Two weeks before professors were set to administer final exams last month at the University of Illinois, Chicago , 1500 graduate teaching assistants went on strike to demand a wage increase. Union representatives had been at the bargaining table with the university for a year, since April 2021, trying to negotiate a new contract after their previous one expired. But the two sides hadn’t been able to reach an agreement.
Across the country, many graduate students strain to get by on wages that aren’t sufficient to meet their basic needs. “A third of our students … struggle to afford rent and 15% struggle to afford food,” Jane Petzoldt, an entomology master's student, says of her department at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, where rents have risen by more than 20% in the past year.
Some policies and stipend minimums are determined at the institution level, but pay also varies within universities, with some departments paying more than others. In Florida, Gaynor has tried to jump-start conversations about graduate student salaries within her department by crowdsourcing stipend data. She put out a request on Twitter, asking biology researchers elsewhere in the country to send her information about the minimum guaranteed stipend for graduate students in their department.
Calls for raises in Canada are also growing. On 12 May, hundreds of researchers and scientific societiesto Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, asking for funding to increase the award amounts for graduate scholarships offered by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada. “They have not had a raise in nearly 20 years,” says Marc Johnson, a biology professor at the University of Toronto, Mississauga, who organized the campaign to send the letter.
Yet we keep voting for the same people.
ScienceCareers Have the schools pay for it… Many reap the benefit of the research…
ScienceCareers Yeah, RA stipends are a complete joke. It was impossible to live on the the -20ish k stipend when I was graduate student. It was absurd that they did not at least pay 40k--it should be closer 60k. The sad thing is that it's a pay cap imposed by Universities.
choongani ScienceCareers Academia is a fascist power system Pass it on
ScienceCareers This should be checked in India, we get paid around $402/month.
ScienceCareers you are the value that you create. just because you have a degree does not justify you should earn more.
ScienceCareers I wish I had never been in graduate school, rather should have learnt how to actually turn an idea into real existence to actually negate the pain or inconvenience and sell it with rewards like those in American Show ‘Shark Tank’.
ScienceCareers Instead, many graduate projects esp in medicine working on some concepts just creating more and more pain and fear for more and more people, and at the end besides publishing some papers and funding from taxpayers, most of them haven’t created anything useful!
ScienceCareers No. Learn marketable skills. Your PHD in angry, lesbian basket weaving doesnt help in society