The original information box accompanying this article contained an error and has been changed. See the bottom of the article for additional information.
This article was updated on May 13 at 1:40 p.m.
On May 1, the UC Student-Worker Union made clear its sunshine demands for 2013. Among this list of demands is an increase in wages for University of California teaching assistants.
In this financial climate, however, the union’s demands, which also include expanded health options and sabbaticals for student-workers, are unreasonable.
Teaching assistants, who are hired on a “half-time appointment” basis and make up 84 percent of the union’s bargaining unit, should not expect their wages to cover the cost of living and education in much the same way undergraduate students should not expect a paid internship or campus position to cover theirs.
The lowest-level teaching assistants are paid almost $2,000 a month, according to the UCLA Office of Instructional Development website. Teaching assistants are expected to work no more than 20 hours per week, which constitutes a “half-time appointment,” said Alison Hewitt, a UCLA spokeswoman. The hourly wage for a TA then comes out to around $25 an hour.
Although the union’s requests come at an inopportune time, teaching assistants often have to go above and beyond their assigned 20 hours a week and often do deserve higher compensation.
The importance of quality instruction cannot be understated, and if teaching assistants are providing more than their assigned duties, they should be duly compensated. Surely we all remember a TA who has had a great impact on our undergraduate success, especially in those survey courses where one-on-one interaction was scarce.
The point is that given the financial state of California’s higher education system, increasing wages for teaching assistants should not necessarily be a priority at this time. As it stands, 90 percent of UC academic student employee salaries come from general funds – the same source that many other programs on campus use for funding, said Dianne Klein, UC Office of the President spokeswoman.
In a system frequently run down by budget cuts, belt tightening will inevitably hit every segment of the UC population.
While not enough to live on, a $25-an-hour part-time job that doubles as professional career training is hardly a slight to graduate TAs. Additionally, working as a TA can qualify graduate students for “fee remissions,” which subsidize education costs.
Serving as a teaching assistant is an important part of the curriculum for many graduate programs. It’s not meant to be a career or a way to pay the bills – it is first and foremost a means of receiving job training for academic-related careers.
Some graduate student teaching assistants report having trouble living off of TA wages. Stephen Morseman, a graduate student in political science, said while teaching is very rewarding, it can be difficult as far as living expenses go.
“I consider this a full-time job, and the TA stipend is just enough to get by,” Morseman said.
While it’s certainly important to adequately provide for TAs, covering costs of living is not something that’s necessarily guaranteed. The UC also has some of the more competitive TA wages available compared to other large research universities.
Some graduate students are concerned that unless TAs are better taken care of, future graduate students will choose to attend other universities.
Given the long-established reputation of an institution like UCLA, it is highly unlikely that prospective graduate students will suddenly begin choosing to further their educations elsewhere. Private institutions have historically been able to pay their employees more; there is no reason to think that this will suddenly result in an exodus of TAs from the UC.
Email Powell at
bpowell@media.ucla.edu.
Send general comments to opinion@media.ucla.edu or tweet us @DBOpinion.
Correction: The minimum monthly salary for teaching assistants for half-time appointment at the UC is $1,962.
First of all, the comparison put together by the Daily bruin senior staff is laughable. The cost of living in Urbana-Champaign (where university of illinois is) is dramatically cheaper than Westwood. Besides that, the schools UCLA is competing with for top graduate students are not Illinois and Washington – it is Berkeley, Michigan, and private schools for the most part. Compare it to the funding packages offered by Caltech, Michigan, and Stanford, and you’ll actually see the decisions admitted students are facing. Most of the Ph.D. students here at UCLA would not even consider attending Illinois and Washington (outside of a few select fields where their research excels) – not our of snobbery, simply because while those schools have competent teaching and may be a viable alternate option for an undergrad degree, if a place doesn’t have top tier research your chances of landing a solid academic job at a R1 institution are just a hair above zero.
Second, the expectation as a Ph.D. student is funding from your university while doing you research (for which you may be expected to work as a research or teaching assistant), which covers the cost of living modestly (and the university remits your tuition). Why? First, Ph.D’s can take up to 7 years, and in many fields do not increase your earning potential at all – so anyone would be crazy to take on hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt to do so is crazy (remember that these students have already gone through undergrad and either paid or took loans, just like you). The second is that to compete for top tenure track faculty, you have to give them light teaching loads, so you need to either have TA’s or hire adjuncts, and we’re cheaper than adjuncts. The third reason is competition for the top graduate students – with so many schools giving funding, being able to meet living expenses is important (and which honestly UCLA is just on the verge of meeting). Learning to teach is important, but to treat it like a learning activity that we’re lucky to be paid at all for is missing the point. Also, another main function of us are citation generators for faculty here – we do research, likely related to our advisers. We likely cite them in papers we publish, which improves the citation rank of their papers.
Now, what happens if UCLA doesn’t raise salaries of TAs for a couple years:Well, current Ph.D. students have to suck it up, because we’re here. However, incoming grad students do look into pay vs. cost of living (I certainly did). While UCLA paid substantially less (by about $10k/year) than our private competitors, since by my calculations it met a modest cost of living in L.A, I picked it because of the quality of research and the faculty here. In the end, while top public schools like UCLA pay less, they pay enough to get by on and we go here to research under top faculty, a bit of extra spending money doesn’t play a huge role in that decision. However, the difference in money is a huge deciding factor when you can’t meet even a modest living standard on your salary at a public school. Had my best option here included loans, I would have likely gone elsewhere, as would have much of my class. UCLA would have other graduate students to take – but they would probably be of poorer quality (with quality being defined however the admissions committee defines it). These students would produce poorer research, and possibly be poorer teaching assistants. The ranking of graduate programs would fall, due to lower yields.
