The Stipend Gap

With the disparity in graduate-student pay, some recipients are mired in debt while others own homes

Survey data: Information from 83 leading research universities on the stipends and benefits they provide to teaching and research assistants in six representative departments in 2003-4.

Overview: The average stipends for selected fields, 2003-4

Chart: Comparing graduate student stipends in three fields

Chart: The proportions of colleges that provide health insurance

Chart: Average stipends for teaching assistants in EnglishBy SCOTT SMALLWOOD

Alik Widge and Christopher Reese are two of the rare students who have managed to buy a home while in graduate school. The similarities end there.

Mr. Widge, who lives in his own condominium in Pittsburgh while studying robotics at Carnegie Mellon University, has a prestigious fellowship from the U.S. Defense Department that pays him $29,000 a year. He admits it’s a comfortable living for a student.

Mr. Reese studies 18th-century British literature at the University of Kentucky. He uses part of his $11,000-a-year teaching-assistant stipend to pay the mortgage on his townhouse. His parents gave him the money for the down payment. Each semester of his seven-year graduate-school odyssey, his student-loan debt mounts higher.

That kind of disparity can be found in graduate programs everywhere. Mechanical-engineering students get better stipends than psychology students who get better stipends than art-history students. Public universities often struggle to keep up with the generous support offered by elite private institutions. And institutions in expensive cities generally offer better stipends than those in the rural South.

All of that means that the bank-account balances of graduate students are just as varied as their programs. This year The Chronicle surveyed the largest research universities in the United States about the stipends they gave teaching and research assistants in 2003-4. Certainly, no one is getting rich in grad school. But the responses -- from more than 80 institutions -- demonstrate that some are getting less poor than others.

In the survey, history departments reported an average teaching-assistant stipend of about $11,200 for the academic year. Biology departments, where most of the appointments are for a full year, reported an average of more than $19,000 for research assistants.

So forgive the English student at the University of Memphis with an $8,500 stipend for thinking that the economics student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, with his $29,000 stipend, is living in the lap of luxury.

Making fair comparisons among stipends is difficult because every institution handles the issue differently. The Chronicle survey, which attempts to capture a snapshot of current stipend levels, reflects that, and it includes some lengthy comments from universities explaining how their system works. (The Chronicle conducted a similar survey three years ago, but it covered a smaller group of universities and asked slightly different questions.)

As graduate students survey the scene, they wonder whether unions will help them, and whether they will get a much-hoped-for federal tax break on their stipends. But in the meantime, many of them are just trying to pay the bills.

Mr. Reese’s air-conditioner just broke. It’s the kind of unexpected expense that knocks him back. Luckily, his parents are paying to repair it. Despite their help, he has taken out $10,000 to $12,000 in student loans each year. He tries not to contemplate the growing bill.

“Let’s see, I’ve been in graduate school for seven years,” he says when asked what his total debt is. “I don’t want to do the math.”

On the Rise

Not everyone has it so hard. Graduate students fortunate to work at certain elite universities or to win a federal research fellowship have seen big increases in recent years. The increases have only widened the gaps between them and students at other institutions.

At Columbia University, for instance, the basic stipend is now more than $17,000 -- an increase of 31 percent over the past four years. In 2000, stipends at the University of Pennsylvania were $12,000, but since then they have easily outpaced inflation, rising 31 percent to $15,750.

And Amy Gutmann, Penn’s new president, recently announced that those stipends would rise another 11 percent next year, to $17,500. “It was clear to me that the biggest difference I could make was to increase the support for graduate students,” she says. “We don’t have a lot of graduate students, and we want them to be the best. It’s an important part of recruiting faculty.”

At Penn, full-time Ph.D. students get four or five years of guaranteed support. “Everybody needs to be able to support himself or herself,” says Ms. Gutmann, a political scientist who benefited from full scholarships for both her undergraduate and graduate studies.

“I had no money,” she says. “I would have been waiting tables without that support. My father was dead, and the last thing I was going to do was have my mother pay for me to be in graduate school.”

