Grad-Student Organizing Is Gaining Steam
More graduate students are organizing to push for better wages and benefits — and it’s working.
In 2022, some colleges agreed to big pay raises in contract negotiations with graduate-student unions. At other colleges, graduate students took steps to unionize. Elsewhere, colleges voluntarily raised salaries or awarded one-time stipends. Campus leaders often cited the need to stay competitive with peer institutions in the market for top graduate students.
For more analyses that will help you anticipate and respond to key developments in higher education, read on.
A decisive moment came in November 2022, when 48,000 graduate-student workers, postdocs, and researchers across the University of California system went on strike for six weeks; it was the largest strike in American higher-education history. With teaching assistants on the picket lines, professors and undergraduates struggled with final exams and grades; graduate students pointed to the chaos as evidence of their crucial role.
The strike ended in late December, after University of California officials agreed to double-digit pay increases; teaching assistants will soon receive a minimum salary of $34,000 for nine months of part-time work, up from about $23,000. Postdocs ended their strike in early December and will soon be paid a minimum of $70,000 for 12 months of full-time work, up from about $55,000.
In late 2022 and early 2023, graduate students at Boston, Northwestern, and Yale Universities voted to unionize. The University of Pennsylvania announced that the minimum stipend for graduate students would be raised to $38,000 from $30,000, the largest single increase in the university’s history. Duke and Stanford Universities offered their graduate students one-time payouts of $1,000 each.
Unionization efforts are up across industries, but higher-ed employees are organizing at even greater rates, experts say. In the past 10 years, there has been a 50-percent increase in the unionization of graduate assistants and research assistants, according to the National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions at Hunter College of the City University of New York.
For decades, spending six to 10 years as a struggling graduate student, living paycheck to paycheck, was a rite of passage en route to a Ph.D. and a probable tenure-track job. Many graduate students say they’re not willing to sign up for that deal anymore, in part because the promise of a well-paid faculty position no longer exists.
Graduate students’ successful organizing efforts are putting financial pressure on doctoral institutions, which have long balanced budgets by tapping graduate students to teach classes.
At the start of 2023, University of California officials estimated that the salary increases for grad students and postdocs would cost $500 million to $570 million over the life of the contracts; UC-Berkeley’s chief financial officer described it as a “financial shock.” Officials said they’d have to consider reducing graduate enrollment and making other cutbacks. The university also announced plans to recoup any money that was erroneously paid out to graduate workers while they were on strike, as well as from faculty members who withheld their labor in solidarity.
With graduate students across the country already seizing on the momentum of union victories in California, campus leaders elsewhere could soon find themselves in the same pinch. —SARAH BROWN
Colleges Betting on Master’s Programs May Be Disappointed
The University of Texas at Austin plans to offer an online master’s degree in artificial intelligence. A new master’s degree in speech pathology is underway at Penn State’s Harrisburg campus. And Georgian Court University, in New Jersey, will welcome its first cohort this fall of master’s-degree students in social work.
Announcements of new master’s-degree offerings illustrate a long-running trend of proliferating master’s programs and are fueled by colleges looking to offset revenue lost by falling undergraduate enrollments. But in the years ahead, some institutions will find recruiting master’s students to be challenging work.
Megan Adams, a managing director at EAB, a higher-ed consulting company, says that colleges that ignore the dominant players in the master’s program they want to start are doing so at their own risk.
“You don’t want to be in a highly concentrated market if you’re a brand-new competitor,” Adams says. Another factor to consider is that some of the large players that offer online master’s degrees are “resourced in a way that many smaller players are not.”
Those resources can give them the edge at a time when graduate enrollment — a bright spot in the early years of the pandemic — has declined. And while master’s-degree programs have grown rapidly over the last decade or so, federal projections of the number of master’s degrees earned annually aren’t as rosy.
In 2014, the estimated number of master’s degrees conferred for the current academic year was just over one million. Seven years later, the estimate for the 2022-23 academic year had been adjusted to 935,000.
Still, college leaders are committed to making master’s programs work. In a recent survey, EAB found that 100 percent of university presidents and provosts said graduate (and adult-learner) enrollment was a high or moderate priority.