Now as an undergrad – you may ask – why do I care? The main reason is, in my experience, if a TA has to take another job, their teaching quality gets worse – and you’re the ones who bear that cost. We know the material really really well – but presenting it effectively to an audience who doesn’t isn’t always the easiest task. It doesn’t take much effort to be an adequate TA – but it does take time to improve yourself and be a good one. And if we have to work another job (perhaps as a research assistant through an outside grant), there’s going to be less time and enthusiasm to put in to teaching. And then you’ll get more TA’s who know the material, but have put too little effort into how to effectively translate the information to you.
“Teaching assistants, who are hired on a “half-time appointment” basis
and make up 84 percent of the union’s bargaining unit, should not expect
their wages to cover the cost of living and education in much the same
way undergraduate students should not expect a paid internship or campus
position to cover theirs.”
Bingo.
Couple responses:
1. As a UCLA TA I’m concerned about the quality of this article. Half of the evidence seems to argue the opposite point that you want to make. It reads very awkwardly. Be careful that you are putting your best foot forward when you attach your name permanently to a piece of writing on the Internet.
2. Re: Mr. or Mrs. “Bingo”: I am impressed if you are referring to UCLA students who pay their own way through college. Most of you have jobs for spending money and your parents pay your tuition. Maybe you take out loans, so you will have to pay that back. Luckily you will make more money than your TAs in your twenties so you can start paying them back. We can’t. Grad students do not come to this institution with the expectation of profit; we come here to contribute to an intellectual community, and we know full well that we could be earning more in the private sector. Undergrads, on the other hand, expect to earn money for their work after college. Apparently you don’t think graduate students should be afforded the same opportunity. We are already taking a financial hit, so please, out of respect for the people who are trying to help you succeed, please do not mock us by parroting the rhetoric of managers who would like nothing better than to balance the state budget on our backs.
A couple more things:
1) Get your facts right. You are citing the salary of a TA AFTER one year of teaching and BEFORE taxes. In other words, we don’t make $25/hour. Not only do we not make $25/hour, but we also 100 PERCENT OF THE TIME work more than 20 hours/week. Three of those hours are dedicated to teaching, three are dedicated to attending lecture, two are dedicated to office hours. That’s 11 hours. Then, we have to read ALL of the material (which, in many cases, is more than our students do). Depending on the professor and the discipline, this can take ten hours in and of itself. But then, we have to reply to emails (about 2 hours/week), grade papers (about 70 hours throughout the quarter), and lesson plan (it takes me about four hours to put together an effective lesson plan). If I average the 70 hours over 11 weeks, that’s 6.36 hours per week. So, 11+6.36+2+3+let’s call it five hours to read all of the material in a way that makes us able to answer any question thrown at us=27.36 hours/week dedicated to TAing. That’s over one full day per week. If we divide that by $1793.12, which is what “lowest-level” TAs make (your lingo, by the way, is insulting; our titles are not “low level” and “high level” TAs, but instead are “Teaching Assistant,” “Teaching Associate,” “Teaching Fellow”), we actually make $15.29 per hour. And I’ve been generous with ALL of my numbers.
2) TAing is not a “part-time job that doubles as professional career training.” It is part of our contracts for being graduate students, and being a graduate student is a FULL-TIME JOB. We take classes just like you do while we TA (especially when we are “lowest-level” TAs), and many of us have additional responsibilities like families since we are no longer in our early twenties. Our professors also expect us to attend seminars and presentations made by visiting scholars, learn languages, work on our own research projects upon which our future livelihoods as professors depend, and do things like make copies, moderate exams AND make-up exams, check in with them (there are usually four to five professors on your committee), publish articles, organize and attend conferences, etc. So, we are expected to do all of this—NOT work a second job outside of TAing—on a TA salary.
3) The prospective graduate student who stayed at my house this year did not choose UCLA SPECIFICALLY because the cost of living was too high compared to the amount that we make as TAs. On this point, you are simply not correct. And what this means is that YOUR degree will mean less because our reputation as a world-class research university—and our national and international rankings—decrease as more graduate students are forced to go elsewhere.
4) This comment—and your article—does not even begin to touch the structural and institutional issues that cause us to be paid so little for being highly trained in our fields, that make us to be unable to accrue assets well into our thirties (at the earliest), and that extend our debt payments from our UNDERGRAD loans into our early years as professors. In other words, we do this because we love academia and continuing the intellectual traditions that so inspired us as undergraduates, not because of the money. We are simply asking for enough money to pursue our dreams, just like you.
Hi Ben, good to see that the DB still supports administration against students after all these years of defending tuition increases. But if you don’t want the people who teach your classes to be paid to cover their cost of living ($18k/yr) who will teach your classes? Maybe people who are independently wealthy and do it as a form of charity? Internships are usually 3-6 months, but I like your idea of imagining a 7-yr job (roughly age 25-32) as an internship.
This guys an a$$hole!
You better hope that the TA that’s grading your final didn’t see this worthy piece of journalism.
What else do you guys expect from our gifted ‘undergrads’? They lack logic and rarely listen in class.