But even those healthy increases pale compared with the recent meteoric rise in the stipend for winners of the National Science Foundation’s graduate research fellowships. Back in 2000, NSF stipends were $16,200 -- more than those at Columbia or Penn, but not that much more.

In the last four years, that has changed. For this year, the NSF stipends are $30,000, making them substantially more than those at even the most elite universities. At the same time, those fellowships have become even harder to get.

More than 9,000 people now apply, almost double the number that sought the fellowships five years ago. The NSF awarded slightly more than 1,000 of the fellowships this year.

Mr. Widge, at Carnegie Mellon, also has a prestigious federal fellowship, though his is from the Pentagon. As the legislative-concerns chairman for the National Association of Graduate-Professional Students, Mr. Widge has a sense of the plight of students around the country. So he knows he is one of the fortunate ones. And he is in good company in his corner of the university.

“You can’t throw a rock without hitting someone in my department with a fellowship,” he says. Two of his friends have National Science Foundation fellowships. Two more have prestigious fellowships from private foundations.

“Unfortunately,” Mr. Widge says, “it is another rich-gets-richer phenomenon. The big schools have the infrastructure and the name to get those types of fellowships.”

‘Poverty Level’

The news for teaching assistants in the humanities has not been as good. Stipends for teaching assistants in English also rose about 30 percent in recent years, according to the few national surveys that have been done on the issue. But a 30-percent raise when you are earning peanuts still may not amount to much more than peanuts.

The average TA stipend in English in 1999 was $8,775, according to a survey of graduate-student stipends by the University of Nebraska at Lincoln. By the 2002-3 academic year, the stipend had risen to $11,355, according to a survey conducted by the State University of New York at Binghamton.

That’s progress, says Susan K. Repine, assistant dean of the graduate school at Binghamton and director of the survey. But even $11,000 “is close to poverty level,” she says. (The 2004 federal poverty level is $9,310 for one person.)

In the Chronicle survey, English department stipends are among the lowest. For instance, the University of Southern Mississippi reported stipends for teaching assistants of just $8,000 for the academic year. The stipends at Binghamton weren’t much better, just $8,474. And while living in Binghamton is much cheaper than in some cities, those low stipends are a problem, Ms. Repine says.

“We are struggling to get the kind of students we need,” she says. “Faculty complain that we can’t bring in the students we want. They’re losing people to larger stipends.”

Even the students in the social sciences with low stipends feel more optimistic than their counterparts in the humanities. Earl Davis gets just $4,000 a semester for working as a teaching assistant in the economics department at Clemson University. He pays $345 for a one-bedroom apartment and keeps taking out student loans -- they now total more than $50,000.

But he is confident that his economics degree will be more marketable than some others. “It’s not like an architectural-history degree, where you are doomed to teaching in high school,” he says.

Unions’ Effects

In the labor movement, the central question about stipends for many people is, Do unionized teaching assistants get higher stipends? The answer is not simple. The elite universities, where students get the best stipends, generally do not have unions. Some of the large public universities that have unions offer only modest stipends. The University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and the University of Wisconsin at Madison have the oldest TA unions in the country, but the English-department teaching assistants there don’t have particularly sweet deals. In Ann Arbor they get $13,570, while in Madison their stipend is $11,264, according to the Chronicle survey.

But for some graduate students the union at Temple University has made a big difference.

When he arrived at Temple five years ago as a Ph.D. student in educational leadership and policy studies, Joseph Soler’s stipend was $11,000. Some of his friends made just $9,000. He counted his pennies, he says, living in a small apartment with a run-down kitchen for $450 a month.

He knows what it’s like to live in Philadelphia on $9,000, which is what he made working for AmeriCorps before starting graduate school. Then he lived in a “tiny, scuzzy apartment” and subsisted on coffee and bread.

In 2001 Temple’s graduate assistants formed a union, and the two sides negotiated their first contract in 2002. Mr. Soler, who is co-president of the union, now gets $13,400 along with other students in the social sciences. His counterparts in the humanities get a little less, while those in the hard sciences get a touch more.

“I’m definitely better off now,” he says. He now takes the train in each morning from his $600-a-month apartment in Northeast Philadelphia. And he does not have to share his apartment to save money. “I would rather not eat and have the privacy,” he says.

