The Graduate Student’s Plight
During your time at university, you’ve benefited from the work of a graduate student. Graduate students exist in a strange middle ground between student and worker; often, they work as instructors, teaching assistants, or markers for many courses. Much of the research conducted at universities is performed by graduate students with guidance from their supervisor. If you’ve read a research paper, there’s a good chance it exists mainly because of a graduate student. It’s not a stretch then to claim that academia continues to function in its current form because of the labour of graduate students.
Graduate students work a stressful and deeply personal job. Each project is different and unique to each student, and therefore it is easy to conflate the progress of your work with your self-worth. It comes as no surprise that many graduate students struggle with mental health – graduate students are approximately three times more likely to struggle with their mental health when compared to non-graduate students. This is largely due to the overwhelming pressure to “Publish or Perish” that permeates academia. Because of this, graduate students are often encouraged (either directly by supervisors or indirectly through the amount of work expected of them) to overwork themselves; many graduate students work well over 40 hours per week, and it’s not uncommon for graduate students to feel pressure to continue working through nights and weekends. This contributes heavily to a poor work-life balance that is so prevalent among graduate students that feeling guilty about taking time off has been turned into a kind of macabre joke. Though while this toxic culture is perpetuated by institutions and academia at large, at least graduate students – who are degree holding academics – can take solace that they are compensated fairly… Right?
Sadly, this couldn’t be further from the truth. Graduate students are paid wages that some describe as “financial torture”. The amount that graduate students are paid simply does not align with the work performed, and often the rate of pay is even below minimum wage (might I remind you that graduate students are required to hold bachelor’s degrees?). The inequality between the rate of pay and the work performed has lead many to believe that universities take on graduate students primarily as a source of cheap labour, cashing in on the ambitions of young academics in order to save a buck.
Photo by National Cancer Institute on Unsplash
Let’s do some math using Saint Mary’s University as an example. A student in the Master’s of Science in Applied Science (a research-based program for the natural sciences – such as biology and chemistry) can expect to receive $17,000 as a minimum amount as a stipend every year ($1,416 per month). Assuming the graduate student works (a conservative) 7 hours a day, 5 days a week, for 49 weeks, that is 1715 hours of work per year. This equals out to a pay rate of $9.9 per hour -- $3 less per hour than the provincial minimum wage of $12.95 (that’s ~23% less!).
This number gets worse when tuition and other fees (a total of $6,855 in the 2021-2022 academic year) are factored in. Without considering fees to take courses, this leaves $10,145 to cover living expenses for the year ($845 per month). This is the equivalent of earning $5.90 per hour, which is approximately the same as the minimum wage in Nova Scotia in 2002. Stipend amounts at many institutions have not kept up with inflation; the Canadian Graduate Scholarship from the Tri-Council, a competitive scholarship, has remained the same since 2004. Graduate students are getting paid relatively less, all while tuition continues to rise. Given the housing crisis in Halifax, and thus the skyrocketing rent (on average $1,125 for a studio apartment), how are graduate students expected to live?
Perhaps it’s time to effect change here at Saint Mary’s; graduate students at other institutions have created graduate student unions, and others have went on strike for a livable wage. If our supervisors and existing student unions won’t advocate for us, perhaps it is time to advocate for ourselves.