it should be written as "Cheap Labor". I can vouch this as I went to graduate school where I worked for 5 years at 8-10 hours/day including Saturday and Sunday for $12,000/year to get a PhD in Biological Science. And it was in one of the most expensive state in US. So could not afford to start a family because of perpetual state of sharing apartment and not enough money and time to go out and find a partner. And at the end I was very delighted to get a post-doc position for $40,000 year at a small town. After working for few years I was burn out due to constant pressure/stress of writing grant to bring money instead of doing real research so ended of quitting science. Now working in a completely different field with much better work-life balance and great salary. Now a days every time I meet an aspirant scientist ready to jump for PhD, I have just one suggestion to them. If you can get into top 2-3 school then go. Else do not waste your time and energy.
The fundamental principle about doing science has changed. It has come from becoming a true scientist(born with natural curiosity towards natures, physics, understanding and exploring fundamentals principles of physics, life and matter) to bread butter scientist where you are pigeon holed into a cubicle writing grants all day and tinkering a very narrow part of a huge field to collect as much data possible so that you can put it in your next grant proposal. Oh by the way, do not forget to teach undergrad, grade their papers and sprinkle some tenure pressure, department politics into it and your life as a scientist is complete.
Academics spend a lot of time on the internet defending their poor decision of going into academia, as well as anyone who points out how obviously fruitless academia is.
For most people it's nearly impossible to admit something they just dedicated a large portion of their life too was completely worthless.
(standard disclaimer statement that of course there are exceptions to the trend.)
Sure if your only goal is to make money...I am a CS PhD and at least in this area, believe it or not, I really haven't met many academics who regretted their choices.
And your statement is something academics have shown empirically :) (I just find it slightly amusing, no point really) I think the most famous instance was that story about the cult whose prediction about the end didn't come true, and they ended up being even more convinced and made up all kinds of excuses instead of quitting (the cult).
That's because science was largely a pastime for indepently wealthy members their societies' elites. Science hasn't changed; middle class people just have access to it now.
I agree it may not when compared to a top school for MBA or Computer Science. Still it opens more opportunity such as consulting in Big 3 or your boss has more contacts in pharma industry so there is a chance you will get some entry level opportunity in big pharma or biotech startups. But if you are from a middle tier state univ where you boss do research on "sleeping habit of frog or pink fluffly bunnies" then you are out of luck.
I can vouch this as I went to graduate school where I worked for 5 years at 8-10 hours/day including Saturday and Sunday for $12,000/year to get a PhD
Well, then don't do your PhD in the US. I did my PhD in the Netherlands, had a reasonable salary and a good work-life balance. I now work as a habilitant in Germany (roughly the equivalent of an assistant professor), it's the same: good salary, good balance.
The primary problem in the Western/Northern European academic environment is getting a permanent position. So, I might end up in industry in the end ;).
Same experience here: I did my PhD in France at a good research institute (CEA Saclay). The supervision was great as I was one of only three PhD students in a group of ten permanent researchers, so I could work with my supervisors every day. There was also a strong focus to keep within the three-year schedule, and a lot of opportunities to visit conferences and the like.
In addition, a PhD is highly valued by companies in Germany (where I live now), so your higher starting salary usually makes up for the low income during your PhD.
That said, doing a PhD for financial reasons is usually a bad idea. For me, a much better reason is that you can work on a deep (and interesting) problem for 3-5 years, becoming an expert in a given topic and training your gumption, which will help you to tackle difficult problems later in your life, even in unrelated fields. Compared to research work, most projects that you can do in industry are rather boring in comparison (there are exceptions of course). So, if you do a PhD, do it out of curiosity and not because of the title or the hope to make more money later.
Research labs are very international so as long as you speak English you can do a PhD pretty much anywhere. It's also pretty easy to get a visa for a PhD or a postdoc. As for the process, basically you need to hold a master degree and find a professor/researcher with enough money to hire you. Labs often advertise PhD positions on their websites.
Finding a grant/supervisor is quite easy for a strong candidate. The critical part is too choose wisely the topic. Research tends to be very specialized and you may end up with a PhD that gives you few marketable skills.
I'm a German citizen, and I learned French in school, my level of proficiency was very low when I arrived though. Getting around using English was quite easy, and the application process was straightforward even with a German Diplom (M.Sc.). For an US degree you'll just have to make a translation and possibly have it's equivalence assessed, that shouldn't be too hard though. The UPMC (Paris VI) has a quite good PhD program for example, and is open to international students.
