Graduate student workers at NC State teach countless classes and perform vital research at the university but largely struggle to make ends meet due to low incomes, high costs of student fees and long working hours.

About half of NC State’s 10,000 graduate students work at the university in teaching assistant and research assistant positions, according to Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost Warwick Arden. These graduate student workers are paid a stipend and have their tuition covered, but not student fees, which can amount to over 10% of stipends.

A widespread concern

John Blondin, senior associate dean in the College of Sciences, said while this has been an issue for several decades, problems with graduate finances are reaching a critical mass. 

“Everybody’s talking about this, but it’s gotten so bad now that it’s becoming a top priority,” Blondin said.

The essence of the issue is that many graduate workers’ stipends are below what is considered a living wage, said John Hedlund, a graduate teaching assistant and fourth-year Ph.D. student in sociology.

According to MIT’s Living Wage calculator, typical expenses faced by adults in Raleigh total $25,684 annually. More often than not, graduate workers at NC State make annual stipends below this figure, according to James Withrow, a Ph.D. student in biology and entomology and president of the Graduate Student Association (GSA).

“I do know people who make kind of in the low teens, which is not enough to live on really,” Withrow said. “It helps, it’s better than nothing, but it’s not like you’re really living on that. Students usually in the more hard sciences and stuff are tending to make more in the 20s. I’ve heard of some in the high 20s, but that’s, I think, unusual.”

Arden said there is high variance in stipends, sometimes going up into the low $30,000s. He said while he and other administrators would like to help graduate students more, the situation is challenging. 

Paying for student fees

NC State’s Graduate Student Support Plan covers tuition and healthcare and costs the university approximately $50 million each year, according to Arden; however, it does not cover student fees. Full-time graduate students are charged $1,288 per semester, or $2,456 annually; this cost increases to just under $4,000 for students in the College of Engineering due to the college’s Program Enhancement Fee. 

Fees can dramatically cut into students’ stipends, and as a result, some graduate students have lobbied to have the university cover this cost. Hedlund said having students pay toward some costs isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but many graduate workers aren’t in a financially comfortable position to do so.

“It isn’t specifically that it’s wrong in principle to make students have to pay for some of the costs of running the university, but it’s the fact that it’s kind of adding insult to injury,” Hedlund said. “We don’t make a living wage already, and then on top of that, we have to pay back thousands of dollars.”

Ankita Gupta, a D.V.M/Ph.D. student in comparative biomedical sciences, said fees are very costly on a student stipend.

“As a graduate student, I do not want to be taking out additional loans besides the debt I have already accumulated as an undergraduate student,” Gupta said. “I am barely able to make ends meet on the student stipend, and the student fees are very expensive.”

Withrow said that while student fees fund services that aid all students, paying for them is a complicated affair for graduate students.

“Student fees as a whole are obviously a tricky subject that the student body tends to not be excited about, but it’s an investment in infrastructure and services at the university that serves the whole student body population,” Withrow said. “I’m certainly not opposed to student fees in principle, but I do believe we should be very active in evaluating them, especially the increases, to determine if those are actually what the student body wants.”

Last year, the university received $88 million from student fees. A significant portion of that came from graduate students, who number around 10,000, according to Arden, and of these, about half receive the benefits of the Graduate Student Support Plan. Although it would be beneficial to students for the university to pay these fees, Arden said this is not something that can be implemented right away.

“It’s not something we can do overnight; we can’t manufacture the money,” Arden said. “The money that’s paid now by graduate students in fees goes to supporting a lot of staff salaries that underpin student success, so it’s not like you can just cut that fee, lose that money and fire those people.”

Difficulties in paying for fees partially arises due to legal issues with appropriated money, Arden said. Some fees were previously paid with money from research grants, but due to a federal rule, this has changed and is no longer allowed, according to Arden.

While fees cannot be legally covered, in certain cases such as research grants, professors are free to raise graduate workers’ stipends, Blondin said. However, because this is a source of income, it then gets taxed, meaning professors must pay students more than the cost of fees to fully cover them.

“Now with this federal ruling, I can’t pay the fees, but the easy solution is then I just don’t pay his fees, but I give him more money in the stipend,” Blondin said. “It doesn’t affect my grant, but he does get taxed on it, so I then have to account for the fact that I need a little bit more to cover the taxes on that.”

Withrow said this is something being considered in his department, entomology, but he recognizes that it’s not a perfect solution because of the added burden of taxation.

Differential fees

A potential method that has been suggested for easing the burden of fees is to simply reduce the amount requested of each student. However, Arden said this is not universally possible; cuts to certain departments’ fees may mean personnel are let go.

