Below Minimum Wage: The System We Built and the System We're Losing

How a back-of-the-envelope calculation adds up to everything we need to fix as we rebuild the scientific structures that are crumbling.

Two years before the Berlin Wall fell. It was just after 3 in the morning. At my lab bench, I was preparing samples for calculating a blood glucose curve in one of the early brain imaging studies. Across from me, my grad student colleague was extracting DNA for his work on the molecular basis of neurodegeneration. We were working in the Neuroscience Laboratory Building (now long extinct). It was the former student food services base for the University of Michigan, an irony I never really got over. It was mid-winter in Ann Arbor. Slush ruled the streets. When the day arrived in four hours, we could be sure the skies would be gray.

Suddenly, K. slammed down his pipetter and exclaimed, “I’m going to talk to the Boss tomorrow! I just figured it out, we make less than minimum wage!”

The calculation was straightforward. Our stipend was maybe $7,000 a year, with tuition covered. We worked—conservatively—60 hours a week, often more. Factor in the 3 AM sessions, the weekend tissue preparations, and the endless equipment maintenance that somehow became the grad students’ responsibility. Do the math: roughly 3,100 hours per year, $7,000 total. About $2.25 per hour—a third less than the 1987 minimum wage of $3.35—to do cutting-edge neuroscience in a converted cafeteria food prep building.

K. did talk to the Boss the next day. I don’t know exactly what he expected—acknowledgment, perhaps, or some explanation of how this was a temporary sacrifice for future reward, or at minimum an expression of concern about the system we were trapped in.

What he got was simpler: “Why should I worry? I’ve got a nice car. I’ve got nice clothes.”

The Divergence

K. and I responded to that moment differently, though we both understood its implications with perfect clarity.

K. finished his PhD. Then he left research entirely. He’s now a practicing radiologist—work that pays substantially more than minimum wage, has defined schedules rather than 3 AM obligations, and doesn’t require pretending that exploitation is training.

I stayed. Not because I had some moral superiority or different principles. I stayed because I was too committed to getting my doctorate at that point. I’d tried blue-collar work before graduate school, and I didn’t want to do that. The sunk costs were real—years invested, experiments underway, a thesis taking shape. Walking away would mean admitting those years at $2.25 per hour had purchased nothing.

The samples I was preparing that night at 3 AM were for quantifying local cerebral glucose utilization using autoradiography. The data would contribute to my PhD thesis on cerebral metabolic variability. It was genuinely interesting work—understanding how the brain’s energy consumption varies spatially could inform everything from imaging diagnostics to our understanding of neurological disorders.

But it was work being done by someone making $2.25 per hour, with no leverage, no bargaining power, and no alternative but quitting. The quality of the science didn’t change the economics. If anything, the importance of the work made the exploitation easier to rationalize: we were suffering for something that mattered.

K. made a rational choice. He extracted himself from a system that valued his labor at below minimum wage and found work that valued it appropriately. He’s probably had a better work-life balance, made more money, had more control over his time, and still contributed to human welfare through medical practice.

I made a different calculation. I stayed in the system, finished the PhD, did a postdoc (at similarly exploitative wages), and eventually built a career as an academic that culminated in serving as NSF’s Assistant Director for Biological Sciences, from the bottom of the exploitation to administering the funding system that perpetuated it.

The View from the Other Side

Fast forward to 2014-2018. I’m now at NSF, overseeing hundreds of millions in biological research funding. I visit grant review panels regularly—watching as distinguished scientists evaluate proposals, debate scientific merit, and argue about which projects deserve support in a constrained budget environment.

And the panelists complain. Not about the science—they’re excited about the research. They complain about the funding decisions: why do we fund these projects and not others? Why these amounts? Why can’t we support more graduate students? Why are stipend levels what they are?

I’m sitting there thinking about 3 AM in 1987, about K.’s calculation, about the Boss’s nice car and nice clothes. And I’m the one explaining the constraints now. Limited budgets. Many worthy proposals. Tough choices. The same justifications, delivered more professionally than “why should I worry,” but fundamentally the same message: the system is what it is.

