Professor: a PhD student costs a school like Harvard ~$500k
Afinetheorem · x · 2026-11-10
A professor pushes back on the narrative that "grad students make this place run" and are "workers," arguing that once you become a professor you realize students are students — and incredibly costly ones. Advising/training is very costly for faculty, PhD courses are tiny and bring in no revenue, and a PhD student at a school like Harvard costs $500k, still high on average even accounting for external TAs and lab staff replacements. The thread offers the institutional-cost side of the debate over whether PhD students are labor.
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