Says Adams: “I have yet to meet a president or provost who does not have graduate enrollment as a top priority.” —AUDREY WILLIAMS JUNE
More Politicians Are Likely to Become College Presidents
Benjamin E. Sasse, a former Republican U.S. senator from Nebraska, left Congress in January for a new office: president of the University of Florida. Sasse’s appointment to that post, which he assumed last week, sparked outrage from those who oppose his conservative social positions, question his qualifications to lead a major research university, and object to the search process that resulted in his being the sole finalist for the job.
But it’s not surprising to see a well-known politician take the helm of a university at a time when higher education has been thrust to the front line in the culture wars. That’s especially true in Florida, where Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, has pushed an agenda that seeks to combat what he sees as the progressive excesses of the ivory tower.
Sasse is just the latest in a steady trickle of elected politicians to become the chief administrator of a college campus or system office over the past 30 years.
Boards have turned to politicians for a variety of reasons — to push reforms that leaders with more-traditional experience would be unlikely to pursue, or to ease tensions with discontented state lawmakers. The role can also be one well suited to a veteran of political campaigns, particularly if that person is good at raising money and enjoys everyday interactions with people.
That trend is likely to continue and even accelerate in the near term, especially as a growing number of governing boards have become more politicized, and conservatives have become increasingly dissatisfied with higher education. A 2021 poll by the Pew Research Center found that 61 percent of Republicans thought higher education had a negative effect on the country.
But a successful career in politics is no guarantee of success as a college president. In January 2018, Michigan State University’s trustees appointed a popular former governor, the Republican John Engler, to guide the institution after revelations that a former university sports doctor had sexually abused scores of women and girls under the guise of medical treatment. Just a year later, the board forced Engler out after his remarks impugned the motives of the survivors.
If Sasse is looking for examples of success, he might turn to that of Mitch Daniels, the former Republican governor of Indiana, who retired last year as president of Purdue University after a decade in that position. Daniels was widely lauded by conservatives for freezing tuition and adopting a free-speech policy that made conservative students more comfortable on campus. Daniels was also very popular with undergraduates, spending time with them in the dining halls, the recreation center, and even the student section at football games.
Daniels eschewed partisan politics as a university president — Sasse has pledged to do that as well — but maintained his popularity, despite harsh critiques from both faculty members and graduate students. Daniels said he had been in touch with Sasse and told him, in dealing with critics, “not to confuse noise with numbers.” —ERIC KELDERMAN
The NCAA Looks to Congress
Many of the hallmarks of college sports today — gleaming practice facilities, gargantuan coaches’ salaries, persistent accusations of injustice — are all the result of a single legal mechanism: colleges’ ability to limit what their athletes can earn for their labor. The membership organization that presides over college sports, the National Collegiate Athletic Association, has for decades defended that ability against charges that its proclaimed adherence to “amateurism” was just a smokescreen to justify shutting athletes out of its hand-over-first revenue collection.
But that defense is wearing thin. Courts have begun rejecting NCAA defenses, and the association was forced to allow athletes to earn money from their names, images, and likenesses (known as NIL) after a tidal wave of state laws began breaking over the nation in 2019. More lawsuits aiming to further loosen prohibitions on athlete pay are making their way through the legal system, and if recent history is any guide, they have a good chance of success.
Faced with those problems and more, the association is looking to one place for deliverance: Washington, D.C. NCAA officials say only Congress has the ability to cure what ails it. The organization’s recent choice of a politician — Charlie Baker, the former governor of Massachusetts — as its next president confirmed its singular focus on a legislative fix. In introducing Baker, Linda A. Livingstone, president of Baylor University and chair of the NCAA Board of Governors, pointed to the need “to engage and motivate Congress, to enact legislation that helps us modernize our framework for regulation of college athletics and the support we provide our student-athletes.”
What would that legislation look like? Livingstone has suggested the association will be seeking three things: protection from antitrust lawsuits, classification of athletes as nonemployees, and standardization of NIL rules.
The rationale for the first two goals is easy to see. The NCAA has been a magnet for antitrust litigation, and the National Labor Relations Board is considering the notion that athletes should be classified as employees under federal labor law. Both present threats to the status quo, and both could be neutralized by Congress, through an antitrust exemption and legislation that classifies college athletes as something other than employees.
The third objective would probably be the easiest for the association’s critics to swallow. The national NIL landscape is a mess. More than two dozen states have their own laws regulating how athletes can make money off their brands; having that many overlapping rules in a nationwide system creates a lot of headaches. Federal legislation could reduce the chaos.