The irony wasn’t lost on me. I remembered pipetting at 3 AM. I remembered the calculation. I remembered the casual indifference to exploitation. And now I was administering fundamentally the same system, just with better rhetoric.

Here’s what hadn’t changed in those 27 years: the basic model of graduate STEM training still rested on extracting maximum labor at minimum cost, justified as “training” rather than employment. Stipends had risen nominally but not dramatically in real terms. The hours hadn’t decreased—if anything, competitive pressure had intensified. The power imbalance remained: PIs controlled everything, and students had no recourse.

If I could have redesigned the system from scratch, I would have created something different: fewer graduate students, higher wages, and much better mentoring. Quality over quantity. Living wages over exploitation—professional development over just-in-time labor.

But that’s not what happened. Instead, the system expanded. More grad students, more postdocs, more soft-money positions, all built on the same below-minimum-wage foundation, just scaled up. We produced more PhDs chasing fewer permanent positions, intensifying competition at every level.

Why did it persist? Because it worked—not for the individuals trapped in it, but for the system itself. The model produced science. Papers got published. Grants got renewed. PIs advanced. Institutions collected overhead. The fact that it ran on exploitation was a feature, not a bug. It selected for people willing to accept it (like me) and filtered out those who wouldn’t (like K.).

And those of us who accepted it, who succeeded despite it, who rose through it—we administered it. We knew it was broken. We’d done the math ourselves. But we had competing obligations: limited budgets to allocate, scientific priorities to balance, and institutional constraints to navigate. Fixing the exploitation model wasn’t in our remit. Our job was to distribute resources within the system as it existed.

The System’s Logic

The defense of graduate student stipends—if anyone bothered to make one explicitly—would go something like this:

“It’s training, not employment.” Students are learning, not working. The stipend is support to enable education, not compensation for labor. Never mind that the “training” produces publishable research, grant-supported data, and intellectual property that belongs to the institution. Never mind that without graduate student labor, most academic research would halt.

“Everyone goes through it.” This is the initiation ritual, the paying of dues, the sacrifice that earns you entry to the profession. I suffered at $2.25 per hour; the Boss probably suffered at similar rates, and you suffer too. The hazing justifies itself through tradition.

“The payoff comes later.” Yes, current compensation is terrible, but you’re investing in future earnings. The PhD opens doors. Except that it doesn’t, not reliably. The academic job market is brutal. Industry positions often don’t require a PhD. And many of those doors lead to postdocs—more exploitation at slightly higher rates.

“You’re doing what you love.” This is the passion tax: because you find the work intrinsically rewarding, because you’re intellectually engaged, because you care about the science, you should accept compensation far below market value. Your enthusiasm is exploitable.

“The alternative is worse.” No funding means no graduate programs means no research training means no next generation of scientists. We’re doing the best we can with limited resources. Which might be true, but doesn’t change the mathematical reality: $2.25 per hour is exploitation regardless of budget constraints.

None of these arguments would satisfy an outside observer. They barely satisfied those of us inside the system. But they were sufficient to maintain the equilibrium because both sides had reasons to accept it. Students needed credentials. PIs needed labor. Institutions needed productivity. Everyone was complicit.

The system persisted because it was stable—not fair, not optimal, but stable. An equilibrium based on asymmetric power: PIs had alternatives (they could recruit new students), students didn’t (switching programs meant losing years of work). That asymmetry meant PIs could extract labor at $2.25 per hour, and students would accept it.

K.’s confrontation with the Boss revealed this clearly. The Boss wasn’t defending the system or explaining its necessity. He was simply observing that it didn’t affect him negatively. Nice car. Nice clothes. Why should he worry? The graduate students’ misery wasn’t his problem.

That’s the logic of exploitation: those who benefit from it don’t experience its costs, so they have no incentive to change it. And those who bear the costs have no power to change it. The system perpetuates.

The International Contrast

It’s worth noting that this isn’t how all countries approach graduate STEM training.

In Germany, PhD students are employees with contracts, salaries, and benefits. They’re part of the research staff and are compensated as such. The fiction of “training not employment” doesn’t work there—if you’re doing research work, you’re paid for research work.

