Rutgers Strike!

[Hibush]

The current starting NIH postdoc salary is $58.4k, so still a decent jump from the grad student rate. It would all depend on if the post-docs are part of the union or not.

HHMI just announced the new minimum for postdocs they fund at $70,000.

@K16 Academics should take note of these benchmarks when receiving faculty offers that are lower. Institutions making such low offers need to know that they are lowballing.

[bio-nonymous]

If a grad student on stipend is paid $40k per an plus free tuition for courses, how much work is he expected to do, to earn all this, if he is still taking a full class load as a student?   This is much much more than adjunct professors, PhD in hand, get paid.

A research assistant is "supposed" to work ~20 hours/week in the lab for their salary, but expectations vary widely from one lab to another...

I am not sure about TAs, but would think it is similar?

And yes I agree that free tuition, health insurance, and 40K for 20 hours of work is a lot, but the reality is that PhD students are normally in the lab for full-time plus hours to get their thesis work done (40-60 hours a week at 40K is not that great.)--plus taking courses for the first 2 years. I was paid NIH wage as a grad student--~21K at the time, and was jealous of the departments at my school that paid big premiums over NIH minimum (some students were making 50% more at least).

One problem I can see is where this money is supposed to come from to pay $40K/year? Training grants and fellowships (F31 for example) pay only a certain amount. If you are paying far in excess of the standard the money has to come from "other funds" to support the students (not a huge problem for well-funded departments and labs, I guess).