The Land of Inadequate Research Stipends
I noticed yesterday that the Irish Government has announced that the stipend for PhD research supported by Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) and the Irish Research Coucil (IRC) will increase by €3,000 a year. The increase will bring the rate of stipend to €22,000 a year for doctoral researchers from January 2024. While this is €3,000 less than the €25,000 recommended by a report published earlier this year, and the Government itself has already tacitly admitted that a level of €28,000 is needed to attract the best students, this is at least a step in the right direction.
Current levels of funding for research students are simply exploitative, forcing research students to take on extra work – often low-paid teaching duties – in order to make enough money to make ends meet. That is, unless they are students from affluent backgrounds. The discriminatory aspect of this policy is plain for all to see: should a career in research only be possible for the wealthy?
Of course this applies only to PhD students funded by SFI and IRC. It remains to be seen whether other funders – particularly Universities themselves – will match this increase. If they don’t, it will create an unhealthy division between students doing similar work but receiving vastly different levels of remuneration.
In related news I notice the Irish Universities Association has proudly announced a new agreement to fund Chilean students undertaking PhD and Research Masters courses in Ireland. Sounds great, I thought when I saw the announcement, astronomy being a likely area for research projects involving Chilean students.
Strangely (?) the website advertising this scheme doesn’t mention the level of stipend offered, but I found out independently that it is $15,000 per annum. That’s about €14,250, completely inadequate for a research student in Ireland, especially in the Dublin area, and especially for one who has travelled halfway round the world to get to Ireland. I certainly won’t be encouraging any students to apply for this scheme unless and until the miserly bursary is increased to the same level as SFI/IRC.
The IUA, of course, knows full well that this stipend is insupportable, so it is reprehensible for it to have agreed to these terms, the only possible outcome of them being to create an underclass within an underclass.
I had my university education for free, without tuition fees and with a full maintenance grant. The stipend I received for my PhD, although by no means luxurious, was adequate too. At times like this I wonder yet again why my generation spends so much time shitting on the young?
In the Dark 
October 13, 2023 at 1:12 pm
“The discriminatory aspect of this policy is plain for all to see: should a career in research only be possible for the wealthy?”
It would be very helpful to obtain statistics on socio economic backgrounds in Astronomy, both for professional astronomers and for amateurs. My impression is that professional astronomers in the UK are overwhelmingly drawn from an affluent background and that this bias has become worse over the last two decades, not better. It is noticeable that amateur astronomy societies — to whom I often give talks — are drawn from a much wider socio-economic demographic than professional astronomers.
(From my submission to the House of Commons Select Committee)
October 14, 2023 at 9:51 am
Peter: I don’t agree that this is a case of the older generation not treating today’s youth as well as they themselves were treated. I found an old pay slip the other day, which listed the PhD stipend I received in 1980. When I put it through an inflation calculator, it came out at about £10,000 per year – only about 2/3 of what today’s UK PhD students receive. Now, I’m not going to argue from this that the present generation is overpaid, but it exposes a few things. Firstly, supply and demand. There are many more PhD studentships these days, and the old rate was clearly insufficient to persuade good people to take them up in the requisite numbers. Secondly, Wyn Evans’s point about class. That stipend was fine for me because I had cheap Cambridge college housing and could earn a lot supervising undergraduates. But 1980 PhD students elsewhere must have struggled. Incidentally, though, I thought doing the supervisions was one of the best bits of the PhD – having to teach a full range of physics solo bedded down my understanding so well. Therefore, I don’t see having PhD students do undergraduate teaching as exploitation, but rather as a great opportunity – provided it comes with the right level of responsibility. Finally, though, the great merit of the low 1980 stipend was that when I got a postdoc I experienced a good jump in my standard of living. This is as it should be: after all that work, you deserve a reward. But today, I don’t think that gap is big enough: take off income tax, NI, pension, and starting to pay Council tax, and a new postdoc just isn’t getting enough extra cash in the bank per month compared to their total income as a student. So the problem is that the real-terms raising of PhD studentships was not accompanied by a corresponding rise in adacemic salary levels – as we know well from years of below-inflation pay increases.
October 14, 2023 at 10:02 am
I agree that teaching is an important aspect of being a PhD student and I always encourage students to take some on, but there is a limit to how much is reasonable, and beyond that it is exploitation. The ones I really resent are those studentships in which students are required to teach without remuneration. Those are purely exploitative.
