Dear Terry,
Many of the figures in your estimate are significantly wrong.
First, on the tuition costs side, fees are not as high at all Australian universities as your estimate. But whatever the fees, this estimate is problematic because many research students are on tuition waiver scholarships. But even then, there is a matter you overlook – and this is the number of students who hold a research fellowship. In Australia, students with a research fellowship earn a tax-free salary to study for a PhD. With tuition waivers and research fellowships, research-intensive universities pay a significant amount of money to support PhD students. In further cases, international students attend university in Australia and elsewhere with full scholarships and fellowship support from their home nations.
If you’re going to look at tuition practices and costs, you should be looking at the research-intensive universities that hold a place in the Academic Ranking of World Universities. That means 500 of the world’s 18,000 or so universities. If you want to figure out the cost and value of PhD programs, these are the universities where you should examine. 19 Australian universities are among the top 500. If you’re looking at universities that treat PhD programs as a profit center rather than a necessary cost, your figures will be off.
Research-intensive universities invest massive amounts of funding to support research programs. This requires supporting research students. To the greatest degree possible, we pay doctoral students.
While some students do pay full fees, serious universities treat doctoral programs as a necessary cost, not as a profit.
When you move past tuition to the actual expenses of running a research-intensive university, you are vastly underestimating the costs.
The majority of PhD supervisors are associate professors and full professors. These cost the university more than $50 an hour.
But research-intensive universities carry far greater overhead costs across the university. Libraries, laboratories, studios, and IT infrastructure are qualitatively different and far more expensive at research-intensive universities.
Consider the differences in IT infrastructure. All universities need computers for nearly everything the do. But research-intensive universities use far more computing power to achieve many more tasks. These tasks differ from one university to the next, but the need for computing power is far greater. At Swinburne, for example, we use massive amounts of computing power in physics. We have one of the world’s best programs of research in physics, and our astrophysics groups requires massive computer support for dozens of tasks. In addition, this IT requires redundancy for safety, special power and security arrangements, and many added systems. All this is both qualitatively different and quantitatively greater in cost. Then there is the time we buy on observatory arrays. And that’s just for astrophysics. Engineering, brain science, and a dozen other research programs have computing requirements far greater than the ordinary IT infrastructure needed for teaching, individual research, and administration.
In calculating any kind of estimate, you should account for the qualitative and quantitative differences between research-intensive universities and teaching universities.
In these universities, supervision and staffing costs are higher than you think; student income and fees account for less than you realize; and general overhead and infrastructure is far greater.
To make the kinds of estimates and suggestions you seem to make, you need a careful, fine-grained analysis based on the actual practices, costs, and income of the different kinds of universities – and the different programs within those universities. What's missing is the careful analysis that allows you to pinpoint the real costs and contributions.
In my view, serious doctoral students should only take a PhD at research-intensive universities.
They do not always do so. This is sad, and many universities treat doctoral programs as profit centers. This is a problem for the students who choose those programs and for the fields they represent, but that’s another issue. The result is that there are many sad stories to tell. To tell these stories requires a careful and specific critique that is inappropriate to a public list.
My concern in this thread is raising the standards of research-intensive universities as a whole while improving the quality of the design field as a research field.
Yours,
Ken
Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS | University Distinguished Professor | Swinburne University of Technology | Melbourne, Australia | [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]> | Mobile +61 404 830 462 | Academia Page http://swinburne.academia.edu/KenFriedman
Guest Professor | College of Design and Innovation | Tongji University | Shanghai, China
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Terry Love wrote:
—snip—
This suggests over the course of a PhD candidature, a university receives $71,000 revenue for each PhD, and the PhD candidate receives $25,000 of services, including supervision, from that.
If the above figures are in the right ball court, the remaining $45,000 of value (64% of the university revenue for the PhD) could be a basis for providing PhD students with around 4 time as much supervision value?
Or is there something missing?
—snip—
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