Turmoil is fast becoming a steady state for American higher education. Student protests over the Israel-Hamas war demand our attention, but while we’re dealing with those convulsions, we shouldn’t underestimate another heavy wave that’s breaking on college campuses: graduate-student unionization.
Graduate students have been forming labor unions since the late 1960s, but it was a niche practice until the 2000s. Since then, the union movement has ebbed and flowed, depending on which political party controlled the presidency — and with it, the right to appoint members of the National Labor Relations Board. Democratic appointees tended to approve unionization bids by graduate students, while Republican members of the NLRB typically opposed those efforts.
Then in 2016, the NLRB decreed that graduate students were employees who were entitled to the protection of the National Labor Relations Act. That ruling remained in place during the Trump administration and now looks secure. Union organizing by graduate students ramped up in the ruling’s wake, and unions have exploded in size and number, even in the anti-union South. The economic pressures of the pandemic further catalyzed the movement, as did the election of Joe Biden, who has proved the most pro-union president since Franklin Roosevelt.
All of this led to a watershed moment in December 2022, when the University of California system agreed to terms with graduate students after a six-week strike that was the largest in American higher-ed history. (Some UC campuses had graduate-student unions before that point, but during the strike negotiations, the United Auto Workers represented students at all of the system’s research universities under one umbrella. It’s common for graduate students to affiliate with an established labor union, and the UAW is a popular option.) The UC contract, which runs through May 2025, gradually raises the wages of about 48,000 graduate students, postdocs, and researchers by more than 45 percent.
Because of its size and visibility, the California agreement has already been enormously influential. Across academe, campus administrators are, understandably, reluctant to speak publicly about it (and about student unionization generally), but I reached out to deans (in person and by telephone) who were willing to talk without their names attached.
The consensus: The California contract is, as a graduate dean from a Southwestern university put it, “a bellwether for where we’re headed.”
At the heart of the graduate-student unionization movement lies the assertion that graduate students are employees, not apprentices. It wasn’t always that way. Graduate school was once built on a simple bargain between doctoral programs and their students: Follow the rules and conventions of our discipline, and we’ll prepare you for a faculty career. In effect, the master said to the apprentice, “Do what I tell you, and you’ll get the job that you want.” In doctoral education, that usually meant a professorship.
Today that bargain is obviously broken. There haven’t been enough tenure-track job openings for Ph.D.s for more than 50 years. But professors and students have both had a hard time facing that reality, and bitterness grew over the years as universities continued to extract teaching and research labor from graduate students at low cost — and under often-straitened conditions — without providing the promised gold at the end of the doctoral rainbow.
Impatience borne of years of waiting has fueled the campus union-organizing movement. Now, observed the Southwestern graduate dean, “Graduate students across the country are demanding fair wages, health care, and a paycheck that will allow them to pay rent, eat, and support a family.”
It’s overdue justice for graduate-student employees to receive such benefits. But they will come at a cost for doctoral programs. That cost is not only economic but also — and perhaps more importantly — structural. Graduate-student unions are already altering the landscape of doctoral education (and higher ed generally). And the changes are only beginning.
Changing the landscape how? Let’s look at a few major areas.
Program size will shrink. Doctoral students will cost more, so there will be fewer of them. A graduate dean at a Midwestern university that is negotiating its first union contract worries that its cost “will lead to the shuttering of our small graduate programs.” She’s particularly worried that some humanities fields “will shrink below sustainability.”
The overall graduate-student population at her university will get smaller, she predicts. “Unless we get ahead of this,” she said, the change “won’t be as intentional or thoughtful as it should be. I worry about it happening in a hatchet way.”
In fact, that Midwestern university has already reduced its student-recruiting targets in anticipation of the union contract’s cost, so the dean’s fear is beginning to come true. In California, it already has come true — for now. Most of the universities in the California system “pulled back on graduate admissions for this year,” a UC dean told me, in anticipation of having to deal with problems arising from the union contract. As for next year, he said, “Who knows?”
Nor are the humanities solely at risk. Graduate study in the sciences faces looming economic threats, too. “Doctoral students are costly” in STEM fields, said the Southwestern dean. “This is our pain point.” But professors in those fields demand that doctoral admissions remain at a certain level “because this is the currency of research.” As part of their start-up packages, new faculty hires in STEM already negotiate for graduate students to work in their labs, the Southwestern dean said, and added: “The cost of graduate students could drive grad science out of business at smaller institutions.”
