(Feedback? Write us an anonymous note and we'll talk about it in our next meeting.)

Update:

UO leadership has rejected our plea for a living wage. Read leadership’s response to the petition and our reply here.
This effort resulted in a news article from the Daily Emerald, with the headline UO rejects petition for stipend raises of Computer and Information Science GEs
The petition was rejected, but we are not deterred. We will continue to fight for a fair wage.

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Welcome! If you’re out of the loop about the current state of graduate employee pay in the Department of Computer and Information Science at the University of Oregon, take a look at the background section of this page. Check out our proposed fix to alleviate the pay crisis. Additionally, we would love for you to sign a petition for better pay. The petition’s Executive Summary gives a comprehensive overview, too.

There are lots of reasons to pay us more!

We’ve gathered data to support a number of arguments. Click on the read more next to each rationale for greater explanation, supporting facts, figures, and sources. In the end, all the data point to one thing: salaries need to be raised before fall term begins.

Our arguments are below. If even one of these reasons is persuasive to you, it stands to reason that pay should be increased.

Reasons to raise pay

1. Existing compensation isn’t competitive when measured against peer institutions. Our department is in the bottom ~10%-25% of all computing departments nationwide in terms of pay offered. Read More
2. We have seen pay cuts in the last two years, in both real and nominal terms, and we want our salaries back. Read More
3. Rental costs, in particular, have become so high relative to pay that we can’t afford housing anymore. Read More
4. Pay is so low that, even going by the University of Oregon’s own official cost-of-living estimates, we can’t afford rent and groceries. Read More
5. There is real human suffering in our department because of the lack of living wages – not just gripes about lower than desired salary. It’s to the point that many of us can no longer ethically recommend graduate study in our department to potential new graduate students (esp. PhD students who are here for multiple years). Read More
6. We are not asking for a lot of money. And there is plenty of money in the budget to pay us a bit more. To not pay us more is a policy decision, not a budget constraint. Read More
7. There is a lot of precedent at the University of Oregon for our request. Graduate employees in many other departments make hundreds of dollars a month more than we do. Read More
8. Realigning GE pay in CIS is beneficial for the State of Oregon as a whole. Not doing it will invite scrutiny from outside UO. Read More

As a reminder, gross median pay for GEs in our department was ~$1,889/month ($17,001/academic year) for entry level employees and overall gross median monthly pay was ~$1,967/month ($17,703/academic year) in 2020-2021.

Background

• The graduate employees of the Department of Computer and Information Science at the University of Oregon teach undergraduate classes in their own right, direct laboratory sections for up to 75 undergraduate students a term, create new assignments for undergraduates, grade undergraduate work, conduct novel research on the edge of human knowledge and understanding in the field of computing, and write and win external grants alongside their senior colleagues: the tenured professors, tenure-track professors, and career instructors of the department.
• For a typical graduate employee in the Department of Computer and Information Science in 2020-2021 working 18-20 hours a week, in addition to full time graduate study, the median gross monthly pay was ~$1,889 for entry level employees and overall median gross monthly pay was ~$1,967;
• In annual terms, median gross pay in academic year 2020-2021 was $17,001 for GE1s;
• Median gross pay for GEs at all levels in academic year 2020-2021 was $17,703;
• Most graduate employees work at 0.45 FTE, although some work at 0.49. A few, in extremely special circumstances, work below 0.45 FTE.
• Each term is different, but there are usually about 25 GEs working in a teaching capacity (all paid by UO funding, like undergraduate tuition or state taxes allocated to the university by the legislature) and anywhere from 20-35 GEs working in a research capacity (nearly all paid by external grants).
• The median health insurance premium paid by the university for a graduate employee in the Department of Computer and Information Science is $504/month;
• Typical net monthly pay for a graduate employee in computer science at all levels of experience is approximately $1,500, give or take $50 to $100 depending on the exact tax situation and nominal hours worked (that is to say, an overall income tax rate of 20-25%);

Proposed Fix

Our fix has four parts: change our salaries to the below rates, keep the number of employment lines at par with historic norms, respond to the proposal promptly, and don’t retaliate against us for proposing it.

Part A

We request the following gross salary rates during the academic year take hold before the 2021-2022 academic school year starts (that is, be effective on September 16, 2021 when the contract begins):

Level	Description	@0.5 FTE *	@0.49 FTE **	@0.45 FTE ***
GE1	Entry level; has bachelor’s degree in computer science	$2,600/month ($23,400/year)	$2,548/month ($22,932/year)	$2,340/month ($21,060/year)
GE2	Passed major PhD milestone; has master’s degree in computer science	$2,840/month ($25,555/year)	$2,782/month ($25,044/year)	$2,556/month ($23,000/year)
GE3	Advanced to doctoral candidacy in computer science	$3,012/month ($27,111/year)	$2,952/month (26,569/year)	$2,911/month ($24,400/year)

* Base rate.
** Maximum amount of time graduate employees can work.
*** 18hrs/week; the norm for the typical graduate employee in CIS.

