectively an entire day of my time for a two hour lecture or seminar, I think I was paid by the hour. This practice goes on everywhere and the real losers are the students/customers.
A reader may also be "shocked and appalled" that research universities like Stanford abused employees by keeping them "part-time" for years at a time to cheat them out of benefits received by FTEs.
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.
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).
As a huge fan of William Gibson, that's some lovely writing, my fellow greybeard.
>> I was an obsessive control freak
There are 'control freaks' and there are the rest of the sea of humanity. Michael Jordan, LeBron James, Einstein, Feynman, ... I like my place in the set of the control freaks of the world. The key is to not ever try to control other people, only our own circumstances, including our own selves.
was doing exactly that a few years ago as Postdoc at Oxford. Yes, the pay is very low, but those who do that (PhD students and Postdocs) do it to get some valuable teaching experience more than for the money. The amount of hours they give for such temporary assignemnts is very little per individual, or at least that's what I saw among my colleagues.
Higher education doesn’t want to shed its clergy status. It’s like they can’t figure out if education is truly a pure pursuit or just this crazy godly thing that is priceless but somehow has this exorbitant real world price that the clergy seems to value …
They sell indulgences at this point, and I don’t think it’s a false analogy. Holier than thou institution where everyone must pay the price for their product or be doomed as a person. How do you question the price of something that’s equated to a gift from god or certainly using the same language - more or less.
"Selling indulgence" is a bit of gross generalisation though. Getting a medicine or technical degree from a top-tier university does prepare you technically for a very technically demanding job. Whatever replacement you imagine for this phase of such occupations will end up reinventing something very similar to university. Do you imagine people should jump straight into these occupations without undergoing some kind of training/testing that they reached a certain level of technical understanding of their occupation?
The problem is that many universities have accreted huge management layers and some non-sensical degrees but this is not unique to universities.
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.
I am arguing this is mostly explained by universities being taken over mba-type managers: launching new products (i.e non-sensical degrees), turning university study into an "experience", ... is all the sort of thing that mba type do and not unique to university (see Boing, Intel, ...)
But the core idea of university remains as sound and essential to a well-functioning society as it gets. From time immemorial you needed gatekeepers to recognised professions who: a) provide hands-on training to the next generation b) certify that a trainer has reached a sufficient level of mastery to practice the profession. Calling this process "selling indulgence" is my issue with your argument.
> Holier than thou institution where everyone must pay the price for their product or be doomed as a person.
One cannot place all of the blame at the foot of the university. Employers also play a role, when they demand accreditation. Students are also to blame, when they fail to do research on what type of training they need to enter a field.
As for the clergy comparison, let's just say that a multitude of people work within universities and those people have very different motivations from one another. Heck, they have very different motivations from one another even if they have the same job title. Painting them with one brush is excessive.
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.
This is the foundation of all academia currently. It’s a nice pyramid scheme while you’ve got it, I just finished witnessing my youngest brother go through it in grad school and his defense is on Tuesday.
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.
> the American model of PhD students being impoverished while studying
This might be true in some cases, but I suspect that ultimately it's only the wealthy who can pursue these higher degrees. Yes, the pay might be low but that doesn't mean they are overall impoverished.
Put another way, the cost of education is one thing, but being able to afford the process might be a higher bar, for some, or more.
Dude, I went through the European PhD system and it's not as glamorous as you depict it. First of all, you forgot to mention that the norm is to give contracts of 50% to 75% FTE. Secondly the hours worked and the vacation time is a complete forgery that you are basically forced to sign. Although the contract is nice on paper, in practice the norms and expectations are different. Thirdly, unlike in the US, in Europe you often don't have a graduate school (although it is a thing) so you are in a very vulnerable situation where you invest 3 to 5 years of the best years of your life and during those years your graduation is completely at the mercy of that supervisor.
There is no “European PhD system” in terms of funding, or the duties expected of a PhD student other than the production of the dissertation. Different countries around the world do it differently, and that is true even within Europe.
