(Bloomberg Opinion) -- The latest dispute in higher education, highlighted by a recent three-day walkout at the University of Chicago, is whether graduate students in private universities should be allowed to unionize. A federal government ruling made this possible in 2016, but that policy may soon be reversed.
One core reason to have unions is to boost the real wages of needy workers. But graduate students are not employees in the traditional sense. They are receiving training, often on very favorable terms. Typically a university is investing large sums of money to make those students employable and successful, usually on the academic market; the University of Chicago says it invests more than $500,000 per doctoral student. If those students demanded and received higher wages for their teaching, the university would not necessarily increase its investment in them at all; it could simply reallocate existing funds. Thus it is misleading to think there is a real bargaining situation here.
Think of a university as an investor in these students, and toward that end it must choose between boosting their academic quality through better training, or paying them higher stipends and teaching wages to ease their immediate financial concerns. The incentive for the university, which cares about its broader and longer-term reputation, is to invest in the quality of those students but pay them smaller amounts (though enough to live on). In contrast, the incentive for a graduate student union would be to push for higher wages, given that the other university investments are less visible and hard to monitor.
At the margin, society is better off if the focus is on the training, which enhances productivity in the long term, rather than on higher wages and stipends for students in the short term. If you are worried about privation, I would merely note that many of my graduate students come from relatively well-to-do backgrounds and face favorable prospects after they graduate. Unlike typical private employers that face unions, a university has a strong incentive to improve the marketability of its graduate students to enable them to move on to something better.
My Bloomberg Opinion colleague Noah Smith and I have both argued that today’s top universities don’t take in nearly enough students, and that if they boosted their enrollments, they could increase social and economic mobility. Would graduate student unions favor such proposals, or would they seek to protect the privileged status of current students and discourage new entrants? We genuinely don’t know, but I fear the unions could be another special interest thwarting badly needed changes in higher education.
Or say schools found a way to reach thousands or millions of graduate students with online education programs, as Georgia Tech has been doing with great success and in a very inclusive manner. I worry that graduate student unions could be another obstacle to this idea, which already faces resistance from entrenched interest groups within many universities. The graduate students might view those online programs as limiting their ability to gain teaching experience, or they might demand a significant share of the revenue, which could limit the incentive of universities to attempt such experiments.
In general, when considering this issue, ask yourself a question: When it comes to bringing about change, do today’s universities have too many veto points or too few?
Some researchers have pointed out that graduate student unions don’t seem to have harmed the public universities that allow them (such unions, which are permissible in many states, would not be affected by the federal government’s decision). The evidence may be compelling in the short run, but the real costs are likely to come later — by slowing down or even preventing beneficial changes to the U.S. system of higher education. Furthermore, state labor laws dramatically limit what public employees can negotiate for. Unionized graduate students at private universities unions would not face similar restrictions.
I also worry about the political implications of such unions. Once a union is present, it will be hard for graduate students who wish to teach to stay out of it. Yet such unions, as they would be regulated under federal law, could support political causes, and today’s private universities are already highly politicized. Is the cause of freedom of expression really helped by forcing graduate students to financially support, with their union dues, political positions they may disagree with?
I recognize that worker unions have done a great deal of good in American history. I just don’t think today’s private universities are the right place for them.
I have a direct stake in this question. I have been overseeing graduate students, using them as research assistants and raising money to support them in varying roles, for about 30 years at George Mason, where there is no such union.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Michael Newman at mnewman43@bloomberg.net
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Tyler Cowen is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He is a professor of economics at George Mason University and writes for the blog Marginal Revolution. His books include "Big Business: A Love Letter to an American Anti-Hero."
©2019 Bloomberg L.P.