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Justice Requires the Full Story

Graduate student workers still struggle without benefits and a living wage

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In any given year, more than 3 million students in the United States are enrolled in a post-baccalaureate program, of whom 1.8 million are pursuing a graduate, master’s, or doctoral program. At many colleges and universities, graduate students aren’t just students, they’re also the workhorses driving cutting-edge research and academic scholarship. They create lectures, teach and meet with students , administer exams, and assign grades; some even create entirely new classes based on their unique fields of scholarship. Twelve percent of all graduate students —including more than two-thirds of doctoral students—teach undergraduate classes. In STEM disciplines, graduate students perform the bulk of the work that helps labs secure research grants. However, graduate students still struggle with living wages, meager benefits, and hostile or exploitative treatment that threaten their ability to access housing, food, and other basic necessities, and some may even be forced to endure to maintain their student and work status. Now, as the pandemic and increasingly environmental disasters have ratcheted up the pressures of university life, an increasing number of graduate students are turning to unions to improve their working conditions. 

Nationwide, many graduate students are paid at (or only slightly above) poverty level and on average make only $35,000 per year —barely meeting the $15 per hour rate that represents a minimum wage in most parts of the country. At this salary level, most graduate students are rent-burdened , paying significantly more than one-third of their monthly income on housing, a situation that can lead to housing instability and possible houselessness. In addition, a graduate student survey of students at the University of California found that 25% of them lack reliable and consistent access to healthy and affordable food, with rates much higher among Black, Latinx, and Indigenous graduate students. On Reddit , graduate students discuss how they might apply for food assistance programs in order to afford regular meals. 

For graduate students who’ve come to the U.S. from other countries—which in some STEM disciplines can represent 80% of all graduate students —the risks of financial instability are even more extreme. At some schools, international students may be required to pay higher tuition or healthcare costs while their visa statuses may disallow spouses from working to bring in additional income. International students also may not apply for public assistance for fear of jeopardizing their future immigration prospects. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, B. Mano— writing anonymously in The Tech —outlined how his graduate student stipend barely covers typical living costs, and leaves no room for unexpected expenses such as the medical emergency Mano faced when his daughter fell ill.

“How can students like me survive, let alone remain sane, when the current stipend covers at most a quarter of the living expenses that MIT itself has calculated?” Mano asked . “As students, we deserve better.”

A cycle of progress and setbacks

Graduate students at public universities have been unionizing since the 1970s, but were unable to do so at private universities until 2000, when a decision by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) first declared that graduate teaching assistants were statutory employees with the right to engage in collective bargaining. The Graduate Student Organizing Committee at New York University was the first formally recognized graduate student union at a private college or university to successfully negotiate a contract for its members in 2002. However, university administrators tend to oppose efforts to unionize graduate students.

Schools that rely heavily on graduate student teaching assistants are able to offer a broad array of classes for a fraction of the cost of hiring tenured or adjunct faculty. Thus, universities have vociferously opposed graduate student unionization efforts, contending that because graduate students are enrolled as degree-seeking students, they should not also be eligible for employee benefits. Persuaded by this reasoning, the George W. Bush administration reversed the NLRB’s decision in 2004, and graduate students at private schools remained unable to organize until a crucial 2016 NLRB decision involving Columbia University reestablished that right for all graduate students. Even in that case, however, Columbia University argued against collective bargaining rights for its graduate student teachers, saying that allowing them to unionize would “harm the educational process.” Several other Ivy League universities expressed support for that position in their own joint amicus brief .

Since 2016’s landmark ruling, graduate students at private universities have capitalized on their hard-won recognition as school employees, and the movement behind graduate employee labor organizing has gained momentum at many public and private colleges and universities. A study by the Hunter center at CUNY found that in 2019 more than 80,000 graduate students were members of a union, up from less than 65,000 in 2013. At public universities, where graduate students have been able to unionize for decades, the fruits of those efforts are already evident: Union-organized graduate students are better paid and report feeling more supported both personally and professionally. Unionized graduate students at public universities also report that they have seen no negative impact of their collective bargaining efforts on their teaching or research. 

