At most Universities in the United States, graduate students do >50% of the teaching hours, >50% of the research hours (and much more than this if you exclude postdocs), a host of administrative duties, etc., but are paid much less than 50% of total academic salary allocations. Most of this money goes to upper level University administrators, whose numbers and salaries have increased significantly over the past few decades [1-4]. Meanwhile, graduate students--who do most of the work--are routinely paid below the living wage in the cities where they live [5-9]. This chronic underpayment problem leads to a host of ills for graduate students and academia at large: undervaluing and maltreatment of graduate students, degradation of teaching and research quality, bleeding of intellectual talent into industry, poor recruitment, lack of diversity, etc [10-13].

Graduate students in Physics are no exception. If you are a graduate student in a Physics department at a US University, please fill out the following short survey to help aggregate data on grad student pay rates in Physics.

This survey is for graduate students only (PhD or Masters programs). Please do not fill out this survey if you are an undergraduate student.

[1] https://www.chronicle.com/article/administrator-hiring-drove-28-boom-in-higher-ed-work-force-report-says/
[2] https://www.air.org/project/delta-cost-project
[3] https://www.aaup.org/news/administrative-costs-rise-state-support-dwindles
[4] https://goldwaterinstitute.org/article/administrative-bloat-at-american-universities-the/
[5] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-01392-w
[6] https://www.science.org/content/article/ph-d-students-demand-wage-increases-amid-rising-cost-living
[7] https://academic.oup.com/ae/article/68/1/22/6561006
[8] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/mar/30/us-graduate-students-protest-against-low-pay-while-universities-profit-from-their-work
[9] https://livingwage.mit.edu/