I’d also say that the inflation adjustment is very difficult because the standard “basket” of goods doesn’t apply in reality to postgraduate students. I never found it difficult to pay for accommodation on my stipend when I was living in Brighton in the (late) 1980s, for example.
October 15, 2023 at 10:15 am
I agree that inflation calculations are imprecise. A particular issue today seems to be that rents have gone up a lot in real terms. But this is a general problem for much of society, so it’s not clear that PhD students have a case to be exempted from something that everyone else is having to put up with. To repeat my previous point, the first requirement is to ask if students are being paid fairly with regard to their place in the academic ecosystem; I think they are (postgraduates, that is; the catastrophe of undergraduate fees and loss of grants is another matter entirely). Then you can ask if academics as a whole are underpaid. If you think they are, then a holistic solution is required, not piecemeal measures like raising only stipends.
October 15, 2023 at 10:32 am
Rent increases disproportionately affect those on low incomes. It seems intolerable to me that many PhD students are required to exist on a stipend that is substantially less than a salary at the minimum wage level.
October 14, 2023 at 10:06 am
PS. I have to admit that I don’t remember what my stipend was, but I think my first salary as a PDRA was around £10K.
October 15, 2023 at 11:56 am
The minimum wage comparison is interesting. I looked it up and the stipend is about 90% of the minimum wage. But you would pay income tax and NI on that (which hardly seems right), plus have to pay Council Tax. So PhD students will be some 10s of % better off in terms of disposable income than someone on minimum wage. And such people are often trying to bring up families on that income. So when you add in a sensible amount of additional teaching income, PhD students are comfortably better off than the bottom end of the working population. I don’t think it’s such a bad deal. BTW what I do agree about is that studentships with compulsory teaching without additional remuneration are immoral – equal pay for equal work.
October 15, 2023 at 1:31 pm
These are presumably UK figures. I’ve been out of that system for >5 years so I had to look a few things up. I understand there was quite a big increase in stipends there last year.
The comparison with Ireland (which is what the post was about) is difficult because the ratio of stipend to minimum wage is lower in Ireland than in the UK and the taxation system is different; there’s no equivalent of Council Tax in Ireland, for example. Income Tax and National Insurance would only be payable on the part of the salary over the relevant threshold in the UK. The minimum wage is set at an hourly rate, so you have to guess how many hours a week a PhD student works.
On current figures, the ratio of the average annual salary to the SFI stipend is about 2.3, whereas in the UK the ratio of the average annual salary to the UKRI stipend is about 1.8. That seems quite a significant difference to me.
Your general point is valid, though. Many in Ireland argue for a system in which PhD students have a salary rather than a stipend (as is the case in many places in Europe). That would mean they were liable to taxation, but it would also give them protection under employment law which, in my opinion, is no small matter.
October 14, 2023 at 3:39 pm
I learnt something remarkable from a now retired Professor who did a PhD in astronomy in Cambridge around the late 1970s. (He is pretty well-known, but I won’t name him).
He came from a non-standard route into astronomy. He was not from a wealthy family and he did not have particularly good exam grades.
So, he had no grant or scholarship and (as he was not a UK national) he had to pay Overseas Tuition Fees, as well as living expenses. He had to fund everything himself.
He was able to do that just by giving supervisions at Cambridge University. He did have the benefit of (subsidised) College accommodation.
Of course, this is just completely impossible now. Overseas Tuition Fees are enormous (around £20,000-£35,000 per year), and the rental of housing in Cambridge prohibitive.
October 14, 2023 at 3:53 pm
Re class. I was led to this by a remark of a Professor at Princeton some years ago, who told me he thought professional astronomers in the UK were drawn from a very narrow demographic. At first, I resisted the idea, but I now thing it is true. It is true even compared to Professors at Princeton!
The gradual impoverishment of postdocs — as pointed out by John — has made this situation worse.
Financial insecurity bedevils the life of anyone on a fixed-term contract. If you are on a fixed-term contract, you know that one day soon the job will end. This uncertainty is particularly damaging for people who cannot afford to risk little or no pay — including those from low socio-economic backgrounds, those on visas with strict salary requirements, and researchers with families or other caring obligations.
May 1, 2024 at 3:57 am
[…] “I noticed yesterday that the Irish Government has announced that the stipend for PhD research supported by Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) and the Irish Research Coucil (IRC) will increase by €3,000 a year. The increase will bring the rate of stipend to €22,000 a year for doctoral researchers from January 2024 …” (more) […]