When I’d present at international conferences during my NSF tenure, European colleagues would sometimes ask about American graduate training. When I explained the stipend levels and working conditions, the response was consistent surprise. “How do your students survive?” they’d ask.

The answer: barely, and many don’t.

The American model—long programs, low stipends, no benefits, complete PI control—isn’t universal. It’s a choice, defended by inertia and rationalized by those who succeeded within it. Other countries produce excellent science without requiring graduate students to work for below-minimum-wage wages. We could too, if we wanted to.

The Berlin Wall Moment

Two years before the Berlin Wall fell, K. and I were pipetting at 3 AM. The Wall seemed permanent then—an ugly fact of geopolitics, stable if not good. Systems that appear unshakable can collapse suddenly when their contradictions become unsustainable.

We’re in that moment now with American science.

The 2025 funding cuts aren’t routine budget tightening. They’re not temporary political fluctuations that will reverse with the next election. They represent something different: a fundamental questioning of the compact between government and science that has sustained American research since Vannevar Bush’s endless frontier.

More than 7,800 grants canceled or suspended at NIH and NSF. Billions in unspent funds frozen. Thousands of researchers terminated or leaving the country. Universities cutting graduate admissions, eliminating postdoc positions, restructuring programs. The infrastructure we spent 75 years building is being dismantled.

And here’s the uncomfortable question: Should we fight to rebuild it exactly as it was?

That system—the one now under assault—was the system where graduate students made $2.25 per hour, where the Boss had a nice car and nice clothes and didn’t worry, where exploitation was rationalized as training, where we produced too many PhDs for too few jobs and called it a pipeline problem rather than a design flaw.

The system produced important science. My thesis work on cerebral metabolic variability contributed to understanding brain function. K.’s work on neurodegeneration might have led somewhere if he’d stayed. The research mattered. But it mattered that, while being built on exploitation, everyone involved understood and accepted it.

Now external force is breaking the system. Not because we collectively decided to reform it. Not because we recognized its flaws and chose differently. But because political power decided that science funding was a convenient target for leverage and cuts.

The question facing us isn’t whether the cuts are bad—they are. It’s not whether we should oppose them—we should. The question is: when we argue for restoration of science funding, what are we arguing to restore?

The System We Could Build

If we’re going to rebuild American science from this moment of crisis, we could choose differently.

Fewer graduate students, better compensation. Instead of admitting cohorts of 20 students to work as cheap labor, admit cohorts of 10 and pay them living wages. Fund fewer projects but fund them properly. This would require PIs to do more of their own work or hire professional staff, which would be appropriate, since it’s their research program.

Limited time-to-degree with guaranteed support. If a PhD genuinely takes five years, fund all five years from admission. No scrambling for RA positions. No anxiety about whether your PI’s grant will renew. No leverage for PIs to extract extra years of cheap labor by withholding degrees.

Professional development is a core mission. Graduate programs should be about training the next generation of scientists, not just producing data for current PIs. That means mentoring, career development, and skill-building beyond bench work. It means treating students as early-career professionals, not disposable labor.

Portable funding. Rather than money going to PIs who then allocate it to students, fund students directly through fellowships and training grants. This shifts power dynamics—students choose labs based on training quality, not desperation for any funding source.

Employment status with benefits. Stop the fiction that graduate students are just students. They’re researchers doing work that produces value. Compensate them as such, with real salaries, health insurance, retirement contributions, and labor protections.

Honest accounting of opportunity costs. A PhD takes 5-7 years, which are prime earning years. The compensation should reflect that cost. If we can’t afford to pay graduate students fairly, maybe we shouldn’t be running programs that require exploiting them.

This isn’t radical. It’s how many other countries already operate. It’s what we could build if we chose to prioritize quality over quantity, people over productivity, and sustainability over short-term extraction.

But building this requires admitting that the old system was fundamentally flawed, not just under-resourced. It requires PIs to accept they can’t run labs of 15 people on the cheap. It requires universities to acknowledge that graduate programs shouldn’t be profit centers via overhead. It requires funding agencies to insist on fair labor practices as grant conditions.