Is the NCAA’s lobbying effort likely to succeed? Nope! Congress is divided, facing a possible shutdown, and the association is deeply unpopular. But administrators will be pounding the pavement on Capitol Hill in hopes they can set the future course of college athletics — before the courts do it for them. —ANDY THOMASON
The New Colorblindness
Powerful critics are on the attack: In recent months, conservatives have taken aim at the infrastructure built to promote and support diversity, equity, and inclusion, arguing that it is an attempt to indoctrinate students, a waste of tax dollars, and, in some cases, illegal.
Current legislative efforts expand on campaigns in numerous states to ban the teaching of concepts such as critical race theory. If successful, entire administrative units could be forced to close their doors. And beyond legislation, critics of DEI are using other means to, as one put it, “gum up the works.”
In January, the Manhattan and Goldwater Institutes, both conservative think tanks, unveiled model state legislation targeting public colleges. The legislation would prevent them from employing diversity, equity, and inclusion officers; end mandatory diversity training; prohibit colleges from requiring diversity statements; and ban preferences for admission or employment based on characteristics such as race or sex.
Calling DEI offices “the nerve center of woke ideology on university campuses,” the authors of the legislation write that “DEI officers form a kind of revolutionary vanguard on campuses; their livelihood can only be justified by discovering — i.e., manufacturing — new inequities to be remedied.”
In Texas a bill introduced in December would prohibit the funding, promotion, sponsorship, or support of offices that support the goals of diversity, equity, and inclusion. It would require public colleges to “demonstrate a commitment to intellectual freedom and viewpoint diversity” and would prohibit “the endorsement or dissuasion of, or interference with, any lifestyle, race, sex, religion, or culture.”
Florida is perhaps leading the way among conservative states in the battle. There, Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican and possible presidential candidate in 2024, has attacked with gusto what he views as higher education’s “woke” bias, with diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts frequently falling in the cross hairs.
In December, DeSantis asked the state’s public colleges and universities for an accounting of their spending on diversity, equity, inclusion, and critical race theory. The colleges reported that spending on a wide variety of efforts, including activities to increase the diversity of faculty or students, totaled less than 1 percent of their budgets. DeSantis did not explain how the information would be used, but when he introduced a broad higher-ed reform bill, in January, he made this promise: “We are also going to eliminate all DEI and CRT bureaucracies in the state of Florida. No funding, and that will wither on the vine.”
Not long after his accounting request, the presidents of 28 state and community colleges issued a statement saying they would eliminate any academic requirement or program “that compels belief in critical race theory or related concepts such as intersectionality.”
Last year DeSantis also signed into law the so-called Stop WOKE Act, which limits what professors at public colleges can teach about sex, race, and racism. The law has been temporarily blocked by a federal judge.
Oklahoma has followed Florida’s lead in requesting a breakdown of diversity spending at public colleges. The state’s superintendent of public instruction asked for details on “every dollar” spent on DEI over the past 10 years by the state’s 25 public colleges. Oklahoma has also prohibited public colleges from requiring their students, faculty, and staff to undergo diversity training that “presents any form of race or sex stereotyping or a bias on the basis of race or sex.”
The Board of Governors of the University of North Carolina system is considering a policy that could effectively ban the use of diversity statements, which discuss a job applicant’s commitments to and experiences with diverse student populations. While increasingly common in higher education, diversity statements are controversial. Supporters say they help to signal and advance colleges’ commitments to diversity, while critics argue they could be used as a political litmus test and thus threaten academic freedom.
Legislators aren’t the only ones attacking higher education’s diversity infrastructure. One faculty member, Adam Ellwanger at the University of Houston-Downtown, has urged conservative students and faculty members to file complaints with DEI offices for speech that disparages their identity characteristics, including white, Christian, and heterosexual. Mark J. Perry, a professor emeritus at the University of Michigan at Flint, has since 2016 gone after what he sees as reverse racial and gender discrimination by colleges. He has filed complaints with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights against, by his count, more than 700 colleges. Campus DEI offices and the federal Office for Civil Rights are required to take such complaints seriously.
Advocates of diversity efforts say they are girding for a long-term battle. “DEI initiatives are not the product of a ‘woke’ ideology” but, rather, “critical to our students’ success,” the faculty senate at Florida Atlantic University wrote in a resolution adopted in January. It urged Floridians to insist that elected officials “ensure our higher-educational endeavors can continue to evolve absent threats and bullying.” It also urged “concerned individuals everywhere to stand with us.” —ADRIENNE LU
