Calculator Fun
People, check out that video I posted on facebook: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zORv8wwiadQ&feature=related
I quite like how the dude argues his point; its very convincing.
Anyways, so I was doing some calculations for fun; I do this from time to time. I'm actaully doing them as I write this up so lets see where this goes.
I compared the Australian Postgraduate Award with the minimum wage; apparently it is $137.21 per week less. That means if you do a Masters or PhD you will be earning 24% less than someone on minimum wage. Overall this comes out to $7134.80 per year. In order to cover that amount you need to teach and mark 7 full lab courses over two semesters of university (at 8 labs per course).
Lab courses pay for postgrads. This is pretty sad really; you basically have to work your ass off in a PhD just to maintain a minimum wage. It cuts your research time by 12-16hs/week or more depending on how fast you mark (in general, it will take more than 1h to be a fair marker. They only pay you for 1h, so it paid me to be a lenient marker and get it done in 50mins - you missed out lemouse). Assuming you work a 40h week (8h/day, 5day/week), that is 24-28h left for research/week during semesters.
Interestingly, the cost of the National Broadband Network is projected at $26 billion; thats the most official information I could find on public expenditure on the project. This is about 142 times the amount of money that the government has spent on APAs this year.
Right now, the people who do Engineering PhDs are those who care more about research than they do about money. It isn't financially prudent to do one. While this ensures only the most devoted end up doing them it throws a lot of good talent at Mining Companies which don't need them (rotagen will probably agree that marks/technical abiltiy doesn't sell that highly in engineering grads). I'm not suggesting we scrap the NBN to train more PhDs, but I do think we can afford to spend a little more on them. At least we could pay them minimum wage.
PS it is very very very sad that I had to CREATE a 'Mathematics' tag. Why haven't I blogged about maths before??
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