News-Letter

Hopkins was the first American university to be founded with graduate education and research as a core part of its mission. To this day, Hopkins is world-renowned for the quality of its graduate education. Unfortunately, a number of misperceptions about graduate student stipends, the payment of teaching assistants and the extent to which the funding of graduate education is linked to undergraduate tuition rates, have been circulating among the undergraduate student body. A recent article in the News-Letter made some misleading statements about the amount of money that graduate students received as payment for TA duties. The article insinuated that undergraduates are unfairly burdened with tuition increases in order to support graduate students.

These misconceptions need to be corrected so that undergraduate students gain a better sense of where their and their parents' money is going. If undergraduates better understand the financial situation of graduate students, and how it affects the quality of undergraduate education, they will likely agree that stipends need to be substantially increased.

As stated in the News-Letter article, Dean Falk acknowledged that graduate student stipends are "distressingly low." This may have been cause for confusion among undergraduates reading the article since stipends were listed as being a healthy $25,200. It also claims that Hopkins places 10th in nationwide rankings of universities for offering among the highest stipends to graduate students.

This information is inaccurate: it was evidently gleaned from a comparison of graduate programs in the natural sciences, where Hopkins does compare favorably with its peers. However, funding for graduate stipends in the natural sciences is, by and large, NOT taken from undergraduate tuition. The $20K+ stipends that graduate students in the sciences and engineering receive primarily come from external grants through federal and private organizations. Moreover, graduate students in the sciences and engineering serve as TAs for undergraduate courses only in the first year or two, and it is only during this period that their stipends are, in part, compensation for TA duties.

The stipends for graduate students in the Social Sciences & Humanities are another story, and are precisely what Dean Falk was referring to. Graduate student stipends in most (if not all) Social Sciences and Humanities departments at Hopkins are around $13,000-$14,000 (which is taxable income), and are typically limited to four years. In most every case, the graduate student is obligated to TA during his or her tenure at the University, and rarely do graduate students get additional funds for fulfilling TA obligations.

Some graduate students, especially those teaching writing and language courses, design and teach these classes independent of any fully paid faculty member, yet their remuneration is the same as those who TA: a maximum of $14,000 a year. U.S. academic institutions of comparable caliber to Hopkins, in cities with costs of living that are comparable to that of Baltimore, have recently raised their stipend rates for graduate students. Such graduate programs are now offering stipends around $19,000-$20,000, which makes Hopkins less attractive to prospective students who are comparing figures.

Of greater concern to undergraduates is how low stipends adversely affect the quality of their education. Typically, graduate students do not have additional sources of income from parents, high-paying jobs or other disposable income. Some of us struggle to find sources of income to support our summer research, and pay the rent while we are writing our dissertations. Many of us need to pay off student loans from undergraduate education or master's degrees. Some of us have families to support. As a result, graduate students often must seek additional employment -- often related to our expertise and career goals, but frequently not. Additional employment obligations detract from the time that we can dedicate to our own research, which means that graduate students have difficulty completing their Ph.D.s within the four to five years during which the University provides funding.

More importantly to undergraduates, second and third jobs, as well as economic duress, adversely affect the quality of teaching graduate students can offer undergraduates. Graduate students value their roles as teaching assistants and teaching fellows, consider it vital to their professional training and immensely enjoy the experience. They want to provide a high-quality experience to their students, and it pains them to sacrifice time they would like to devote to TA and teaching duties simply to pay the rent. In the end, the very small percentage of undergraduate tuition increases that might go to graduate stipends improves the quality of education for both graduates and undergraduates alike.

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