Part B

The total number of graduate employee teaching lines for the department must remain commensurate with the student-to-graduate-employee ratio of the 2020-2021 school year. (I.e., 75 GE lines distributed over three terms, for an average of 25 graduate employees per term on teaching funding.) Current faculty searches should also continue.

In short: Do not cut the number of graduate employee positions in order to realign pay to livable levels. As a corollary, do not cancel the planned search and hiring process for a new tenure-track professor in data science.

Part C

Respond to this proposal in writing within two weeks (10 business days) of formal delivery.

Part D

No writer, signer, or deliverer of this proposal shall be subject to formal or informal discipline, dismissal, or contract non-renewal.

Reason 1

Existing compensation isn’t competitive.

Salary is low compared to peer institutions.

• UO CIS GEs were payed substantially less during the 2020-2021 academic year than national averages as reported by the Taulbee survey, the gold standard for enrollment and salary statistics for academic computing departments (see Figure 1).

Figure 1. Comparing teaching assistant (TA), research assistant (RA), and full support fellow (FS) annual salaries at private and public institutions as reported in the 2020-2021 Taulbee survey with annual salaries of UO CIS GEs over the same year. (source; page 43)

• We also gathered data from specific peer institutions which faculty members in our department have identified as representative peers. These include the University of California - Santa Cruz, which is close to the University of Oregon in rankings of computing departments; the University of Wisconsin - Madison, which has a similar cost of living as Eugene, is in a “state stingy with money” and is higher up in the rankings but within reach for UO to overtake; and the University of Washington, which has one of the highest ranked computing departments in the world and represents the most prestigious computing department in the US Pacific Northwest.

• UC Santa Cruz pays their average computer science GE $24,400/year + healthcare
• UW-Madison pays their average computer science GE $25,000/year + healthcare
• University of Washington pays their average computer science GE $27,000/year + healthcare

Contrast this with the University of Oregon:

Average pay (which is actually a little bit lower than the median pay, as reported in background) at the University of Oregon in CIS is $17,455.50/ year + healthcare. We recognize that healthcare is excellent at UO, and we pay for that excellence. But even if we add $2,000 worth to our compensation to account for above market healthcare, we’re still only at $19,455/year. And even if we consider an additional $4,600 (which some administrators have indicated to be the true overpayment amount, which we strongly reject), we’re still only at $22,055/year; some $2000 behind our peers.

The claim of low pay compared to peers holds true even when considering the cost of health insurance provided by the GTFF.

• To help us reason about the price of healthcare more directly, we considered a hypothetical where the university, instead of offering health insurance, gave each GE in CIS a stipend to buy their healthcare on the open market.
• We found that the health insurance paid by the university for the most typical graduate employee (i.e., single individual in their late 20s/early 30s) is comparable with plans offered on the open market (we found that the median low/zero-deductible plan for a single individual in their late 20s/early 30s living in Eugene offered through on Healthcare.gov was around $400/month, but these plans do not offer vision nor dental benefits, which would likely bump up premiums by another $100-$150 or so, and would then match the GTFF healthcare plan price);
• However, we recognize that brokering health insurance plans in bulk is different. While we think that calling our GTFF negotiated healthcare “overpriced” by $4,600 is too steep, we are willing to concede that the university offers an additional ~$2,000 worth of compensation, in terms of healthcare benefits, above peers.
• We further note that the health insurance premiums for graduate employees paid by the university are historically among the lowest of all employee groups on a per-employee basis;

And, of course, we pay embarrassingly low salaries compared to industry.

• Graduate employees hold bachelor’s and master’s degrees in computer science, a closely related field, or otherwise have backgrounds which have prepared them for graduate study in the field of computing;
• The United States Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that 2020 median annual salary for software developers with a bachelor’s degree was $110,140, and, for computer research scientists with master’s degrees, $126,830, thus creating a compelling financial reason for graduate employees at all graduate levels of computer science to eschew academic study for far more lucrative jobs elsewhere;
• The vast majority of graduate employees in the Department of Computer and Information Science at the University of Oregon have forgone years of lucrative salaries elsewhere to commit themselves to teaching, research, and general scholarship – surely we can pay them at least a living wage.

Reason 2

We have seen pay cuts in the last two years, in nominal terms.