Before I became aware of criticisms likening universities to pyramid schemes, I recall hearing a Stanford professor managing a large research team say something like: "For this project, we have around 150 PhD students exploring it further in many directions". I was astonished by the sheer scale of their capabilities, especially because I liked the subject and had hoped to explore it as a hobby with just a few like-minded friends.
what do the people who make and manage money learn, and could clever people be taught this skill too? maybe instead of spending their afternoons on the golf course like wealth managers they could pursue research and teach. how difficult could it be?
A lot of people make money from zero sum games, or from things with a small positive sum socially (e.g. selling something for a little bit less than someone else).
All UK universities do this. Not necessarily a bad thing unlike how the article portrays it. PhD students (and depending on the institution, postdocs) in the UK get a stipend that has no mandated teaching hours. Teaching allows PhD students to earn some extra income within the university.
We certainly still have a compensation problem in academia. Bright STEM PhD grads don't want to earn £30-40k as a postdoc when earning £150k+ in big tech or finance isn't unusual. However, PhD students earning a little side income by marking lab reports or programming assessments isn't necessarily bad.
When I read the article when it came out, I was a bit annoyed that it singled out Oxford as it's the same at all the universities. It's also been that for a long time - I earned comparable amounts as a DPhil student and post-doc teaching at Oxford and another UK university. More recently I've worked as a tutor for The Open University and the pay for that has felt in a similar ballpark once you take into account all the marking and prep you need to do.
When I did it, I had my DPhil grant/post-doc salary and it felt like side money rather than being my 'job' and I was partly doing for the experience, for my CV (good to be able to put 'Lecturer at Oxford' on it!) and partly because I enjoyed it. I felt quite lucky to be offered tutoring jobs at Oxford as they were much sought-after by DPhil students.
I think it's also worth pointing out that not all Oxford colleges are 'rich' and many have buildings and grounds that are expensive to maintain. I don't think most of them are better placed to pay more than other UK universities.
There's an argument to be made that people teaching at universities should be paid more, but it does feel unfair to single out Oxford.
When I was a postdoc in Cambridge, the problem was that there were too many PhD students and postdocs who wanted to teach. Not because of the compensation but for the experience. A lot of people wanted to try a career in the academia, and they needed teaching experience for that. But there were not enough undergraduates for them all to teach.
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.
> 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"
Ehn, it really doesn't.
Harvard admits significantly less undergrads than Penn or Columbia, and in personal experience, the "Ivy" cachet doesn't really help that much in most industries outside of High Finance (which itself tends to targets Penn+Columbia instead of Harvard). Harvard was historically overrepresented in MBB+Management Consulting, but that industry is dying now that Accountancies and Implementation firms are bundling MC, and companies increasingly do strategy in-house.
Prestige is a finicky thing. 30 years ago UChicago was not viewed as "prestigious" compared to Harvard (it was Claremont McKenna with snow back then), but ask high schoolers today and UChicago has a strong brand value.
Also, ime, I just don't bump into Harvard grads anymore at high level positions (Director and above). Harvard historically overindexed on MBB and Boutique Consulting recruiting while Penn+Columbia targeted Wall Street and Stanford+Cal targeted Sand Hill and YC. Consulting slowly started withering away, so recruiting is tough.
That said, Harvard does very well in China (largely thanks to John Fairbanks and Roderick MacFarquhar in the 1970s-90s), but they aren't as driven as UPenn has been in trying to diversify their international presence.
Living conditions are worse for non-FTEs in America where there isn't the NHS and housing is more expensive.
By contrast, Stanford's FTEs c. 2004 received such benefits as:
- Choices from 9 health insurance plans
- Vision, dental, mental healthcare, and long-term care
- Employer-matched retirement contribution 1:1 up to 5% of salary, plus free 4% of salary
- Access to then closed mutual funds like Fidelity Magellan
- Secret discounts like on luxury vehicles
- Credit union with 0% VISA debit foreign currency exchange rate
- 50% discount on tuition after being an FTE for 10 years
Was about to say the same. Haven't PhD students usually done tutorials and supervised labs to undergraduates for the extra cash. Certainly was the case in my electronics undergrad course a few decades ago.
