Wow, Johns Hopkins U wants to offer its graduate students $30,000 per year + medical insurance + obviously, full tuition + $1,000 per year in travel money. Fewer students will be admitted but the ones who do will get these phenomenal work conditions. In order to make up for the lost labor of graduate TAs, tenured profs will be encouraged to teach more undergard courses.
Can you guess who is protesting against this plan for a dramatic increase in grad student funding and a better access of undergrads to actual professors?
Clarissa's Blog 
My guess is the professors.
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The undergrads?
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Well I cheated and read the story on Inside Higher Ed because I was too curious by your teaser. 🙂 I won’t spoil the riddle but I was shocked at the complaints. I read the story twice and just didn’t understand them. I’m thinking that maybe there is some part of the story we are missing?
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Grad students…
This program looks great provided that profs. prepare grad students well enough to the (lack of)job market and do not transform them into adjuncts.
30k a year + travel money? I would have gone to JHU in a heartbeat. I wonder whether grad students will have to teach in their first year of study, however. If so, perhaps I would have gone to another place which offer less money, but a `course release` for a year or two.
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Of course, it’s the graduate students.
My guess is that the part the grad students don’t like is the one that defines the number of years the funding will last (maximum five instead of the customary 8). This is just my guess until somebody from the school confirms or denies.
“This program looks great provided that profs. prepare grad students well enough to the (lack of)job market”
– I still don’t know how this can be done realistically. A professor who is not saying to a good student, “Of course, you will absolutely find a job” is sabotaging. Imagine going through 6 years of grad school hearing how everything is horrible, you will never find a job, the job market is bad, there are no TT positions. What purpose would it serve other than making one (even more) depressed?
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“- I still don’t know how this can be done realistically”
You’re right. The thing is that… I knew it would be a shitty job market (at least for me) when I entered grad school in 2004, but I went for the PhD anyways. And I would have gone even if I would have known what would happen in 2008-09. My point is: do not lie to your students. Those of will want to be grad students will be grad students. Just show your potential students the stats and the fact, for instance, how many of your recent grad students found TT jobs and where?
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Sabotaging? Hmmm…seems to me a professor who SAYS to a good student “of course you will absolutely find a good job” is lying. That’s not healthy either. Surely some middle ground is possible? “You, student, are awesome and facing a capricious job market: here’s how we’re going to put you in the best possible position to succeed.”
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“Here’s how we’re going to put you in the best possible position to succeed” is perfect for a convocation speech. But in the course of working with somebody closely for several years, more intimate relationships are forged. And one needs to move from the official language of “the best possible position to succeed” to a more personal engagement.
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Sure. And it’s precisely that personal engagement that’s at risk if an advisor asserts “of course you will absolutely find a good job.” A student who ventures at all into the academic blogosphere, who looks at placement statistics, who talks to graduates of their own program is going to recognize that their advisor is engaging in a certain amount of magical thinking. That might be very sweet, but it would also erode the trust between advisor and advisee.
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It looks to me from the article like their issue is the reduction in graduate students, when they talk about a “robust graduate community” and such…which seems sort of odd, because it ultimately decreases the number of students who will be GOING for the jobs these grad students want, right?
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This is precisely why I think that something else must be going on. There must be another reason the grad students are opposed, and all I can think of is the reduction in the years funded .
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The reduction of the number of years of funding is a serious issue. I finished a Ph. D. in four years but most people take much longer. Five is not enough.
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I agree with David. Not necessarily because a student needs more time to finish the dissertation but because a student MAY need more time to find a job. I had 6 years of guaranteed funding with additional years of competitive funding opportunities. I could have finished my dissertation in 6 years but I didn’t find a job that year and so applied for (and received) funding for my 7th and 8th years and I found a job during my 8th year. But I wasn’t lazy during those additional two years: I improved my dissertation, radically expanded my teaching dossier, published etc etc. In short, I was making myself more marketable.
So I would be against anything that strictly limits grad students to 5-6 years. Given the job market, that may not be entirely reasonable. But I would support 5 years of guaranteed funding at 30,000 and then 2-3 years of additional (competitive and reduced) funding to students who are making good progress.
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I knew it would be the grad students and agree, it must be time to degree. 5 is not enough in humanities, will not make you competitive unless you are going to be placed by a dissertation director with one of their friends.
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I did mine in 5 years and believethat it is too long except for those from rich families. I would have been happier with 4 but barely managed to make them let me go in 5.
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“and believe that it is too long except for those from rich families.”
I’m not from a rich family! Extending my time as a graduate student (with the tuition waiver and small stipend) allowed me to survive until I found a job!
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It is more than possible that the grad schools where I studied were weird and are not representative of how things are elsewhere. But the culture at both of those places was that nobody talked about looking for a job, nobody tried looking, this wasn’t even discussed. People simply wanted to remain in the program for as many years as possible, and only then start considering looking for a job. The people who suffer as a result of this culture are those who desperately need to find a job as soon as possible, like me.
This is a limited and obviously limiting personal experience but I can’t make myself overlook it.
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4 years, that means going straight to dissertation after the M.A., if you are going to have a year of research and a year of writing and revising. I suppose one can do it — I did a research project and published the resulting article right after the M.A. — but the education I rely on, I got in classes after the M.A. and through studying for the Ph.D. exam.
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Johns Hopkins is a great university. I believe they have a greater endowment and receive more in research grants than most universities, but I might be off on that.
I would venture that the $30,000 plus health insurance is fine for the grad students who get it. But if it means many fewer students get the opportunity for advanced study, then I would understand why grad students in general would be skeptical.
I would imagine that after five years, the really promising scholars would probably be able to find a research grant or fellowship of some sort. And if one is not a truly great scholar, investing five years in grad school might be time better spent elsewhere. I know there are other points of view.
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“I would imagine that after five years, the really promising scholars would probably be able to find a research grant or fellowship of some sort.”
– This only works for STEM. In my field, for instance, the very concept of a research grant or a fellowship is absent.
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STEM can be very varied with regard to this. I have known people who finished a mathematics Ph. D. dissertation problem in a weekend. Others took five years or longer just to solve the problem they were writing on. The writing up of the work is maybe 1% of the total work, unless one is lucky like the one weekend person.
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Right. Graduate work in the humanities is really hard. Do you think there is any solution in sight?
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