Cbreeze- I didn’t mean that someone at DE Shaw and Bridgewater have secure and lifelong employment… I meant that your employability coming from a place like that if/when/during a downturn is significantly higher than coming from a 5-10 person shop. I was working in financial recruiting during a previous downturn, and when you are competing with every other out of work quant who was ALSO working out of someone’s garage or basement at a 5 person firm, and having to explain why you didn’t see the meltdown in natural gas, or why you took an overly optimistic and un-hedged position in REITS or GIC’s or the Euro/Yen differential, or why your model couldn’t predict a shift in trading velocity or whatnot… well, it’s not pretty. At least when you’ve got the scale and scope of a very large fund behind you, you’re not trying to rewrite history with a magic marker. At a huge fund no single quant is betting the house on every position…
@Alexmer, if you perceive graduate students to be employees of the university, then yes, they should be taxed on their income, like everyone else.
The thing is, there are so many underemployed PhDs out there that if graduate students start to demand being treated as regular employees, then universities will just stop using them for teaching etc. You are attempting entry into a lottery profession. You throw your hat in the ring and hope you are chosen. There are way too many aspirants and not enough places. It’s horrible and I feel for you, having gone through it myself. But until that imbalance of supply and demand changes, I do not support the institutional favoring of graduate students over degree-holding PhDs. Your perspective will change when you are no longer a student and you have a PhD, with which you are competing for employment with inexpensive probationers.