> in 2023-24 one in five tutorials (20%) were taught by hourly-paid tutors – typically PhD students or academics at the start of their career.
is this news? this sounds like every university in the US, which uses underpaid adjuncts to do most of the teaching and underpaid phd candidates and postdocs to do most of the research
not saying this is right -- adjuncts and postdocs absolutely need to be paid more commensurately with the value they provide -- but it has been the status quo for a long time; the bigger problem is that it used to be a temporary stepping stone to professorship, whereas now universities are perpetually and increasingly relying on this cheap labor to cut costs, making the path for academia an increasingly tortuous one. It's highly counter productive because who wants to go through all that instead if you can get a job in industry that values you much more? The result is that you don't get the best and brightest educating the next generation, except maybe at a few universities - Oxford, Stanford, Harvard, MIT, etc. - where the prestige itself is enough of a draw.
Universities are basically farms these days. They harvest funding from the research councils. Similar working practices and economic factors!
Edit: I mean the research portion of course. The teaching part is more of a classic multi-level marketing scheme.
It seems that these days academia is mostly garbage for anyone who wants things like money, family or a healthy work-life balance.
Throwaway account. Yes that is exactly what happened to me. Figured I'd do a PhD so took a research / part time teaching position after masters. Terrible money, demanding job, knee deep in politics. After about 12 months I said fuck it and went and got a job for 4x the money and a 35 hour week. No regrets.
Or even research experience. In many fields industry is now years ahead and academia lacks the funds and the man power to compete. AI and biotech are two examples.
I think traditionally it was for people who were unmarried. Hence its connection to the church. So expecting enough to raise a family is a relatively new idea.
was it ever not "garbage"?
When was it a high paid job with great work/life balance?
What do you mean "accused of"? This has been the official and government-wanted policy for years in some countries, so much so that there are specific laws that ensure young academics by default cannot expect a long-term career in academia.
Yup. They deliberately overload the front of the pipeline. It can attract smart people from overseas and also save plenty of money. They usually openly argue that the university's job is training for the rest of the economy so it only makes sense that they don't have enough long-term positions for people.
I took a position at a prominent London university to teach one of their courses and I did it for the love of it, because it was less than two days contracting for an entire term of lecturing and marking. Forget that coming into college to teach was effectively an entire day of my time for a two hour lecture or seminar, I think I was paid by the hour. This practice goes on everywhere and the real losers are the students/customers.
A reader may also be "shocked and appalled" that research universities like Stanford abused employees by keeping them "part-time" for years at a time to cheat them out of benefits received by FTEs.
Stanford has a business school, doesn't it?
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.
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).
>> hidden Brazil ductwork steampunk menagerie
As a huge fan of William Gibson, that's some lovely writing, my fellow greybeard.
>> I was an obsessive control freak
There are 'control freaks' and there are the rest of the sea of humanity. Michael Jordan, LeBron James, Einstein, Feynman, ... I like my place in the set of the control freaks of the world. The key is to not ever try to control other people, only our own circumstances, including our own selves.
was doing exactly that a few years ago as Postdoc at Oxford. Yes, the pay is very low, but those who do that (PhD students and Postdocs) do it to get some valuable teaching experience more than for the money. The amount of hours they give for such temporary assignemnts is very little per individual, or at least that's what I saw among my colleagues.
Higher education doesn’t want to shed its clergy status. It’s like they can’t figure out if education is truly a pure pursuit or just this crazy godly thing that is priceless but somehow has this exorbitant real world price that the clergy seems to value …
They sell indulgences at this point, and I don’t think it’s a false analogy. Holier than thou institution where everyone must pay the price for their product or be doomed as a person. How do you question the price of something that’s equated to a gift from god or certainly using the same language - more or less.
