PhD students have decried miserly wages for decades. Now, amid rising cost of living, the problem is taking on new urgency. ScienceCareers
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.
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