Yea, it is easy when you are single and are from Europe or US. But for somebody like me who has lot of limitation like ailing parents at home, siblings to take care of and immigration issues then it gets difficult to get out of country. And sometimes you do not know that you are in a deep rabit hole unless you are 2-3 years down there. Then you realize you just grind your nose on ground for 2-3 more years and get done with it rather looking for somewhere better to start from 0.
I am Dutch, but most of my PhD colleagues were from other (primarily European) countries. They typically didn't know Dutch. Some decided to do Dutch courses, others managed fine sticking with English.
Many European research groups use English as their main language for communication. Also, outside academia many people in Western European countries and Scandinavia are proficient enough in English to communicate with. (Though in my personal experience, English proficiency in Germany is quite bad compared to e.g. The Netherlands or Denmark.)
Most PhDs in Netherlands accept English speakers, and they all have many international students. When you find a position advertized, you can ask them about the procedure for non-EU citizens.
This is also true for Scandinavian countries (and trivially true for the UK). I would guess most of Europe, really. But you probably need to learn a small bit of the local language just to shop for groceries etc.
The country I would be most hesitant about is France, they really don't like speaking English, and most French PhD theses are still written in French. This is really idiotic, all it does is slow down the dissemination of research; some acquaintances who did their PhD in France were looking hard for a non-French external examiner of their PhD, which is the easiest loophole if you want to write the thesis in English.
> The country I would be most hesitant about is France, they really don't like speaking English
I believe it's a stereotype and it's certainly not the case in CS research labs. I did my PhD in a French research institution (INRIA). In my group, a majority of the people didn't speak French. And of course, PhD students could write and defend their thesis in English if they wanted to (I don't know if they had to find a non-French external examiner, but it's likely to be the case that some examiners are foreign anyway).
This is only partly true, but even then, I wouldn't it call it idiotic. After all, can you defend your thesis in the US in French? You can't. So, why would it be idiotic for the French to expect theses at their unis to be defended in French, which is btw also an international language? It is not very pragmatic, for sure, but it has sense.
After all, can you defend your thesis in the US in French? You can't. So, why would it be idiotic for the French to expect theses at their unis to be defended in French
Because English is the lingua franca of most academic fields? If you are publishing in English conference proceedings and journals, isn't it reasonable to write your thesis in English as well?
(Note that English is the default language of theses in many European countries.)
The last academic institute I worked for (in Spain) was started by people from a French institute. Mix of nationalities and they all spoke English well.
One, the amount of money universities can shovel at athletics is insane. It cannot be justified, I don’t care how many reasons you come up with. They pay millions to build stadiums, pay coaches, etc. while throwing chump change at people doing academic work. I have also seen hundreds of thousands of dollars thrown at things like ugly artwork and statues.
Two, the “chump change” I spoke of doesn’t even come close to scaling with cost of living. I don’t even know how there can be students in cities where housing costs are out of control, unless they are the children of millionaires.
At least for schools with successful football or men's basketball teams athletics are generally run as basically break even programs. The money brought in by those two sports funds everything else.
And that doesn't even take into account the large alumni donations that big time sports programs can bring to a school.
Here, for example, is the University of Michigan 2015 budget (the first one I found googling):
A lot of the time, a university will raise money for the stadium via private money and revenue bonds. So none of your tuition goes to funding the stadium, although the university likely doesn't profit.
Real estate and businesses have a vibrant financial market, so you don't necessarily need large figures to participate. You're not going to raise $100 million in revenue bonds for a professor to study sea slugs, because there isn't any revenue.
University administrators do not have the power to make investors fund sea slugs over stadiums. If you can convince the nation's pension funds, hedge funds, and private investors to somehow buy science bonds rather than revenue bonds, then the administrators would stop buying stadiums and start hiring sea slug researchers.
I would tend to agree that the money might be better spent on building up dormitory or apartment housing for students rather than stadiums, if the revenue and costs were equal. But I'd need to look at the financials.
And to piggyback on your comment, modern academic science is the way it is because their "investors" (i.e. granting institutions like NSF) have certain stipulations for grant funds or at the very least prefer certain applications over others. Applications that have some aspect dealing with STEM education, for example, are incredibly popular with NSF and other institutions at the moment.
