Could Grad Students Regain Union Rights? Some Hopeful Signs

http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/15735/could_nlrb_greenlight_graduate_student_unionization/

Tuesday Oct 15, 2013 4:20 pm By Rebecca Burns



Graduate students at NYU who work as teaching assistants, research assistants and graduate assistants are demanding their right to collectively bargain. (GSOC-UAW Local 2110)


In one iteration of an ongoing joke in The Simpsons about the lot of graduate students, Lisa throws bread on the ground to feed a group of ducks, only to have a crowd of scraggly students converge instead. A professor with a whip appears and barks, "No food for you grad students until you grade 3,000 papers."

Whips aside, the scene captures the thin line between education and exploitation for advanced degree candidates, who often go deep into debt for the privilege of spending years grading Sisyphean towers of paperwork.

Data on federal loan recipients released recently by the Department of Education distinguishes between graduate and undergraduate student borrowers for the first time. Grad students, it turns out, are saddled with a disproportionately heavy debt load. Though they make up only 15 percent of all students in higher education, they account for nearly a third of federal borrowing, as Jordan Weissmann noted this week at The Atlantic. Skyrocketing tuition and scarce financial aid for graduate programs are among the factors that keep advanced degree candidates mired in debt.

But at the same time that they’re students in need of aid, many graduate students are also workers in need of a raise. The mean annual salary for graduate assistants is $33,000, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Meanwhile, they shoulder an increasing share of the teaching load.

FULL story at link.