The Well-Being of Grad Students

Certainly, some graduate students struggle to make ends meet, and others live relatively comfortable lives. But, at the moment, it’s hard to know how much money a typical graduate student is paid, or how much work she does. There’s also little information about differences in working conditions across departments: my limited personal experience suggests that students in the natural sciences earn more than students in the humanities, but there is little hard evidence to back up intuitions like this.

To address these questions, I recently launched GradPay, a survey of graduate student working conditions. The project is inspired by the Adjunct Project, but focuses on graduate students rather than adjunct faculty.

You know how much I love a good survey. According to Joshua Carp, The GradPay project asks master’s and Ph.D. students about the kind of work they do, how much they’re paid, and what kind of benefits, health or otherwise, they receive.

Also this: “The survey also reveals staggering differences across institutions and departments: Students at the highest-paying university earned stipends over 180% more than stipends at the lowest-paying university.”

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