In this new and challenging terrain, it can be more economical for a professor to hire a postdoctoral lab worker than a graduate student, said the UC dean. “If the lab director is more interested in the scientific results,” he said, “then there’s more value there.” Because postdocs are not students, you don’t have to teach them as much. “Unionization,” he said, “throws the funding side of science into full view.”
The question of cohort size (that is, how many graduate students to admit each year) may get settled by simple economics. Instead of asking how many students we should admit as a professional and curricular matter, the new question may simply be how many we can afford.
With these changes comes the matter of equity. The Midwestern dean fears what she calls “compensation misalignment,” in which the salary of a new graduate student will exceed that of some postdocs, non-tenure-track faculty members, and professional and administrative staff members. When graduate students cost too much, she said, “you stop developing them.”
Not surprisingly, union organizers view the cost issue differently. “It’s up to the university to recognize that problem and raise the bar for everyone on campus,” said Zara Anwarzai, a graduate student in philosophy and cognitive science and the organizing coordinator of the Indiana Graduate Workers Coalition at Indiana University at Bloomington. Misalignment also gives “incentive for those other groups to organize,” she said. Another organizer at a public university in the Northeast, who did not want to be named, said it’s a matter of “creating a union culture on campus.”
The UC dean posed an even more dire scenario: What if the university decides that graduate students simply aren’t worth paying for? “Here’s the neoliberal piece of this,” said the UC dean. “If graduate students are laborers, then what’s the return on my investment?” What if, he asked, it becomes clear that it’s more financially sound for a university to replace some graduate students with AI? “Will the higher cost of grad-student labor expose an oversupply?”
“Go too far down this road,” the UC dean continued, and we can easily lose sight of the fact that graduate students are students first. “The result of this contract will be to open questions not only about the funding of graduate study but also the nature of graduate study.” That’s pretty fundamental stuff.
The union view is likewise fundamental. “The idea is to elevate everyone,” said the graduate-student organizer from the Northeast. “We produce more when we’re well-fed.” Graduate students are extremely productive for universities, said Anwarzai. “They’re putting out research with the university’s name on it, promoting it domestically and internationally. They’re doing the lab research and writing the papers that get the grants.”
Graduate-student advising may become more businesslike. The UC dean’s tone also points to another fundamental issue: faculty-student relationships in the newly unionized workplace. “I hear faculty worrying that they won’t be able to have their advisees to dinner anymore,” said the Midwestern dean. They’re concerned that their connection to their students will become colder, “just transactional.” These concerns extend to the relationship between the graduate student and the institution. “Will they be happy to have gone here?” the dean wondered. Or will collective bargaining “make everything antagonistic?”
Some of those worries will surely prove unfounded. Not all labor-management relations have to be oppositional. Many universities have dealt with unionized faculty members and graduate students for years without suffering such tensions.
Union activists believe collective bargaining will make graduate advising more transparent, and thus, more productive. For example, Anwarzai said, “without a living wage,” you might need a second job to make ends meet, and “you can’t be sure you can tell your advisers” about that outside employment out of fear that they might see it as a sign that you’re not “serious” about graduate school. And if the relationship goes sour, unions can negotiate support for students while they change advisers, as the union did at the University of Michigan.
But some new tensions may arise when professors find themselves competing with a graduate-student union for the same pot of money. “We can fund graduate study at a certain level,” said the UC dean, “but that money will come out of general funds, including faculty hires.” Faculty members have generally supported graduate-student unions, but competition may “create new fissures” in previously “tight coalitions,” he said.
Certainly that’s possible, said the Northeastern student organizer. “Solidarity is hard. But we need to know what it means to support each other.” Said Anwarzai: “We’re all fighting for the same thing.”
Strikes exacerbate the potential for frustration and anger. During the extended student strike in California, the UC dean recalled that he “saw the worst of people.” His memories remain vivid. “It’s difficult to have a mob yelling at you,” he said. “‘How could they be doing this?’ I thought. ‘What are they going to do to me?’” In the end, he continued, “We ended up exhausted, battered, but with a ratified contract.” But he was “shaken at the moral level.”
Yet the UC dean remains optimistic in some important ways. “The university runs on money,” he said, “and I hope we might come out of this with more faculty understanding of university finances. This is where shared governance can really work.”
Union organizers agree with him about that. “With financial transparency,” said Anwarzai, “all parties will understand how the university works. It’s about shared governance, making the university answerable to the different groups who make it run.”
Such cooperation will be of the essence, for we are dealing with a transformative force. It’s early yet, but widespread student unionization is poised to alter graduate education as we have known it.
“My education,” the UC dean said, “is in trying to navigate these new waters. When we get past the emotions, the hostilities, the competitiveness, we need to ask: What are we going to do?”
