Princeton Raising ‘Grad Student Stipends’ in Hopes to Stop Unionization
“…the University confirmed that the annual stipend rate for the 2023–2024 academic year will be between $47,880 and $50,400.”
Mike has written a few pieces about undergrads and grad students at universities either trying to unionize or threatening to unionize.
Princeton is jumping ahead of the curve:
After a two-week union campaign, Princeton Graduate Students United (PGSU) announced that the University will raise some graduate student stipends by $5,000 in the 2023–2024 academic year. In an attachment to a recent memo sent out to the graduate student body, the University confirmed that the annual stipend rate for the 2023–2024 academic year will be between $47,880 and $50,400. Current graduate stipends range from $38,000 to $42,000. The raise comes as the University has expressed “concerns” with the unionization drive to the graduate student body, and after 1,600 graduate workers, a majority, signed union cards.
According to an email obtained by The Daily Princetonian from the PGSU sent to graduate students, the group hopes more support is to come. In addition to the raise, the union is pursuing guaranteed affordable housing through graduation, improvements to the grievance procedure, more support for international students, better healthcare, funded childcare, improvements to workplace safety, among other causes.
“This is the first of our union wins, but it’s not enough,” the PGSU organizing committee wrote in an email to graduate students. “We need a union for graduate workers that will allow us to bargain a legally binding contract.”
This news comes after over 150 graduate students, undergraduates, and post-graduate fellows rallied with PGSU on Wednesday, Feb. 15 to demand fair wages and more affordable housing from the University and the Graduate Student Government (GSG) voted to release a message of support for PGSU. Graduate students formed the PGSU in 2016.
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Comments
These are just insane numbers. When students complain about loan size, they should look to these outrageous payouts.
The obvious question is how much of those sums are earmarked for tuition and fees? 50K may not be actual take home pay.
No, stipend comes after tuition. The only thing that they may have to still pay is fees. I’m willing to bet at a place like Princeton even that is covered.
For comparison, my salary was 19k-23k as a graduate teaching and research assistant in a STEM field. That was not that long ago…2003-2008.
My first salary as a post-doc was under 40k and I entered repayment at 400 a month on a 30yr plan (switched it later when I made more).
These numbers were totally doable and something is going to have to give.
My graduate student salary was about 9K back in the early 1980s, but that was mostly before the tax laws changed in 1986, and it didn’t include tuition and fees which were simply paid from the grant. My postdoc salary at a Federal Lab in 1988 was in the neighborhood of 80K back then. Today postdocs make about 110K.
I’m guessing you don’t mean a real post-doc. You mean a position you take after your Ph D that was a full-time permanent job. Post-docs definitely do not make 110k in most fields even in STEM.
If you are paid off of a grant, which most are, you start off around 55k.
https://www.niaid.nih.gov/grants-contracts/salary-cap-stipends
This is specifically allergy and infectious diseases division of the NIH but most are pretty standardized.
Here’s the standardized one across all divisions of the NIH
https://www.research.chop.edu/announcements/nih-announces-new-stipend-levels-for-postdoctoral-fellows-2022
When graduate students form a union and go on strike, I hope for two things:
1. That the strike goes on forever.
and…
2. Both campus administration and the union lose.
I say give them some rope and allow them to hang themselves. The irony in all of this is that as a group they are all about sustainability, and yet are oblivious that the whole higher education system is absolutely not sustainable without huge injections of outside money. They are in an inflationary cycle even more severe than what Brandon et al have inflicted on the rest of us. Very few people in academia would ever be able to make it in private industry, outside of the professional schools.
“This is the first of our union wins, but it’s not enough,” the PGSU organizing committee wrote in an email to graduate students. “We need a union for graduate workers that will allow us to bargain a legally binding contract.”
So they took the money and intend to unionize anyway.
Who here didn’t see that coming?
Are the Princeton administration the stupidest suckers ever, or what?
Now I wanna go be a graduate student.
When I can’t decide who to root for, I go with “I hope this just keeps going.”
Moar popcorn.