Most of all, it requires breaking the cycle where those of us who succeeded by enduring exploitation then administer systems that perpetuate it. The fact that we survived at $2.25 per hour doesn’t make it acceptable. The fact that we built careers despite the system doesn’t mean others should have to do the same.

The Reckoning

I’m still in touch with K. He’s doing fine—radiologists make good money, have reasonable schedules, and contribute meaningfully to patient care. He saw the system clearly, did the math, confronted the Boss, got an honest answer, and made a rational choice to exit.

I made a different choice. I stayed. I succeeded. I administered. And now I’m watching the system I succeeded within face potential collapse, and I’m wrestling with complicated feelings about that.

There’s grief—genuine grief—for what’s being lost. Brilliant research programs shut down mid-stream. Talented scientists are leaving the country—graduate students whose training is disrupted. The accumulated infrastructure of American scientific excellence is under assault.

But there’s also—if I’m honest—something else. A recognition that the system we’re grieving was deeply flawed. That its excellence was built on exploitation. Those of us who rose through it had obligations to fix it, and we didn’t. We knew better—K.’s calculation proved we knew better—but knowing better didn’t translate to doing better.

When we fight to restore science funding—and we should fight—we need to be clear about what we’re fighting for. Not restoration of the exploitation model. Not rebuilding the $2.25-per-hour wage. Not recreating the power imbalances that let PIs accumulate nice cars and nice clothes while graduate students pipetted at 3 AM.

We should be fighting for something better: a system that produces excellent science while treating the people who produce it as valuable professionals rather than exploitable labor. A system where the next generation doesn’t have to choose between career aspirations and basic dignity. A system where doing the math doesn’t lead to the conclusion that you’re being exploited, because the math actually works out fairly.

What I Would Tell My Younger Self

If I could go back to that 3 AM moment in 1987, what would I say?

I wouldn’t tell younger-me to quit. The PhD mattered. The work mattered. The career I built was meaningful. I don’t regret staying.

But I would tell younger-me that K. was right. Not just about the $2.25 per hour—that was obviously correct mathematically. But about the fundamental point: the system was designed to extract maximum value while providing minimum compensation, and that design wasn’t accidental or temporary or likely to change through individual complaints.

I would tell younger-me that succeeding within an exploitative system doesn’t validate the system. That making it to the other side doesn’t mean the journey was necessary or appropriate. That future responsibility comes with having survived—responsibility to change things for those who come after.

I would tell younger-me to remember that moment, that calculation, that casual indifference, and to let it inform every decision about how science should be organized and funded and sustained. That when you have power later, you use it differently than it was used against you.

And I would tell younger-me that systems that seem permanent—like the Berlin Wall, like the graduate student exploitation model—can collapse suddenly when their contradictions become unsustainable. That the question is always what we build afterward, whether we repeat the same mistakes or choose differently.

The Choice Ahead

We’re at that Berlin Wall moment now. The old system is breaking. What comes next is undetermined.

We could fight to restore exactly what we had: the funding levels of 2024, the program structures we’re familiar with, the career paths we know. We could rebuild the $2.25-per-hour model, just with better marketing and more rhetoric about the nobility of sacrifice for science.

Or we could acknowledge that the crisis creates opportunity. That when systems break, we can build better ones. That American science doesn’t have to rest on exploitation to produce excellence.

Four decades after K. slammed down his pipetter and did the math, the system he calculated is facing its reckoning. Those of us who survived it, who succeeded within it, who administered it—we bear responsibility for what comes next.

We can rebuild exploitation with better PR. Or we can build something actually better.

K. figured out we made less than minimum wage. The Boss explained why that didn’t matter to him. And the system rolled on for nearly four decades.

It won’t roll on much longer. The question is what replaces it.

When we rebuild American science—and we will rebuild it—we should build it for people like K. and younger-me, not for people like the Boss. We should build it so the math works out differently. So the response to “we make less than minimum wage” is horror and reform, not nice cars and nice clothes.

The Berlin Wall fell. The system breaks. What we build next is our choice.

Let’s choose better.