International graduate students, in particular, say that unionization efforts have been crucial, and that they represent one of the only avenues for self-advocacy available to them. At Harvard University, for example, the Graduate Student Union secured in 2019 contract language guaranteeing job security for international graduate students temporarily unable to return to the United States due to visa issues, a particularly important protection after the Trump administration’s numerous efforts to restrict immigration by limiting student and employee visas. At the University of Illinois-Chicago, the graduate student union reduced extra fees charged to international graduate students . Lastly, many graduate student unions also position themselves as advocates on behalf of graduate students of color facing incidents of racism, and many seek to implement more objective grievance-redress policies to better protect graduate students who have been victims of racial discrimination.

The right to organize is only the first hurdle

No longer fearing a hostile federal government under President Donald Trump, graduate student activism in the last year has been especially vociferous—and has endured significant backlash from university administration. Students at Columbia University struggled to be formally recognized by the school until 2019, at which point school administrators and union representatives entered into contentious negotiations to improve working conditions for teaching assistants at Columbia that resulted in a strike after a year of unsuccessful bargaining. The pandemic ended up delaying the strike until picketing began on March 17, 2021. The picketing lasted for two months, with Columbia administrators deploying numerous intimidation and retaliatory tactics , including a threat to reduce graduate student pay and block financial aid while the strike was in effect. Eventually, the union’s bargaining unit returned a proposed contract that lacked several key demands and failed to receive a majority vote from union members. The union’s bargaining unit members eventually resigned and the union voted to formally end the strike without securing their first contract. Graduate students are contemplating another strike action in the fall, and some labor organizers say the university has already acted preemptively to discourage that action by altering their stipend pay schedule, which activists believe was done to make it easier to withhold graduate student wages in the event of a strike. 

While some graduate students form their own distinct unions, at other schools, most graduate students unions choose to affiliate with existing union organizations officially recognized by the school, which facilitates their own goal of being formally recognized as well. At the University of California (UC), United Auto Workers Local 2865 represents over 285,000 graduate students across the multi-campus system. However, disparities in local costs of living complicate efforts to negotiate a common graduate student salary across the University of California’s 10 campuses. In 2019, graduate students at UC Santa Cruz (UCSC) pointed out that Santa Cruz is one of the most expensive cities in the nation, and that the recently re-negotiated salary level would still mean that 50-80% of graduate student income at that campus would go to rent—far more than at other UC campuses situated in cities with a cheaper cost of living. 

Graduate students at UCSC overwhelmingly voted to reject the union contract, but did not outnumber graduate students at other campuses. UCSC graduate students then launched a wildcat strike (i.e. a strike that is not officially sanctioned by union leaders) in December 2019, refusing to turn in grades until their demands for a cost-of-living adjustment to address local affordable housing shortages were met. Graduate students across other UC campuses joined in solidarity with UCSC graduate students, who maintained their grading strike throughout the first half of 2020. The school retaliated, firing 41 graduate students for participating in the grading strike; those students’ teaching positions were only reinstated in August 2020 after sharp backlash against the university. Nonetheless, a cost-of-living adjustment has not yet been implemented for UCSC graduate students. 

Success is possible but still hard-won

Even at schools where negotiations have been historically successful, school administrators remain resistant to efforts to improve graduate employee working conditions. Graduate students at New York University are negotiating their second union contract and in April they walked out of classrooms, refusing to teach classes or grade papers until salaries were increased to living wage levels in New York City. Hoping to capitalize on the previous contract, students are being more ambitious in their demands. In addition to the salary dispute, graduate students are also negotiating to address issues that might endanger Black and brown graduate students, including efforts to reduce unnecessary calls to campus police. Graduate students also want NYU to implement emergency COVID-19 relief compensating graduate teaching assistants for transitioning to remote teaching. But the union has faced fierce resistance from school administrators, who have gone so far as to email students’ parents to criticize the negotiation efforts. The union has already dropped its initial wage proposal from $46 per hour—which was calculated based on the high cost of living in New York City—down to $32 per hour.

“They’re trying to bully us to drop our wage proposals lower and lower,” said Ellis Garey to The New York Times in April. Garey is a fourth-year Ph.D. student and a labor organizer. 

