Pennyless Student Stories, 3

Here is what life as a graduate student has been like for me
so far:

The funding package I received was one of the most generous available to my cohort in the History Department. And yet. My son (who was 3 months old when my program began) qualified for food vouchers under the WIC program, and since I was breastfeeding, I also qualified for food vouchers until his first birthday (thereafter, he alone remains eligible). The WIC program is targeted at low-income mothers & children, but, as can be seen from their eligibility guidelines, most Uof C graduate student parents without additional sources of income would surely qualify. My son also qualifies for free health insurance under the "All Kids Covered" program. We have only ever shopped at thrift stores for clothes for the three of us, and for toys and books for my son. We are lucky to have the Family Resource Center nearby, whenever my son gets bored of his sad old toys. We have hitherto relied on public transport for all our grocery shopping, which was tough in the winter with a young child. I grew up on thrift store clothing and am proud to support Chicago's public transport system, but I feel that the University takes the sacrifices made by the graduate student population to study at this institution too lightly. I used to have a job, and so I do remember being able to afford haircuts, and the occasional purchase of makeup or new clothing... The University's lavish expenditure on catering at high profile events is offensive to those who are obliged to scrimp and save daily (and hoard leftovers from these events). Is it not an indictment of the system that events on campus advertising "free" food are such a draw in an affluent private institution?

The tiny number of times we allow ourselves meals out, trips to the cinema or theater seems too frivolous to mention. We have been able to travel home to see our families solely through their generosity. This year, my husband and I are both receiving the most generous aid packages available (he entered this year and thus has the new 19500 deal), and yet, with no support for childcare available, we have taken on an extremely time consuming (albeit rewarding) position with the Office of Undergraduate Student Housing (as Resident Heads), without which we could not afford childcare. As international students, my husband and I are not eligible for most of the research fellowships normally applied for my students whose program requires a prolonged period of field research abroad. I have no idea how I will afford my year of archival research, scheduled for 2009-2010. We spent all our savings on my first research-related trip, last summer.

The Provost's Working Group Report reinforced general concerns with our doctoral program which I had since I entered. I will focus on just two interrelated observations, one to do with student living costs and one to do with the way those costs relate to the time required to complete a degree.

1) The university does not really know how the average graduate student supports him- or herself in a given year. The figures in the report seem to suggest that many or even most of these students, unless they can access significant outside funding, would live in what can be only described as poverty, especially when they are in advanced residency. Nor does there appear to be any predictably available and generally accessible institutional mechanism that could lift them out of it. Indeed (on the basis of the report at any rate) the longer students are here, the poorer they are likely to be. Surely such a serious and general problem requires a serious response that would address the student body generally. The report documents the problem more effectively than it addresses it. The report suggest a number of new Advanced Residency fellowships, for example, and these would no doubt be helpful, but it also seems to be a winner-take-all sort of program: the fact that some students will win them is predicated on the fact that a larger pool of applicants won't. It would not truly address the fact, which the report makes obvious, that a very large number students - even a majority of them - who do not have access to significant outside resources can scarcely pay half the cost of living as a graduate student.

2) Student funding appears to be structured on the basis of a degree program that does not really exist. Current funding seems to assume 5 years of funding on entry (though not everyone has even this) plus perhaps one more year on a write-up grant to finish off the dissertation -- i.e., the funding regime seems to presume that students take five or six years to graduate. But it takes virtually all students years longer than this to complete a degree, leaving the average student unsupported for a large percentage of their time in the program (8 or 9 years on average). Thus the degree program entails a disparity between the resources that students require to complete it and the resources available to help them to do so. This problem is a general one, which arises predictably on a program-wide basis because of factors that are well beyond the agency of individual students to change. As such, it would be inadequate to try to solve the obvious funding gap by a focus on giving incentives to students to make them try to finish more quickly (a position which the report found among several informants in the faculty and administration). This would only work if most students were actually finishing in five or six years, while a few others inexplicably took longer, just needing an extra push to get them to finish on time. In the situation of the program as it stands, however, an insistence on the principle of incentive would, in effect, convert an institutional problem into an individual responsibility. The funding gap would remain substantially unfilled.

- a.a.