UC Santa Cruz fires 54 grad students who were striking for higher pay
There are about 1800 UCSC graduate students [1]. From this 2014-15 UCSC budget report [2] there is a very near 2:1 masters:phd graduation ratio. Assuming there are 2 years of masters students and 6 of PhD at any one time, that makes PhD students 60% of “graduate students”. Let’s make this easy by saying 1000  PhD students (if anything I imagine it’s way less than this — as I understand, monetizing masters students has been an increasing trend in American universities). The UCSC grad student union says average pay for the year is about 22k [3] (edit: this appears to be a minimum, not average, wage).<p>The strikers want 1.4k more per month. With the current 9 month payment system, that’s about 13k more per PhD student per year. So 1k*13k = 13mil overall to put this problem to bed.<p>That seems...surprisingly little? Aggravating a big chunk of your on-the-ground workers and attracting all this bad press doesn’t seem worth it. Meanwhile, there appear to be a whole lot of UCSC administrators making comfortable six figures [4].<p>I get that a lot of people on HN probably see the current low wages as a natural function of supply and demand in different academic disciplines. But heck, just looking at this from the point of view of the university, which is allocating resources to fight this, the calculus is odd.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.ucsc.edu/about/facts-figures.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.ucsc.edu/about/facts-figures.html</a><p>[2] <a href="https://planning.ucsc.edu/budget/reports-overviews/pdfs-images/profile2015.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://planning.ucsc.edu/budget/reports-overviews/pdfs-imag...</a><p>[3] <a href="https://gsa.ucsc.edu/things_to_know/funding" rel="nofollow">https://gsa.ucsc.edu/things_to_know/funding</a><p>[4] <a href="https://ucannualwage.ucop.edu/wage/" rel="nofollow">https://ucannualwage.ucop.edu/wage/</a>