Pennyless Student Stories, 4

I am a student of the Social Sciences Division in advanced residence. The school still charged me $1,900+ for tuition per quarter. My RA job pays $14 per hour ($0.5 up from last year). The tuition is therefore equivalent to 136+ hours per quarter. Since I am an international student and can only work 19.5 hours during the quarter and 35 hours off-quarter, 136 hours per quarter means 7 weeks per quarter. In other words, most of my earnings during a quarter goes to tuition and other inescapable expenditures and I have only 3 weeks' earning for rent, food, utilities, and so forth. The only time I can try to break even is during the summer. My colleague from UCLA told me that they did not have to pay any tuition for three years after they proposed. As you can imagine, I have to pay most of my expenses out of my pocket and this is not funny when your parents have retired.

I did have a choice when I came here. Like Mr. Neal Patel in his horror stories sent to Provost Rosenbaum several weeks ago, I did believe in "the Life of Mind", and I have since been duly punished for my naivete, inanity, stupidity, you name it. When I came here, the stipend of the U of C was 50% below what I would have received at Penn and Berkeley, and these two school offered something more. Penn offered a desk plus insurance and Berkeley promised additional scholarships. What's even worse is that the stipend of U of C decreases by year in program, something students at other schools have never heard of. They did say you can maintain your stipend by working as a TA, but what they did not tell you is that those positions are very limited in scope and there are far more applicants than positions. As a result, at my fourth year in program, my stipend was only half of what I would have received elsewhere. How naive I was. When we went to a workshop at OSU last summer, we were so embarrassed to discuss our plight with students from other schools.

What's worse is that the school does not offer any support for presentation at annual meetings, even if I have something to present. My friend told me that OSU offered $2,000 for such meetings, regardless whether a student has paper or not, and my colleague from Madison told me that, despite the financial difficulties at Wisconsin such that the amount has been frozen for 10 years, they still get $750 if they have papers for the show.

Let's also forget about summer support at the U of C.

Even Loyola's Ph.D. students in English receive more than most of us old students. Their current rate is $16.5K per year. See the following link:

http://thegradcafe.com/survey/index.php?q=Loyola

I do not understand how the U of C dares to call its alums for donation if the school itself offers so miserably meager when the students are at school.

- CM