cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com
When I showed up at my first tenure-track job in a right-to-work, kind of Southern state, adjunct writing faculty were being asked to pay tuition for a summer pedagogy seminar run by the writing director in an illegal “pay-to-work” scheme.
(Unless the prospective adjuncts were spouses of tenure-track faculty, in which case they still had to take the course, but were graciously comped the graft.)
This was 1998, at the University of Louisville. Six-year graduation rates under aggressive “quality management” were around 30 percent (where they remain). And the latest innovation in “enabling access to higher education” was indenturing college hopefuls to UPS and discarding them without a degree, in a scam I’ve previously discussed as Extreme Work-Study.
Ten years later, the South writhes again.
According to a detailed survey (large pdf) run by the graduate employees at the University of South Carolina, the mean 2008 assistantship on that campus was under $10,000.
Even single persons earning at that rate qualify for food stamps in South Carolina, as the report points out, placing them well under the U.S. poverty threshold. But wait, there’s more.
The majority of the several hundred respondents with assistantships indicated they still have to pay tuition to good ‘ol USC! (Yep, that means they pay to work.)
They pay for health care, too. And apparently it’s not much of a plan.
Even though they are not recognized by the state as “employees,” they are barred from having other jobs, and most make up the shortfall by extensive loans, parental grants, or a spouse’s income.
The university’s own estimate of living expenses for an undergraduate is 40 percent more than it pays the average grad student.
The grad student association calculates that the average single graduate student on assistantship is able to cover less than half of their monthly expenses of $2,171. The pay is little more than 1/3 of what graduate students with children require, leading to an annual “unmet financial burden” of over $14,000.
For a graduate student in the humanities (nationally averaging nearly 10 years to degree), Ph.D. recipients in this category would beg, borrow or overwork well over $100,000 — all to get a job in their 30s, if they were moderately fortunate, paying about 50 grand to start.
Read part 2: Grad students speak out and faculty reaction.
