Teacher assistants or graduate assistants have been unionized at UIC [1]. I have noticed that they have gone on strike a few times. Unfortunately anything you are hopeful of achieving doesn't seem to have changed at all.
The best choice of my life was not going back to school. I think I might do it through my employer but at this point I just do machine learning as a hobby.
The problem with grad school in general is the fact that other than being a
gerontocracy is that the optimal strategy for scientific research requires more failures than successes and getting tenure becomes more and more difficult because other than people living longer you don't need more professors instead you just need more TAs / GAs to teach people and educate people to get the people to keep the system working.
Right now Mathematics (specifically Calculus) makes money for a college and or university in contrast to psychology, philosophy and other humanities don't. If this was automated then Mathematics will have less and less professors and or grad students so if the current trends continue then we will probably only see computer science professors dominating universities.
The UIC grad student union is pretty effective at keeping their teaching hours to under 20 hours per week (so, you complain to them when there's too much grading). But the stipends there are among the lowest of good math departments, certainly lower than many non-unionized places. How much of this is due to the union being ineffective vs UIC being broke and poorly run I don't know. [Source: I used to teach math at UIC]
Overall I am not really convinced grad student unions really make much of a difference in practice, at least as far as everyday stipends and working conditions. I am at a non-unionized place now and we don't work the students any harder. But in principle it's certainly a good idea, and I have indeed seen the union be a useful advocate in certain special situations.
UIC has been underfunded for so long that it is a joke. I don't even think that they even budget that kind of thing anymore and just accept the fact. But, the computer science college is going to have a building dedicated to computer science due to the fact that a bunch of alumni are funding it directly. I personally gave around $100 but I would guess many other alumni will give much more.
The best choice of my life was not going back to school. I think I might do it through my employer but at this point I just do machine learning as a hobby.
The problem with grad school in general is the fact that other than being a gerontocracy is that the optimal strategy for scientific research requires more failures than successes and getting tenure becomes more and more difficult because other than people living longer you don't need more professors instead you just need more TAs / GAs to teach people and educate people to get the people to keep the system working.
Right now Mathematics (specifically Calculus) makes money for a college and or university in contrast to psychology, philosophy and other humanities don't. If this was automated then Mathematics will have less and less professors and or grad students so if the current trends continue then we will probably only see computer science professors dominating universities.
[1] https://uic-geo.net/mainsite/