Vantaggi
Working as a graduate student can afford you the freedom to work on something you are passionate about and to work people who are masters of their field. The university has some interesting cultural activities like plays and concerts.
Svantaggi
The university is extremely top heavy, with administrators making huge salaries, while those who do the actual research and education work are paid as little as possible. Graduate students carry out most of the teaching burden rather than professors or permanent staff, lowering the quality of education for undergraduates. In turn, graduate students are paid well below a living wage (usually between 10k and 20k per year) to do 60+ hours/week of high-skill work. This lasts for five, six, often even seven or more years while students struggle to finish a degree amongst shifting, uncertain expectations. The university then charges five thousand dollars a year back from paychecks for "tuition and fees", even for students who aren't taking a single actual class (as of 2010 graduate students who have finished their coursework are required to take 12 hours of "dissertation research" or other make believe filler courses so that the university can charge them tuition). These fees are not made clear up front, and change frequently. Graduate assistants are also required to buy their own health insurance, the same goes for supplies such as books, work computers, special software, etc. They and often crammed in to tiny, windowless offices with a dozen other researchers, or not provided office space at all. Administrators are all extremely eager to sell of university services to to private companies who gut and mismanage them. Such as signing students up and automatically depositing their financial aid in to bank accounts where they are then gouged with predatory fees. The IT for the university (such as the web infrastructure) is insultingly bad for a public university, probably because administrators contract this work out to incompetent companies à la Obamacare. They make up for the technological dysfunction by maintaining a gigantic, ineffective bureaucracy of low level functionaries in the offices surrounding the gigantic football stadium.