When you talk to research academics in the sciences, they often complain about what a burden education and outreach are on their time. Most of them would rather spend 100% of the time on their research. However, their public sector "investors" have an agenda for how their money is spent. They want to see certain results - it's not just enough to see more sea slug research, they want to have grantees also encourage STEM education growth.
The outreach stuff itself isn't that bad, and it can be fun to see a bunch of 'civilians' get excited about a topic that you yourself care deeply about. It is frustrating that you need to shoehorn it into all sorts of proposals where it doesn't make a ton of sense: Why is the funding for a bunch of PhDs to study A linked to their willingness to explain B to a bunch of K-12 students?
On the other hand, the administrative stuff (writing your own grants, reviewing other people's papers and grants, and getting things like purchase orders and experiment approval through the university) takes a huge amount of time and is fantastically unrewarding.
Athletics are a profit center for only a few universities. I doubt though that this includes spending on stadiums. There is also the cost in terms of corruption of the university and the damage done to athletes (especially American football) for little to no compensation.
They're also only a profit center if there are other universities willing to make a loss. If those universities decided to stop spending on athletics then the profitable ones would soon find their profits disappear. Taken as a whole, the college athletics industry is an overall negative sum for education. Looking at it from the perspective of an individual college misses the big picture.
Accepting that that's actually true - and we know how flexible accounting is not just when you apply a will to bend the numbers but also when you have a bias (same as working with any data) - then it's only true within the system of "a university is a business". Whether it makes sense from any other perspective is quite a different matter. There are those (like me) coming from cultures where not everything was or is a business, and there is no such believe that making everything a business makes it better.
I've been yapping this for ages. Apple or Google can't just start selling nuclear submarines to the highest bidder even if it meant huge profits if such an enterprise took the leadership away from what they currently do.
It isn't just money (and most universities LOSE money in athletics) but rather the change in culture with high spending in spectator sport. The top level leadership at universities is increasingly detached from academia.
I get that there needs to be some spending in support structure but the first and main goal should be education. Too much money (and more importantly attention) is being wasted in brand recognition and marketing.
Side note: would it be possible for universities to build small private cubicles/rooms or something assigned to each student where they can go study or whatever (probably with noise restrictions and so on to prevent distracting neighbors)? Even at its best, such a place would hardly be something a university can boast in its marketing pieces unlike a 80k seat football stadium.
Yes but instead of booking an available room or cubicle, everyone gets their own. Sort of like a dorm room but just a desk and a small closet/locker? Just brainstorming ideas. I was talking to someone about what college libraries can do to stay relevant in fields like computer science...
At one point in my graduate career, my university was paying the last two basketball coaches more than $100,000 each because they had been so bad at their job they had to fire them but their contracts had multiple years left on them -- including one who had been in trouble for NCAA scholarship violations in the past and shockingly got caught violating the rules again while he was at my school.
From various anecdotal evidence and talking to other graduate students (and going to Graduate School myself), it seems like the experiences vary a lot, and they seem to depend a lot on the amount of funding a field or a professor can attract.
For me personally, I had to teach one semester as a TA, but the Prof. I worked with was extremely helpful, and would pitch in to help when the workload was too much. After that, all my semesters were spent as an RA, which is a pretty awesome job if you work in the lab of a good professor and on an interesting project, which I did. And many of my friends pursuing graduate degrees in engineering seem to be in a similar position.
As you said 'good professor'. It seems prestigious != good these days, even though prestigious does bring in money and can simplify a number of problems. From what I have seen in STEM at 'top' research institutions the true delineating factor is the professor/group you work in, money/grants is a second and project is 3rd.
I agree, although I think that's always been true to some extent, so I don't know if I'd add "these days". There are stories going back centuries of famous professors who were also famously jerks and horrible mentors. Some people are great at advancing math or chemistry (or [insert subject]) but really bad at mentoring new students. Other people are great at teaching the current knowledge and mentoring but not particularly amazing at advancing it. Others are great at one-on-one mentoring and research but kind of meh at teaching in a big lecture-hall setting. Still others can give great, engaging lectures to large audiences but are not so good at one-on-one mentorship. Top universities of course want to claim they're full of the unicorns, professors who are top-5% in all of: disciplinary research and interpersonal kindness and large-classroom teaching and 1-on-1 mentorship. But the odds are any individual will not be equally good at all of those tasks.