In 2019, graduate students at Harvard engaged in a month-long strike to pressure the school to increase pay, improve health care, and provide for third-party mediation in harassment and discrimination cases. That led to the ratification of their first year-long union contract. However, despite numerous negotiation sessions, the university and the union have failed to establish a second union contract, and over 500 graduate students signed onto a joint letter last month vowing to engage in a strike action should an agreement not be reached. Recently, the union voted to extend the first contract to the end of August as negotiations continue.

Across the country, labor activists continue to fight to improve working conditions for graduate students who serve an increasingly critical role as the life’s blood of our nation’s colleges and universities. Graduate student unions advocate for vulnerable graduate students—and in particular international graduate students and graduate students of color—who have little other protection from colleges and universities who wield power both over their salaries and their degrees. By emphasizing the role of graduate students as employees who contribute in fundamental ways to the functioning of colleges and universities, these unions are redefining the role of graduate student workers. They are rendering visible the historically overlooked and undervalued graduate student work that many schools rely upon in sustaining the success of their institutions. Graduate student unions are also implementing important protections that rewrite the institutionalized power imbalances that have traditionally enabled the exploitation of graduate student workers, and are instead creating new avenues for graduate students to politically advocate on their own behalf.

“Graduate students do real work,” wrote Marissa Knoll, a graduate student at New York University, in an op-ed for Salon in 2019. “The historical underpaying and overworking of graduate students will surely continue unless graduate students have a way to effectively organize and negotiate with their universities … We as graduate workers have a right to stand up for better working conditions.”

Jenn is a proud Asian American feminist, scientist and nerd who currently blogs at Reappropriate.co, one of the web’s oldest AAPI feminist and race activist blogs. Follow her on Twitter @Reappropriate. More by Jenn Fang

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ALERT: On Aug. 27, 2024, USCIS updated its  policy guidance regarding when students may be eligible for optional practical training (OPT) for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) fields. The update also clarifies guidance concerning online study, school transfers, the grace period, and study abroad.

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If you would like to study as a full-time student in the United States, you will generally need a student visa. There are two nonimmigrant visa categories for persons wishing to study in the United States. These visas are commonly known as the F and M visas.

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M-1 Student Visa

The M-1 visa (Vocational Student) category includes students in vocational or other nonacademic programs, other than language training.

F-1 students may not work off-campus during the first academic year, but may accept on-campus employment subject to certain conditions and restrictions. After the first academic year, F-1 students may engage in three types of off-campus employment:

• Curricular Practical Training (CPT)
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F-1 students may also be eligible to work off-campus on a case-by-case basis as a result of  special situations  such as severe economic hardship or special student relief. M-1 students may engage in practical training only after they have completed their studies.

For both F-1 and M-1 students any off-campus training employment must be related to their area of study and must be authorized prior to starting any work by the Designated School Official (the person authorized to maintain the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS)) and USCIS.

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If you are interested in changing to F or M Student Status, see the Changing to a Nonimmigrant F or M Student Status page.

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For more information on the nonimmigrant student (F and M) classifications, see the  USCIS Policy Manual .

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For more information on  International Students and Social Security Numbers (PDF) , see the  Social Security Administration  website.

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Student Workers Frequently Asked Questions

Who is considered a student worker for purposes of this guidance, will ofccp continue to accept student worker data if the educational institution chooses to provide it in the course of a compliance evaluation, why is ofccp using its enforcement discretion to not consider, or cite violations based on, student worker employment data during compliance evaluations, can a contractor be cited for a violation for excluding student workers from the data it provides to ofccp during a compliance evaluation, will ofccp accept a complaint filed by a student worker.

Generally, a student worker is a student, undergraduate or graduate, engaged in research, teaching, work-study, or another related or comparable position at an educational institution. The individual’s primary relationship with the institution is educational, and the student’s working relationship has been obtained as a result of or in conjunction with his or her studies.

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Yes. However, if the contractor’s submission includes student workers, OFCCP will not consider such data in the determination of violations in the course of the compliance evaluation.