"Selling indulgence" is a bit of gross generalisation though. Getting a medicine or technical degree from a top-tier university does prepare you technically for a very technically demanding job. Whatever replacement you imagine for this phase of such occupations will end up reinventing something very similar to university. Do you imagine people should jump straight into these occupations without undergoing some kind of training/testing that they reached a certain level of technical understanding of their occupation?
The problem is that many universities have accreted huge management layers and some non-sensical degrees but this is not unique to universities.
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.
I am arguing this is mostly explained by universities being taken over mba-type managers: launching new products (i.e non-sensical degrees), turning university study into an "experience", ... is all the sort of thing that mba type do and not unique to university (see Boing, Intel, ...)
But the core idea of university remains as sound and essential to a well-functioning society as it gets. From time immemorial you needed gatekeepers to recognised professions who: a) provide hands-on training to the next generation b) certify that a trainer has reached a sufficient level of mastery to practice the profession. Calling this process "selling indulgence" is my issue with your argument.
This comment and the whole tread are completely surreal. What clergy status, exactly? The second paragraph makes absolutely no sense, either.
Well put, and that's a good part of the reason they're going the way of the Catholic Church.
That said, I'd call it an 'aristocracy' instead. But, tomato/tomahto, ya know?
Both British universities (I do not know about globally) and the Catholic Church have expanded rapidly in recent decades.
Like a star near the end of its life.
> Holier than thou institution where everyone must pay the price for their product or be doomed as a person.
One cannot place all of the blame at the foot of the university. Employers also play a role, when they demand accreditation. Students are also to blame, when they fail to do research on what type of training they need to enter a field.
As for the clergy comparison, let's just say that a multitude of people work within universities and those people have very different motivations from one another. Heck, they have very different motivations from one another even if they have the same job title. Painting them with one brush is excessive.
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 are the new priest class.
Truth was replaced with authority.
'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.
This is the foundation of all academia currently. It’s a nice pyramid scheme while you’ve got it, I just finished witnessing my youngest brother go through it in grad school and his defense is on Tuesday.
Yep! Ask any PhD candidate in America how they love those poverty level wages!
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.
Shouldn't they be paid a decent wage for the teaching, itself?
> the American model of PhD students being impoverished while studying
This might be true in some cases, but I suspect that ultimately it's only the wealthy who can pursue these higher degrees. Yes, the pay might be low but that doesn't mean they are overall impoverished.
Put another way, the cost of education is one thing, but being able to afford the process might be a higher bar, for some, or more.
Dude, I went through the European PhD system and it's not as glamorous as you depict it. First of all, you forgot to mention that the norm is to give contracts of 50% to 75% FTE. Secondly the hours worked and the vacation time is a complete forgery that you are basically forced to sign. Although the contract is nice on paper, in practice the norms and expectations are different. Thirdly, unlike in the US, in Europe you often don't have a graduate school (although it is a thing) so you are in a very vulnerable situation where you invest 3 to 5 years of the best years of your life and during those years your graduation is completely at the mercy of that supervisor.
There is no “European PhD system” in terms of funding, or the duties expected of a PhD student other than the production of the dissertation. Different countries around the world do it differently, and that is true even within Europe.
> It’s a nice pyramid scheme...
Before I became aware of criticisms likening universities to pyramid schemes, I recall hearing a Stanford professor managing a large research team say something like: "For this project, we have around 150 PhD students exploring it further in many directions". I was astonished by the sheer scale of their capabilities, especially because I liked the subject and had hoped to explore it as a hobby with just a few like-minded friends.
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"?
what do the people who make and manage money learn, and could clever people be taught this skill too? maybe instead of spending their afternoons on the golf course like wealth managers they could pursue research and teach. how difficult could it be?
Because money does not come out of nowhere.
A lot of people make money from zero sum games, or from things with a small positive sum socially (e.g. selling something for a little bit less than someone else).
So, you will be taught only by people who do not need to earn money to live. I.e., aristocrats. This is by design, I suppose.