Totally agreed. I have long been trying to figure out how an incoming graduate student may assess the quality of a professor beyond his academic publications and asking people who work with him. I have come to the conclusion that the best predictor is reputation amongst peers. I may be wrong here, but from what I have seen it usually is the most accurate. The issue is that there is no review site for professors outside of their teaching inside of classrooms. Would be very helpful in selecting mentors, imo.
Maybe even a matching market, much like medical residency in the US.
Yeah. I think getting plugged into the current grad students' social network and hearing about their profs is going to be good information. Of course, that is hard to do if you are coming across the country to grad school.
Another thing to watch out for is to make a cold and cynical calculation about whether or not the PI will still be there when you are done with your thesis. My brother-in-law had his PI and another member of his committee leave 1 year short of his thesis being done. Fortunately, they both made arrangements to continue on his committee so that he could actually graduate, and he did, and has maintained good relationships with them.
On the other side... I know a guy who was not nearly as far along. His PI left, triggering others, and that sub-group in the department more-or-less collapsed. He was on the opposite coast doing a summer internship while that all went down. So.... "Heyyyyy, my internship is up in a couple of weeks, do you think I could go full time?"
It's not an uncommon story: My wife's PI got cancer. 3 years in. In her case, she just abandoned the whole thing. A friend of mine's PI instead moved to UCLA from San Antonio, and didn't raise pay a cent, or provide relocation assistance, so people had to follow him. Given the fun rental agreements in Texas, leaving a lease mid way still makes you have to pay for it unless someone else occupies the apartment. This made my friend end up in a nice, multi thousand dollar hole. She did get her Ph.D, but seeing the life of the postdoc, she gave up on that route herself, and now teaches English in Japan, crushed by student debt.
Between all the stories like that I have, and the relatively low improvement in outcomes when things really work out, I am so very happy I ignored academia and went straight to industry.
I'd never heard of the 2-week grade strike at Yale. That's bold.
My experience at a state-school, tier 1 research university was that the grad student TA workload varied greatly by department. I calculated I was making just under $25/hr while there with the time I put into TA responsibilities. It wasn't too bad.
Some friends in humanities were swamped though. Most because they cared a lot and spent a ton of time grading carefully.
> Some friends in humanities were swamped though. Most because they cared a lot and spent a ton of time grading carefully.
huh, strange. for undergrad i went to a "good" UC and this is the opposite of what i saw in my humanities TAs. they either didn't give a shit and handed out A's like candy or graded on a rubric (i.e. did student posit counter-argument in paragraph N and support with primary sources in p. N+1) while paying little attention to content.
either way they certainly didn't seem stressed... unlike the STEM ta's... who were literally going gray in their mid 20s and clearly drank a lot.
At least these days, most grad students and adjuncts depend heavily on student feedback for their continued jobs. It creates a perverse incentive for sure.
A very perverse incentive: https://jakeseliger.com/2015/01/13/what-incentivizes-profess.... It also creates an incentive to avoid anything that could be considered remotely controversial, as I discovered the hard way a while ago. I was fine, but I didn't have to be.
I think the same incentive is present in the "real world." As a manager, it was in my short term self interest to inflate performance reviews. The company was aware of this, and imposed quotas, which only amplified the incentive but made the reviews less effective and more political.
The schools I'm at might be different but in my experience the student evals aren't the deciding factor in employment.
They are important and I was once talked to because of a poor student eval (although in that same meeting she said she wanted me to help out in course instructor meetings since I had taught the class several times and wanted me to mentor the new grads. It was a confusing meeting...) and I saw a fellow grad student come under a lot of scrutiny for some odd teaching (I really think the guy was bipolar) but there was never any fear that you wouldn't be able to teach next year.
I'm currently an adjunct at another school and luckily my evals have been quite positive overall so I haven't had to worry about it here.
If you catch a student cheating, they may also give you a terrible evaluation as payback. If the response rate is low enough, that can actually have an impact on whether you get to TA again. Those jobs are how many students fund their post-grad, which makes rocking the boat dangerous.
At the University of Oregon it seems almost a yearly occurrence that grad students strike, usually a week or two before finals need to be graded. I'm apathetic to the ordeal because whether its administrators, professors, or grad students, getting payed, I'm still stuck paying an egregious tuition.