The Effect of Unions

But the question remains: Would Mr. Soler’s stipend have risen anyway without the union? Temple’s stipends are now comparable with those at other Pennsylvania institutions, including Lehigh University and the University of Pittsburgh. Across town, at Penn, graduate students have fought unsuccessfully for a union. The National Labor Relations Board dealt a serious blow to the efforts there this summer, ruling that graduate students at private institutions were not covered by federal labor law.

Yet, despite the lack of a union, Penn students get much nicer stipends than those at Temple. The irony is not lost on Temple’s Mr. Soler. “That’s the difference between a public and private,” he says. “We have a union and representation, and they still pay them $4,000 more.”

Union leaders at Penn and Columbia, where a similar ruling from the NLRB has stalled a unionization attempt, say the labor movement, even if it has not led to negotiated contracts, has forced the universities to treat graduate students better.

But administrators at both universities contend that their increases in graduate-student support are not the result of union pressure. Instead, they say, they are simply trying to stay competitive with their peers in attracting the best students.

Ms. Gutmann, Penn’s president, says that the union “had nothing to do with” her decision to increase the stipends. “I would have done this under any circumstances, given what the facts were on the ground,” she says.

Paying the Tax Man

While graduate students and universities debate whether unionization makes sense, they agree on another federal policy change that would put extra money in graduate students’ pockets -- a new law that would exempt their stipends from federal income taxes.

Before 1986, such stipends were tax exempt. And money that students get for tuition and fees remains exempt. But the National Association of Graduate-Professional Students is lobbying hard for a bill that would treat room and board as a “qualified educational expense.”

In essence, says Mr. Widge, the group’s legislative-concerns chairman, that would mean most students would not have to pay taxes on their stipends. And that would save most students $1,000 to $2,000 a year, he says.

U.S. Rep. Phil English, a Pennsylvania Republican, introduced the bill last year, and Mr. Widge is hoping to keep pushing for it next year. The idea is supported by the Council of Graduate Schools, the Association of American Universities, and the American Council on Education.

Mr. Widge knows that his stipend is generous enough that even under the bill he would probably pay some taxes. “That’s OK,” he says. “I have no problem with people in my comfortable situation paying taxes.”

And he knows that plenty of students do get by on their much smaller stipends. “If you gave me $13,000 and said I had to live in Pittsburgh, I could do it,” he says, although he knows he might have to take a part-time job to get by. “I would be doing a lot of things that would make me focus less on my studies, and it would probably take me longer to finish.”

Luckily, with a $29,000 fellowship, he doesn’t have to.

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GRADUATE-STUDENT STIPENDS

Below are the highest and lowest stipends in three fields for the 83 institutions that participated in a Chronicle survey.

		Highest
		Lowest

English Teaching Assistants (academic-year appointments)
Columbia U.	$17,044
Harvard U.	$16,892
U. of Southern California	$16,694
U. of Southern Mississippi	$8,000
U. of Memphis	$8,463
State U. of New York at Binghamton	$8,474
Economics Teaching Assistants (academic-year appointments)
Massachusetts Institute of Technology	$29,000
Clemson U.	$18,847
U. of California at Irvine	$18,231
U. of Virginia	$7,250
State U. of New York at Binghamton	$8,698
U. of Alabama at Tuscaloosa	$9,113
Biology Research Assistants (full-year appointments)
Columbia U.	$25,000
Brandeis U.	$23,500
Four tied*	$22,000
U. of Maine	$13,114
Saint Louis U.	$14,100
U. of Louisville	$15,000
*Rice U., State U. of New York at Stony Brook, U. of Utah, and Washington U. in St. Louis SOURCE: Chronicle survey

HEALTH INSURANCE

Most of the colleges that responded to a Chronicle survey said they provided health insurance for graduate assistants, while a much smaller percentage reported that they also offered benefits for the graduate assistants’ spouses and children.

Offered to graduate assistants only:	56%
Offered to graduate assistants and dependents:	21%
No insurance provided:		23%
SOURCE: Chronicle survey

http://chronicle.com Section: The Faculty Volume 51, Issue 8, Page A8