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Stanford University

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Stanford University reviews

4.3

83% would recommend to a friend

(5,716 total reviews)
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Jonathan Levin

79% approve of CEO

68% positive business outlook

Stanford University has an employee rating of 4.3 out of 5 stars, based on 5,716 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have an excellent working experience there. The Stanford University employee rating is in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) for employers within the Educación industry (3.7 stars).

Reviews by job title

6K reviews
3.0
Apr 18, 2024

It all depends...

Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Individual experiences working at Stanford vary widely based on which school you work for, and which faculty and staff you work with. Suggest reaching out to current team members if possible to learn about the departmental culture where you want to apply. There are a wide variety of activities and classes available to staff, in addition to the beautiful campus environment (if you work on the main campus). The best benefit is the college tuition benefit for dependents, although you must be continuously employed for 5 years to be eligible.

Cons

Salaries are not competitive with other local private sector employers. Healthcare coverage options are not great, and there is not a lot of room for career advancement for staff. Most roles are hybrid and at least some days in office are expected.

3.0
Feb 12, 2024
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

The campus is beautiful, lots of opportunity for collaborations and to attend interesting seminars.

Cons

1) The parking policies are hostile towards underpaid employees coming to work on site. I understand they want to promote use of public transit, but this is suboptimal and not feasible for all across the Bay Area. My 45 minute commute each way would turn into 2 hours if I used public transit from deep within San Francisco to Stanford. Is my job to be on public transport? On the other hand, the parking plans are outright unaffordable, with many Staff getting salaries lower than Postdocs, even if the Staff completed postdoctoral training themselves (if you were hired before NIH bumped salaries for postdocs, for example). 2) The whole hierarchical structure in Academia makes publishing scientific research extremely inefficient. Professors are typically swarmed with grant deadlines and collaborations to manage, and if a particular research manuscript is not of urgency for a particular grant, it can sit on their desk literally for years, and there's nothing the other scientists can do about it. This is immoral and unethical in various way, starting from the fact that the research is likely publicly funded through grants NIH, NSF, or other governmental agencies using tax payer money, and thus hoarding unpublished research results is detrimental to the progress of science in general; also, this can have profoundly stymying effects on junior scientists for whom it is important to publish efficiently and with regularity, whereas Professors can afford to "sit on" papers for years because they have many other studies they're responsible for to publish (i.e., for a professor a junior scientist's paper may be "just another paper", while for the junior scientist it is THE paper that they need to propel their careers). 3) There are few opportunities for growth if you're not a Professor or a trainee. For reasons I've never understood, Staff (even Senior scientists) are not elegible to apply for grants, fellowships, internships, exchange programs, etc. They're definitely an under-appreciated, neglected underclass

Viewing 70 - 72 of 5,716 Reviews

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