That said in every department except for the Math department both professors and GTFs (graduate-teaching-fellows) have been top notch and gone above and beyond their duties to educate.
They're priced about the same, though, it seems to me. I'm left wondering what you think a reasonable price is. Unless you're from out of state. Those prices are could very well more than the education is worth.
You can always drop out if you feel the tuition is too high. We can talk all day about how much it ought to cost, but clearly you feel it's worth it to stay enrolled.
You can always avoid hospitals if you feel the cost is too high. We can talk all day about how much it ought to cost, but clearly you feel your health is worth it for continued check-ups.
Getting a PhD was one of the best decisions I ever made. You have your whole life to go optimize for making $ if you want afterwards. At a top research school in the right lab you get a 1:1 apprenticeship with a world-class expert in an area of science you are passionate about. They take 1 or 2 new apprentices a year. It's a unique experience and changed me dramatically for the better. Postdocs are a different story (only do that if you are sure you want to be a professor) but I recommend getting a PhD to anyone passionate about an area of bleeding edge hard science or engineering.
Your view is a bit rare these days. Nearly all my friends who started PhD's who've dropped out or quit early with a master's wasn't because they didn't get this experience. They all loved doing the science, that's the fun part. It's just that as a young scientist it's so clear looking down at the end of the tunnel that the light keeps stretching further away. Grants, tenure, and politics are the new extracurriculars needed to show you're capable of being a scientist.
Being at a top research school probably helped, but the majority of grad students in this country are not at those types of homes.
Agree the professor track is tough but a PhD is a great idea even if you don't want to be a professor. It's just a unique experience that both gets you deep in a specific area of science and teaches you how to conduct open-ended research in general.
I haven't regretted doing my PhD in the slightest. I've learned a huge amount, in a wide variety of areas. However, the system in the UK is a bit more favourable regarding funding. Having said that, the funding doesn't scale with location. I live in one of the most expensive cities in the UK (outside London), and am funded to the same level as everyone else outside of London.
The bigger problem I have is in deciding to leave academia. There are still questions I would like to know the answer to (and I expect there always would be). It just doesn't seem to make sense to take that path. Low pay, high competition, and the likelihood of being on a series of 18month contracts for the majority of your career. Indeed, in my specific field (Bioinformatics) the career path isn't even that well defined, and you can more easily get a job at a software company who will pay several multiple of what you could expect as a postdoc. It just doesn't make sense to do it.
I think unions involve a lot more than that. (Correct me if I'm wrong.) For instance, the decisions a union makes or negotiates for may affect all other workers even if they aren't part of the union.
I've always thought that PhD students should band together and refuse to run experiments for one week. The shock that might have on the current academic system, when administrators, managers, supervisors and project leaders start to realise that their careers depend on a constant supply of dependent serfs might shake things up.
There's always more willing serfs where they came from, especially after the NSF started overfilling the pipeline in the mid-late '80s insisting there was a terrible shortage of them. Of course, they just wanted to spend less money on scientific labor, and things like bringing in many foreigners helped that, while making the job even less attractive to natives.
That will likely hurt the student much more than the PI. Depending on the lab, PIs often have a tech, postdoc, or staff scientist when runs many experiments. The student's time is much more valuable than the PIs as the student only graduates when his/her thesis has enough content to write.
True about the serfdom, but the students aren't necessarily delusional.
The US takes 1.2 million immigrants a year, but it is extremely difficult to gain admission as a random applicant without family connections.
One possible way for in is graduate degrees in STEM fields. There are various work visa programs that are far easier to access through STEM graduate school in the US. You can get here on a student visa, gain some connections, interview on campus, and perhaps get a work visa through a tech employer - and this is easier with a grad degree, as those degrees grant certain exemptions from visa caps. If you remain in the good graces of your employer or university, you may eventually qualify for a green card.
It's a slog, but keep in mind, we're not talking about people with freedom of choice here. It might be more rational to sell real estate, open a sandwich shop, or become a dental hygienist if you were allowed to do so legally without fear of deportation.
But if your options are very limited due to visa and immigration restrictions? Sure, it can be highly rational to pursue a graduate degree in a narrow subsection of STEM fields. Unfortunately, as long as universities have this power, they probably won't have much incentive to make the degrees rational for people with the freedom to choose their careers.
They are not. But are startup employees doing something meaningful, or building their own reputations and expertise?