Sorting through data to determine whether individual student workers meet the legal test for employee and thus should be included in affirmative action programs (AAPs) is not only burdensome for contractors but may prolong the time it takes OFCCP to complete compliance evaluations, and may take focus away from examining the personnel practices and outcomes of non-student workers of these contractors. Additionally, data on student workers is typically not robust enough for analyses due to quick turnover and limited application pools. OFCCP has an interest in focusing its time, attention, and resources on individuals whose primary relationship with the educational institution is work-related. To learn more about what constitutes an employee, please see our FAQs .

No. OFCCP will not cite contractors for excluding student workers from AAPs or personnel activity data submitted to OFCCP during a compliance review.

Yes. OFCCP will continue to accept complaints alleging employment discrimination by and on behalf of student workers. For any such complaints, OFCCP’s regional and field office staff will work with the Office of the Solicitor, as appropriate, to determine whether such students are employees under, and thus protected by, OFCCP’s laws.

The contents of this document do not have the force and effect of law and are not meant to bind the public in any way. This document is intended only to provide clarity to the public regarding existing requirements under the law or agency policies.

Last updated on September 5, 2019

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THE LEADER IN ADVANCING BEST PRACTICES IN DIVERSITY, EQUITY, AND INCLUSION

The fight for graduate rights: a new student worker movement.

A graduate student assistant in the United States earns on average $18,600 annually, according to the employment website PayScale. Those at the top earn nearly $30,000 per year at most, while the bottom 10 percent earn approximately $12,000.  

Many graduate employees say their stipends are simply not enough to live on and amount to exploitation considering the significant amount of labor required of them. At research institutions across the country, a growing number of these workers are hosting sit-ins, rallies, and strikes to demand better compensation and support.  

[Above: Loyola University Chicago graduate assistants and their supporters participated in a mass walkout on April 24, 2019. Photo credit: LUC Graduate Workers’ Union, SEIU Local 73].

Illinois has become a center for this movement. Graduate student assistants at multiple research institutions there, including University of Chicago, University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Northwestern University, have within the last year held protests for better pay and benefits. Those at Loyola University Chicago (LUC) are embroiled in a lengthy and contentious battle to be recognized by the administration as employees with collective bargaining rights.

“The position of the Loyola administration has for the last two years been that we are not actually workers, just students, and they know they can get away with that because of the current makeup of the NLRB board,” says Abram Capone, a third-year philosophy PhD student.  

NLRB, or the National Labor Relations Board, is a federal agency whose members are appointed by the president to oversee employee unionization. Under President Barack Obama, the NLRB ruled that graduate assistants at private universities are employees and can therefore negotiate for better pay and other employment benefits.  

According to the LUC website, “graduate students who are engaged in teaching and research as part of their academic program are fundamentally students. … [T]hey are not eligible for union representation.” The university did not respond to requests for comment on this story.

If the university recognized LUC’s graduate assistants as employees, their union, which is represented by the Service Employees International Union Local 73, would be able to bargain for increased transparency in the assistantship assignment process, better healthcare benefits, and higher wages, Capone says. “Right now, all we’re asking for is a seat at the table. [The administration] has made it a clear that they value communication, … but we can’t have open dialogue if we can’t even agree on the terms of what we’re asking, which is to stop acting illegally in violation of the NLRB ruling and negotiate with us in good faith as a union,” he says.  

Over the last several weeks, graduate workers have intensified pressure on LUC through a variety of protests. On April 16, they and their allies held a sit-in in front of the president’s office. Seven students were arrested. On April 24, they held a mass walkout that included both graduate students and undergraduate student supporters. Members of the clergy, faculty members, and local politicians have joined in solidarity with the workers at multiple rallies.  

At many institutions, graduate assistant contracts forbid or strongly discourage outside employment. During summer months, however, many of these workers take on multiple, temporary jobs to get by, Capone says.  

Base pay for teaching and research assistants at LUC is $18,000. According to a living wage index developed by MIT, the living wage for a single adult in Chicago is $27,700.  

John Hawkins, a fourth-year PhD student in English, says traditional graduate assistantships are designed to support the stereotypical college student: single, healthy, and young. As a married father of a 1-year-old, he and his family struggle to get by under policies that disadvantage nontraditional students. Getting coverage for his wife and child under LUC’s graduate assistant health plan, for instance, costs $6,000 annually. The money is due in a lump sum in the middle of summer, during which time he and most other graduate assistants do not receive a stipend.