There is a recognition that some services provided through fees are not utilized the same amount by graduate and undergraduate students, Arden said.

“Undergrads and grads pay the same in fees,” Arden said. “I don’t think graduate students benefit to the same degree … There are some things they clearly do. The transportation system, healthcare, campus rec, many other things graduate students have equal access to and utility of, but I can’t help but think there are some things they’re not using to the same degree as undergrads.”

Withrow said he has noticed this as well, but in the past, when the idea of differential fees was proposed in student leadership, a consensus was not reached.

“Here at NC State, for a couple of years, the grad students in Senate and GSA as well have floated the idea of possibly splitting the fees out a little bit, so at least some of them are differential amounts,” Withrow said. “So it’s not necessarily that grad students wouldn’t pay in at all, but that maybe we’d pay in a little more in relation to utilization. That hasn’t gone over well here, but it remains a possibility, and one that some administrators are more open to than you might expect.”

Mallory Kinczyk, a Ph.D. student in marine, earth and atmospheric sciences, agreed that cutting back graduate student fees based on utilization may be a good idea.

“Because graduate students often don’t participate in many campuswide activities that are funded by general student fees, it is a major burden for these students who are already making very little money to pay thousands of dollars a year into these services,” Kinczyk said. “A more effective and fair system would be to have a fee breakdown that allows graduate students to opt out of paying, and therefore having access to, certain campus activities or services.”

Blondin and Arden agreed that it would be in the university’s interests to collect more data on graduate utilization of certain services.

“Not being paid for the hours that we work” 

Withrow said stipends tend to be rated for about 20 hours of work a week, but the reality is far outside of this.

“The stipends are generally officially rated at 20 hours a week of work,” Withrow said. “No one even pretends to think that’s what it is. It’s a full-time job; it’s a full-time-plus job. There is a tendency to romanticize the image of the hardworking grad student who is working long hours in the lab, and it’s not all bad. Ideally, we’re here, we’re passionate about something, we have this opportunity to learn, and we’re excited about it. The dark side is when the expectation is just outside of reality.”

Graduate students often spend over 60 hours working a week, according to Lexie Malico, a fourth-year Ph.D. student in chemistry and vice president of Student Governance Relations for GSA. Withrow said this is fairly normal.

“We’re generally not being paid for the hours that we work,” Withrow said. “Grad students definitely feel overworked, underpaid and very stressed out about lots of things, whether that’s financial, whether that’s professional.”

Blondin said in the College of Sciences, there are efforts made to keep hours at 20 per week, though he acknowledged the workload can be demanding.

“The workload, particularly on the TA side, that’s always an issue,” Blondin said. “Technically, they’re half-time, so they’re nominally working 20 hours a week. Within our college, we really try to make sure we’re not exceeding that, but we certainly hear a lot of complaints that they’re working too hard.”

As stipends can be far lower than a living wage, some students look for other sources of income. Hedlund said this may mean teaching an extra class or finding a part-time job. However, he said in some cases, students are discouraged from finding outside work and sometimes require departmental permission if they want to take a part-time job.

“Graduate school, particularly if it’s a Ph.D. program but also for many master’s programs as well, it’s intended to be your full-time job,” Hedlund said. “It’s oftentimes frowned upon for you to work outside your program.”

While graduate students may go on to work in well-paying positions after graduation, Dmitry Zaritskiy, a Ph.D. student in animal and poultry science, said it seems strange to pay such students so much less just before these jobs.

“Fees and other expenses are heavy on students,” Zaritskiy said. “One major issue that I have encountered is that no one assists us in getting additional funding, scholarships or simply helping getting on-campus part-time jobs. Students who are about to become professors that would get up to $80,000 a year are surviving on $14,000 before tax.”

Arden said administration is looking into graduate finances, but there is no easy solution.

“It’s not just a matter of looking at fees or looking at tuition or looking at stipends,” Arden said. “It’s about looking at all of those things, plus it’s about looking at cost of living and so forth. We’re dedicated to continuing this discussion and finding out ways to improve the competitiveness of our graduate student packages, but a big issue is finding where we can identify new resources or reallocate resources to doing this.”

Malico said low stipends lie at the root of many other issues faced by graduate students.

“Many of the issues we face would be alleviated if we made more money,” Malico said. “Student fees wouldn’t be as burdensome if we had more disposable income; parking wouldn’t be as big of a deal if we had disposable income; healthcare wouldn’t be such an issue if we had disposable income. When you look at the root of a lot of the issues, it comes down to, in so many respects, the financial elements of it.”