More than half a dozen Ph.D. students sat cross-legged in a circle on the grass here at Duke University last month, holding copies of their bank statements.
They had gathered to review their finances and to figure out how, together, they might pay for a plane ticket to Brazil for a fellow doctoral student whose dissertation is about a 19th-century writer from Rio de Janeiro.
They could cut expenses by eating out less, they said, and by shopping at Food Lion rather than Whole Foods. They discussed how they might bring in some money, too, perhaps by subletting the apartment of one group member.
In the Duke Collective, as some in the group refer to themselves, one person’s financial problem is everyone’s financial problem.
Facing common graduate-school money challenges, these literature and English students have turned to an uncommon solution: They have decided to pool their money, putting it into one bank account, from which each member can freely withdraw funds as needed.
Doctoral students at Duke and at universities across the country face difficulties in financing their degrees. Wide disparities exist in stipends of graduate students among institutions, within disciplines, and even within the same department.
Summer financial support also varies and is often challenging to secure, especially for humanities and social-sciences students who don’t have as much access to federal grants as their peers in other disciplines do. Students who don’t have a fellowship or a teaching or research job lined up have to cobble together off-campus work often unrelated to their research to get through the summer. It’s one reason that humanities doctorates take as long as they do to complete: a median of nine years, data show.
Ph.D. students face particular challenges in the latter years of their degree programs, because many universities provide more teaching and research assistantships and other financial support toward the beginning, partly to encourage students to finish programs more quickly.
To lessen disparities and help their peers who are struggling, the students at Duke are placing their hope in collective financing.
In addition to stipends, group members put outside employment checks, tax refunds, money from parents, and other income into the collective account. There are no rules, they say, and each person puts in as much as he or she wants. Some put in more than others.
‘A Better Way to Live’
Members of the Duke Collective, who now number nine, believe that security in the insecure world of Ph.D. study can be found in numbers. Money for dates, rent, bills, travel, and groceries comes from the communal account. So do funds to assist with unexpected expenses, like the $3,000 that helped one member replace a car that an insurance payout wasn’t quite enough to cover.
“It’s a better way to live your life,” says Karim Wissa, a Ph.D. student in literature and the owner of the 2011 Hyundai Elantra that was paid for in part by the collective account. The car, he says, is for everyone’s use.
The students say they know that pooling stipends doesn’t magically create more money.
Humanities and social-sciences Ph.D. students at Duke receive stipends of about $21,500 excluding summer funds, an amount the students say is relatively generous compared with other universities. Students who receive summer money because they got fellowships have total annual stipends of about $27,000.
Even so, some graduate students receive enough money to live comfortably, members of the collective say, while others don’t. And students who may be comfortable one year are financially stressed the next. Combining pay, they say, provides a financial buffer and allows them to focus on studying and research.
One member of the collective, for example, did not receive fellowship funds during her dissertation year. Because of help from the group account, she can focus on her dissertation without seeking employment, allowing her to finish her Ph.D. faster. And Damien Marassa, the student who wanted to go to Brazil to finish writing his dissertation, is in Rio de Janeiro for the summer.
Mr. Wissa was one of the three people who started the collective two years ago. He was racked with stress over how he’d pay for his Ph.D., he said. It got so bad that he often considered dropping out.
Now, although money remains a worry, it is spread among the group. The students say they have created a social-support system in an academic environment that is otherwise isolating and a breeding ground for depression. Now their fellow Ph.D. students are their teammates rather than their competitors.
The collective, says Adra Raine, who is a member, is “a new paradigm.”
Ms. Raine, who is in the fourth year of an English Ph.D. program, is the group’s only student from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a 15-minute drive away. The collective is open to anyone who wants to join, Mr. Wissa says.
Ms. Raine’s stipend, at $15,200 a year, is less than that of her Duke counterparts, she says.
“You’re so poor,” Mr. Wissa jokes.
“It’s not just my money anymore,” she retorts.