One of the milestones for the PhD program in Computer Science is to undertake a significant project fairly early on in a student’s studies. This milestone is called the Directed Research Project (DRP). From the requirements:

The scope of a DRP should be somewhere between an undergraduate honors and a master’s thesis. A desired result of a DRP is a publishable paper or a departmental technical report.

A DRP consists of the following components: literature review, research, possibly software artifact, written report in the form of the DRP final paper, public presentation of the results, and the exam by private questioning from the committee members.

Each PhD student used to be offered funding during the summer, which was usually spent undertaking this project.

This summer funding was stripped away in ~2020, but the DRP requirement remains.

Doing the DRP during the school year, on top of full time classwork and an 18-hour/week GE-teaching assignment, is simply setting students up for failure. Summer continues to be the ideal time to complete major research projects as an early-career graduate student. But if you can’t find independent summer funding which is truly research oriented (and not, say, a software development job which pays the bills but doesn’t advance research), then the DRP continues to stay on the backburner and provides a barrier to graduation.

PhD programs are about developing the academic skills of novice researchers into experts. The whims of the summer internship job market (which, as we saw during summer 2020, can be extremely unpredictable) should not prematurely and arbitrarily end the careers of up-and-coming graduate researchers before they have even one full calendar year of graduate school experience.

If DRP summer pay isn’t restored, then at least give us raises. It’s the least that can be done, given the financial ladder has been pulled up behind us for the next generation of GEs.

We have seen pay cuts in the last two years, in real terms.

Net pay for a GE in the department is around ~$1,500/month (read more). The median monthly rent for a 1-bedroom apartment in the Eugene-Springfield metro area now exceeds $1,000 (read more).

Less than $500 a month ($16.70/day) of discretionary after-rent income is not enough to buy food and basic essentials in Eugene for one person, let alone a family;

Nationwide inflation at 5.4% in June, its highest point since the 2008 financial crisis, is confounding the financial difficulty. The paltry 1.4% cost of living adjustments negotiated by the university-wide graduate employee labor union two years ago no longer make sense in today’s context. Unfortunately, the new Letters of Appointment (contracts) for graduate employees in the Department of Computer and Information Science sent out by the university for the 2021-2022 academic school year reflecting this meager 1.4% pay adjustment, and not a penny more, is intolerably low.

Reason 3

Rental costs have become so high relative to pay that we can’t afford housing anymore.

The median monthly rent for a 1-bedroom apartment in the Eugene-Springfield metro area now exceeds $1,000.

Moreover, the price of housing in Eugene has skyrocketed in the last year, such that landlords are raising rents at or near the amount permitted by Oregon’s statewide rent control law (over 9%). The University of Oregon does not have the will nor the capacity to house all graduate students at a subsidy in university owned housing, and has itself both raised rent multiple times and infamously moved to evict some of its graduate student tenants in good standing in the last few months (source), including tenants working for the Department of Computer and Information Science

(TODO: Matt is providing more sources here.)

Reason 4

Pay is so low that, even going by the University of Oregon’s own official cost-of-living estimates, we can’t afford rent and groceries.

The University of Oregon itself makes estimates of graduate student expenses, reported on its page https://financialaid.uoregon.edu/cost_of_attendance_graduate

These expenses are tabulated as:

• Monthly Housing Costs: $1,070;
• Monthly Food Costs: $341 (which we believe to be an underestimate)
• Books and Supplies: $1,158
• Personal Expenses: $2,196
• Transportation: $1,308

Which, when added together, correspond to average expenses of $1,929/month, nearly exceeding the gross pay offered by the department, and certainly more than the ~$1,500 net pay hitting our wallets.

Reason 5

There is real human suffering in our department because of the lack of living wages. It’s to the point that many of us can no longer ethically recommend graduate study in our department to potential new graduate students.

Pay has gotten so tight that some graduate employees in the Department of Computer and Information Science are discreetly taking additional flex jobs in order to make ends meet, such as picking up occasional fast food shifts and doing gigwork like Uber or Lyft driving, none of which is conducive to teaching, research, or progress towards the graduate employee’s own graduation. At one point, a PhD student in our department hosted an immediate family member in a tent in their yard, because there was no more space in their home for another person to sleep. Moreover, graduate employees who cannot take on additional work are particularly impacted by unlivable pay, such as carers of young children, people with certain disabilities, or international students who are generally prohibited from working for employers other than the university as a condition of their visas.

We are proud of our university, our department, our earned degrees, our students, our faculty, and the caliber of academic rigor provided by our labor. However, many of us can no longer recommend graduate study in computer science at the University of Oregon to potential doctoral and master’s students due to the scarcity of graduate employee positions and the unlivable pay provided by those positions that do exist. We are doing this since the livelihood and graduation of approximately 50 graduate employees (approximately 25 teachers and 25 researchers) and their families is at stake here. We need your help to do our jobs.

