PhD students shouldn't be picking fruit

An email from the University of Auckland to some PhD students blew up in the media on Thursday and Friday. As the New Zealand Herald reported:

Auckland University has advised its doctoral students to "take a holiday from your academic work" - and go fruit picking.

The email, sent to all PhD students in the university's School of Cultures, Languages and Linguistics, has drawn astonished and sarcastic comments from students.

"As we near the end of the year, some of you may be wondering about whether to take a holiday from your academic work schedule," the email says.

"If it is possible for you to take a break, we really recommend that you do so. It has been a very difficult year, and most of us have not left Auckland at all. A break out of the city doing a very different activities [sic] can refresh the mind and body and help you have a productive year in 2021.

This rightly led to a collective 'WTF?' from PhD students. However, much of the commenting online seems to be of the form "When I was a student, we picked fruit during summer...". This demonstrates how little the general public understands what it is that PhD students do, and a failure to consider the opportunity cost of fruit picking.

Most undergraduate students are not studying over summer. So, taking two or three months of their summer to pick fruit will have no effect on how long it takes those students to graduate. The opportunity cost of fruit picking is fairly low for undergraduate students - these students give up time that they could have spent on summertime leisure pursuits, or for most of them, in some other employment.

In contrast, a PhD student is undertaking a sustained period of self-directed study (under the supervision of a panel of academic staff). If a PhD student takes two or three months off to pick fruit, then that means it will take them two or three months longer to complete their thesis. The opportunity cost of fruit picking is that the student potentially gives up three months of much higher earnings that they could have achieved after they have completed their PhD. Sure, those higher earnings don't happen until up to three years later, but no one's discount rate is so high that a barely-above-minimum-wage fruit picking job is a superior alternative. On top of that, many international PhD students are spending time away from their family, and taking longer to complete their thesis means more time away.

I'm sure that some students will be looking for work over summer, and some of those students will end up working in the horticulture industry. But PhD students should not be among them, and the University of Auckland should know better.