There is an easygoing banter among members of the group. They greet one another with hugs.
“There’s a sense of family here,” Mr. Marassa says.
The students’ actual families, though, aren’t always excited about their participation in collective financing.
Mr. Wissa’s mother, for one, had “extreme resistance” to the idea, he says. “When she’d give me money, she’d say, ‘This money is for you. Not the collective.’ "
But, he adds, “she’s come to know this thing is very important to me. She now knows that whatever money she gives me is also going to a bunch of people she’s never met.”
Duke Makes Changes
Duke recently responded to some of the concerns that sparked the collective’s creation.
Officials say the changes were not in response to the group but the result of talks that the graduate school has been having for years about how to better support graduate students.
Starting this summer, the school is guaranteeing full stipend support, including for the summer, to all Ph.D. students in their first and second years. The goal is to provide full funding for all years, says John Zhu, a spokesman for the graduate school.
The literature program that Mr. Wissa and other group members are part of went further. It is guaranteeing five years of full funding, Mr. Zhu says.
In April the university announced that $5-million of a $7.5-million gift from the Duke Endowment, a charitable foundation in Charlotte, N.C., would be set aside to create an endowment for graduate fellows. The money is especially helpful for graduate students in traditionally underfunded disciplines like the humanities and social sciences.
Mr. Wissa says concerns remain about summer funds for students after their second years and during the latter years of their Ph.D. studies.
Before they started pooling their money, Mr. Wissa says, they tried to start a wage-sharing plan among all graduate students in the literature program. It got no traction, mostly because students had an aversion to the idea, but also, he says, because their initial arguments were polemical.
Ben Shellhorn, who is president of Duke’s Graduate & Professional Student Council and is not a member of the collective, says the students’ experiment has “drawn a lot of attention here to how humanities Ph.D. students are funded.”
Some of what the group is doing “seems really noble,” he says, but sharing a bank account, to his mind, “is pretty insane.”
“For professional students like myself and most other students who would be averse to participating in this academic socialism, I think it’s ultimately a matter of trust and control,” Mr. Shellhorn says. “I’d probably have an inherent distrust of what I would see as my money being spent by other people.”
‘No One Goes Hungry’
Sharing is a way of life for members of the collective. When they go out to eat, they often order plates of food—onion rings, fries, veggie quesadillas—that are easy to pass around. Food that is not as easy to divvy up—a hamburger, for example—is cut into pieces and scooted along a table at an Irish pub downtown.
When the check comes, there is none of the awkwardness that often accompanies cash-strapped student dining. No disputes over who would pay. No splitting hairs over who ate what.
“When we go out, everyone eats,” Ms. Raine says. “No one goes hungry because they don’t have money.”
So far, collectivizing their funds hasn’t caused major changes in their daily lives, the students say. The changes, like no longer dividing up a restaurant check, have been subtle.
Over all, though, there is less stress. It’s less important who receives a grant or fellowship and who doesn’t, since the money goes into the same account.
But is there a danger inherent in the collective model? Could it make one lazier if one’s financial successes and failures are spread among a group?
No, the students say, they don’t see it that way.
“Knowing that other people are counting on me and depending on me makes me want to work harder,” Mr. Wissa says.
“Slam!” Mr. Marassa says in solidarity.
A group member asks if anyone wants another round of beers—on the collective account, of course. Even the cigarettes that most of the members smoke are paid for through the collective’s account.
“The cancer treatment, too,” Mr. Marassa says.
The remark, made in jest, touches on the pitfalls of this experiment. The students say they haven’t thought through what would happen if a group member did end up incurring major medical costs. Or what they would do if a member were successfully sued, or if it turned out that they had let someone into the group who had nefarious motives.
“This is still a work in progress, and we haven’t encountered any of those things yet,” Mr. Wissa says. “We’re cognizant that this thing isn’t foolproof. Someone could join, take out all the money, and run.
“It’s a risk,” he says. “But for us, it’s a risk worth taking.”
