Not sure if the pay rate for postdocs and PhD students are set nationally. But I was wondering if PIs compete with each other for good students by marking up the (rather small) salary. Is this current practice or a good idea or bad idea?
Thanks, Shuheng
This will depend wildly on the setting in question. For example, NIH grants have specific postdoc rates, and while a professor could "tweak" those offers (usually in ways that involve a second grant/account/etc.) they may or may not have the ability to do that.
Additionally, there may be departmental requirements - for example, in my current department, all graduate students are paid a fixed rate, take their preliminary exams and get a slight bump to another fixed rate. There is no flexibility in this, by design.
As for whether or not it's a good of bad idea? I think it's a bad idea for my lab. Salary negotiations create an unlevel playing field among the members of my lab, and that's not a message I'm willing to send by "sweetening the pot" for one postdoc vs. another. The only differential benefits I'll accept is if the "unit price" of something is variable - for example, if I offer to pay for a postdoc's plane ticket when they move to join my lab, I pay for a plane ticket, understanding that someone coming from a state away is likely to be less expensive than someone coming from overseas.
If we are talking about hiring postdocs with salaries paid from grants, in the US you can do it but you have to be creative because you cannot just single out one postdoctoral fellow (as a person) and offer him or her better terms than the others have. The usual way out is to create a position with some new fancy title (like "John Smith research visiting fellow" or whatever your imagination suggests you) and pretty much the same job description as a regular postdoc. That requires some bureaucratic moves and you have to explain the administrators (your chairman, at the very least) why that may be desirable, but if you go through all the routines successfully, you can modify standard terms considerably (within reasonable limits). In particular, you can set the salary above the usual level, or to offer reduced teaching load, or....
As far as I understand it, this practice is not very common but not unheard of. Normally, you compete for better students by having higher reputation (as an individual, or as a department, or even as a town) and many good students are happy to get a bit less in money if they can work with whom they want or live where they want, so a small salary raise alone won't give you too much advantage and if you want to offer 1,000,000 a year, that would be blocked by both the administrators at your university and your grant office. So when I use this, I do it not to compete with other PI's, but just to give my postdocs some break from life hardships hoping that they get more productive in return. However there is a competition for good students not on the individual level but on the university level (in the US the postdoc salaries are set not by some national agencies but by individual universities) and that one can get quite fierce when it is a "student" market. Now, as far as I can tell, it is harder for a bright student to get an offer from a mediocre university than it is for a mediocre university to hire a bright student, so almost everybody is just offering the "standard package".
I have fallen victim to a scheme of inflated postdoctoral salary, detailed in the thread below:
Persistent issues with salary pay as a postdoc in China: What can I do?
Regarding the core of your question, this is a direct example of how a higher salary should not be a relevant strategy to attract postdocs. I should state I was not attracted as a postdoc primarily because of the salary. My country was sliding down a serious economic & political crisis, and as an adventurer I was greatly interested in trying my luck in China. Moreover, I believed one of the PIs involved in the project was a good scientist. I kept pushing for a higher salary merely as part of any job negotiation, aiming for the best offer.
What this institution and relevant PIs do is declare funds which are strictly reserved for project expenses as promised salary, in the hopes of attracting the best possible postdocs. I believe this is both bad and stupid practice strategy, for the reasons below:
(i) I believe the best scientists seek the most interesting & exciting scientific environments because they are moved by passion; (ii) any conflict over salary pay and research expenses will destroy necessary focus on complicated technical discussions and procedures; (iii) attempting to buy scientists will corrupt their interests, resulting in biased scientific output.
Had these professors honestly declared the actual smaller salary and the available project funds, I'd have accepted the offered conditions and joined them as a postdoc anyway. In the absence of conflicts over salary pay and project expenses, I'd have focused entirely on the project ideas I had proposed, resulting in fair collaboration and interesting output.
In the end after leaving I now try my best to prevent other colleagues from falling prey to similar schemes. I am counter-advising any scientist to visit China, as I believe a local money-centred culture is corrupting the field.
A trivial example is the local practice of paying prizes$$ per published paper, which I have seen resulting in colleagues openly negotiating authorships as commodities, not only among each other but also with journal editors and local staff.
I firmly believe universities cannot work for-profit, and that high intellects cannot be bought.