Hawkins and Capone both rely on others for assistance. Capone is covered under his parents’ health insurance. Hawkins has family members who lend him money to get through summers. Many students, especially those who come from low-income backgrounds, aren’t so fortunate both men say.    

Both say they’ve known graduate students who left their programs because they could not afford to continue or were too burned out from the workload. The average attrition rate for graduate students is nearly 50 percent, according to research.

Over the last year, however, graduate workers felt that their desire for a more equitable contract, including a living wage, was falling on deaf ears.

“We had [union] members come to the bargaining table [with the administration] and tell their stories of how they were struggling. Some of them were in tears talking about their financial struggles and how it affects mental health,” Schuhrke says. “But it was only when we went on strike that the university realized they had no choice but to listen to us.”  

After 13 months of “escalating protests,” the students went on strike on March 18, essentially “shutting down” the university, Schuhrke says. Without graduate teaching assistants, hundreds of classes were canceled over the course of the three-week strike.  

In the end, UIC agreed to meet the students’ demands, including implementing new guidelines to make the process of securing an assistantship more transparent. Another major victory was being able to waive a $2,000 annual fee that “was essentially 10 percent of our pay,” Schuhrke says, and getting fees for international graduate students cut in half.  

At some research universities, campus leaders have been proactive in improving the graduate student experience. Georgetown University received widespread praise when it, as a private institution, supported its graduate assistants’ decision to unionize.   Emory University in Atlanta gained national recognition last fall when it announced it would raise the graduate assistant stipend by nearly 30 percent over the next three years. And Southern Illinois University Edwardsville recently announced the administration had revised its budget in order to increase teaching and research stipends and will soon begin meeting with its graduate worker union to discuss salary expectations.  

Graduate students owe it to themselves to become informed of their rights and “stand up for each other,” says Jonathan Bomar, director of employment concerns at the National Association of Graduate-Professional Students (NAGPS).

“We cannot always be the ones squeezed for cash by increasing fees and cutting our benefits,” says Bomar, who works as a research assistant while he pursues his PhD in biomedical engineering at the University of Maine. “Graduate school is already a very stressful and difficult experience, and universities owe it to their [graduate assistants] to protect their well-being.”  

In addition to improving financial support for these workers, Bomar says universities can take other measures to better support graduate students. Providing free mental health counseling and making sure that people are aware of and encouraged to use these services would be “a golden tool” in reducing the chronic stress that many of these individuals contend with, Bomar says.  

Transparent guidelines regarding assistantship appointments and work duties are another essential way to support their students, he says. Similarly, universities can encourage and train faculty advisors to “take a more holistic approach to training and teaching their students,” Bomar says.  

“I think a lot of problems stem from a lack of communication between students and faculty,” he says. “A student who works 60-plus hours a week for too long could get totally burned out but may be afraid to go to their advisor about this because they feel that’s what is expected of them. That just leads to mental health problems and poor work performance.”

NAGPS has found that when graduate students communicate with their teachers and advisors about the stress they are under, faculty members are extremely receptive. They want to see their student workers succeed but may be unaware of their struggles, Bomar says.  

“There’s this lingering culture that if you’re a graduate student, you should be miserable, because that’s part of the experience. If you’re working in a lab, you should be there all day and never go home,” he says. “That’s an old-school culture that serves nobody well.”

Mariah Bohanon is the associate editor of INSIGHT Into Diversity.  This article ran in our June 2019 issue. 

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• 13 November 2019

PhDs: the tortuous truth

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Getting a PhD is never easy, but it’s fair to say that Marina Kovačević had it especially hard. A third-year chemistry student at the University of Novi Sad in Serbia, she started her PhD programme with no funding, which forced her to get side jobs bartending and waitressing. When a funded position came up in another laboratory two years later, she made an abrupt switch from medicinal chemistry to computational chemistry. With the additional side jobs, long hours in the lab, and the total overhaul of her research and area of focus, Kovačević epitomizes the overworked, overextended PhD student with an uncertain future.

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