2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

There exists a crisis in the doctoral engineering population. This crisis is evidenced primarily by 1) the high attrition rates of doctoral engineering students from their programs and 2) the poor mental health status of doctoral engineering students. Despite typically being fully funded, doctoral engineering students leave their programs without completing their dissertations at high rates. This represents a significant loss of effort and time to various stakeholders including the students themselves, faculty advisors, administrators, universities, and ultimately the funding entities that support the work of graduate students. The mental health crisis in graduate programs at large is well-documented and cited in literature, however little literature exists specifically on engineering doctoral students. Understanding the causes of these issues is an important step toward being able to remedy them. I believe that these issues are merely symptoms of a deeper issue, specifically the working conditions of doctoral students.
As existing literature and legislation reflect, the doctoral engineering student has long existed in an ambiguous space. Universities do not consistently classify them as either staff or student. However, engineering graduate students do perform work and provide quantifiable economic value to universities through research and teaching that are critical to the business model of universities and essential to the advancement and dissemination of scientific knowledge. When recontextualized as workers, many frameworks and theories can be used to explain the experiences of doctoral engineering students. One promising framework is the Psychology of Working Theory (PWT). Central to the PWT is the concept of decent work. The PWT claims that in order to have access to well-being in an affluent western context, decent work is necessary. Decent work is defined within the PWT as having five components: (1) physically and interpersonally safe working conditions, (2) hours that allow for free time and adequate rest, (3) organizational values that complement family and social values, (4) adequate compensation, and (5) access to adequate healthcare. Decent work exists when all these components are present.
This paper explores the argument for doctoral engineering students to be classified as workers for their research contributions as well as for the work they perform for universities as teaching or research assistants. It posits that the “typical” doctoral engineering student likely does not have access to decent work. Finally, it compares recommendations from current work which views the doctoral engineering student as a student versus work that looks at the doctoral engineering student as a worker to illuminate political implications of both approaches.