And since you're talking about software startup employees, probably the closest comparison is CS phd students, who are nowhere near suffering. The vast majority of graduate students are at least as satisfied as a developer, otherwise whole programs would have disappeared decades ago from inability to recruit. New admits always ask current graduate students what it's like. There seems to be this dissonance between people here on Hacker News believing that everything is like the horror stories of grad students being abused by psychopathic advisors and at best will get poorly paid adjunct positions before burning out, and what's really happening.
There's a lot of variation, both due to school and due to department. When I did my PhD, I found the Biosciences department to be rather brutal. Drinking and misery poker (and Magic the Gathering) were the standard pastimes, and long, tedious hours were the norm. On the other hand, the CS department was much more laid back, with much more time put into 'cerebral' work. It's not that the CS students were smarter, I knew a number of brilliant biologists, but the nature of subject matter and the culture. Biology experiments are inherently physical, and can fail or die if not attended to properly, putting a pretty tight time constraint on the experimenter. CS work is much more forgiving, and much more of it (proportionally) happens in the mind. Biology is also a much more grind-centered culture, perhaps in part because it lacks a strong history of internal tool building, while tedious work in CS tends to inspire attempts to build automation and higher level methods. I think some of this is the difficulty (tools in Biology are just harder to make), and some of this is purely culture. I would argue that the somewhat bizarre field of Biophysics is, historically speaking, the tooling culture of Biology that was severed off when Molecular Biology became a field in it's own right and the tools were commoditized, and it's partially this split that's responsible for the culture there.
All of which is to say, grad school is horrible. Sometimes. Sometimes it's awesome, and YMMV.
Glad the NLRB gave decision in favor of the student unions. Though it is true that unionization in universities "would threaten to undermine the primary relationship, that of student to professor, advisee to mentor" , the grad students wouldn't have had to do this if the private universities with billions of dollars in endowments refused to provide basic and reasonable incentives.
NYU, for example only recently increased min pay to $15 per hour up from $10 after the union fought for like 2 years. It's a double edged sword to allow unions in universities, but given the state now, perhaps it's wise that they allowed them.
A barely-adequate salary for a BS in CS in some rather awful location is 50K. The _top end_ salaries for grad students are about 30K nationally. Most are in the 15-20K range. Many times, grad students can qualify for food stamps and other forms of welfare.
I would suggest that "professional median salary for holder of degree with 0-3 years experience" is the rubric that should be applied for compensation. More for relevant experience.
Of course, that would entirely shatter the entire US academic system, since it is, today, built on the backs of grad students working in penury (often having a blast, it must be said). The entire current system is built around VERY cheap willing labor.
a remark: grad students working for nil and startup employees working for nil have a facially similar appearance. The difference is the startup employees should have some fat options to compensate. The grad students don't have any upside...
exactly. With number and salaries of administrators (and various non-education positions like sport coaches, etc.) swelling, i don't see why the grads performing the actual labor of education, serving direct business purpose of universities/colleges, shouldn't be let in on their share of the pie.
During my grad student days in a STEM program at a large state university, professors were occasionally able to "buy-out" of their regular course load and forfeit a percentage of their salary. The department head would then hunt for the next best thing - usually an unsuspecting grad research assistant to cover the offering.
That's not exactly how it works. Professors can use grant money to buy out of teaching; they are not forfeiting their base salary. That money will be (indirectly) used to fund other instructors, which may be grad students. It's not like the department head forces an unsuspecting grad student to teach; if they choose to teach, they will be paid for their teaching (tuition + stipend) so that they do not need to be funded by their advisor's grants. The money has to come from somewhere.
You don't always get paid--a lot of programs require 2-3 semesters of TA duty, even if you don't need the funding.
That said, I found teaching to be pretty fun and helpful in solidifying my own understanding so it was helpful (but I'm sure the school also likes the free labor).
I think they meant, "Does the 'undergraduate' student get a discount for a class that is being taught by a Graduate Student rather then the original faculty staff".
Fun fact: buying out usually means "use grant money to cover hiring an adjunct for a term," not forgoing salary. Adjuncts are cheap (they cost less than a grad student, since they don't get benefits), and a successful research semester tends to make that money back with interest in overhead from the next grant submitted.
Who said a grad student gets benefits? At my college at least, grad students are basically students with - if they're lucky - a stipend and a tuition waiver.