Reason 6

We are not asking for a lot of money. And there is plenty of money in the budget to pay us a bit more.

• The Oregon State Legislature has allocated some $900 million to Oregon’s public universities over the next biennium;
• Undergraduate enrollment and tuition numbers for the upcoming academic year appear to be promising, and returns from the university’s savings through its $912.5 million endowment and other investments are considerable;
• The University of Oregon has recent success in grants and donations, both with respect to the Department of Computer and Information Science specifically, and to the university more broadly, with the Knight’s second $500 million dollar gift dedicated to applied science coming to mind;
• All parties are in agreement that graduate employee salary levels at the University of Oregon are low on their face, and compared to peer institutions;
• Neither immediate supervisors nor the department head set pay levels for graduate employees. Since compensation decisions are made by the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences Bruce Blonigen (annual salary: $565,000) or their designee the Divisional Dean for Natural Sciences Hal Sadofsky ($313,500) with some input from the VP for Finance and Administration & CFO Jamie Moffitt ($407,400), the Provost Patrick Phillips ($615,200), and ultimately President Michael Schill ($1,235,400), we find that claims of “lack of budget” to ring especially hollow, given that our desired contribution from CAS of about $100,000 will better the lives for ~50 GEs;
• The salary request places de-facto starting salary at $21,060;
• The salary request is estimated to cost the university an adjustment of no more than $253,000, of which roughly half is expected to be paid for by external grants (i.e., not from undergraduate tuition nor state tax allocation)
• The salary request is less than a 0.15% overall shift in the College of Arts and Science’s budget, a rounding error in the context of the university’s overall budget of nearly a billion dollars; and simply adjusts entry level pay for graduate employees in the Department of Computer and Information Science to be in the same ballpark of the Departments of Biology, Chemistry, Physics, and computing department peers elsewhere;
• The salary request is expected to cost approximately $3,818/year for a GE1, $5,293/year for a GE2, $5,045/year for a GE3, with the highest price change being no more than $5,900/year for any GE;

Reason 7

There is a lot of precedent at the University of Oregon for our request.

The average starting pay for graduate employees in other departments is hundreds of dollars more a month, including in the departments of Art History, Biology, Chemistry, Creative Writing, Earth Science, Economics, Mathematics, Physics, and Psychology, and, further, the Department of Computer and Information Science’s graduate employees have lower average overall pay than graduate employees in an additional 18 hiring departments.

In the College of Arts and Sciences alone, we note the following departments have higher median starting salaries than in CIS as of May 2021. The dollar figures are median gross salaries paid per month by hiring department in the academic year for GEs on teaching funding.

Grade	Hiring Department	Median FTE	2019-2020 (Official)	2020-2021 (Estimated YTD)	2021-2022 (Projected)
GE1 - Teaching	CAS Chemistry	0.46	$2,239	$2,271	$2,302
GE1 - Teaching	CAS Biology	0.45	$2,239	$2,271	$2,302
GE1 - Teaching	CAS Earth Sciences	0.49	$2,158	$2,188	$2,219
GE1 - Teaching	CAS Psychology	0.49	$2,149	$2,179	$2,210
GE1 - Teaching	CAS Creative Writing	0.49	$2,069	$2,098	$2,127
GE1 - Teaching	CAS Physics	0.40	$2,051	$2,080	$2,109
GE1 - Teaching	CAS Mathematics	0.49	$2,013	$2,042	$2,070
GE1 - Teaching	CAS Economics	0.49	$2,011	$2,039	$2,068
GE1 - Teaching	CAS Computer & Information Science	0.45	$1,863	$1,889	$1,916

Reason 8

Realigning GE pay in CIS is beneficial for the State of Oregon as a whole. Not doing it will invite scrutiny from outside UO.

• There is a severe shortage of qualified computing professionals in Oregon, including business software developers, data scientists, web designers, app creators, network administrators, computing research scientists, and computer science teachers;
• A bipartisan group of representatives of the Oregon State Legislature introduced a bill in 2019 declaring an emergency with respect to computer science education in Oregon (House Bill 2967);
• 91% of Oregon parents desire more computer science educational opportunities for their children;
• Just think of the headlines that could happen if pay in CIS isn’t raised, and how that might influence the legislature’s thinking about the wisdom of UO administrators spending taxpayer dollars going forward.

RESOLVED: The people in budget setting authority positions must boost graduate employee salaries in the Department of Computer and Information Science.