Whenever his students take an exam, teaching assistant Jeremy Best dedicates 20 to 30 additional hours to his normal working week, grading and grading and grading.
With each collegiate exam come additional stress and temporary social restrictions to the lives of nearly all undergraduate students. But when graduate students such as Best devote extra time to exams that are not even their own, they often spend up to 40 hours on teaching responsibilities alone while still conducting research, taking their own exams and working jobs on the side.
“I don’t resent the time I’m asked to give. It’s just difficult,” Best said. “I worry that sometimes the teaching suffers because I don’t have time to give it everything I’d like to.”
Meanwhile, many graduate students arrive at the university with the expectation that they will only be working 20 hours each week for teaching assistant duties and getting paid enough to afford adequate housing, particularly at Graduate Gardens and Graduate Hills, the university-subsidized graduate student housing.
But their work load often exceeds that number, particularly when they have exams and papers to grade, and their stipends are providing enough to put them “barely above the poverty line,” said Christopher Perez, an American studies graduate student.
Johnetta Davis, associate dean of the graduate school, said graduate student stipends have increased 4.55 percent annually for the past two years. However, graduate students say stipends are not keeping up with additional costs, such as rent and health care.
Perez said his income amounts to about $15,000 a year, while Best said he makes around $15,900 before taxes. Best said every graduate student he knows in the history department has financial support from a spouse or family member, or has sought employment elsewhere.
One graduate student, who wishes to remain anonymous, said he receives $2.79 less every two weeks than in previous years’ paychecks. “My total pre-tax did go up this year, but not enough to cover increased costs of my pharmacy/dental/health benefits,” he wrote in an e-mail.
Dean of the Graduate School Charles Caramello said the Graduate Student Affairs Committee, comprised of both faculty and graduate students, conducted research on graduate student workloads in 2006. The committee has analyzed the study and will report their findings to the graduate council this fall, he said.
“We are very much on the side of students for this,” Caramello said.
But Graduate Student Government President Laura Moore, who is on the Student Affairs committee, said rather than making strides to find a solution to the problem of low stipends and high workloads, the university is “talking it to death.”
“It doesn’t take rocket science to figure out that when graduate students can’t pay their rent, it’s a problem,” Moore said. “We’ve studied it to death. What are we going to do about it? They have to take action at some point.”
When Best prepares to take comprehensive exams, mandatory tests generally given to graduate students in their third year, he is required to read up to 500 books. In those years, the combined frustrations of limited free time and empty pockets may impede graduate students’ abilities to effectively teach, although it hasn’t yet happened to Best, he said.
“Exam years are the toughest years,” Best said. “The priority for graduate students has to be to pass their exams. The first thing people sacrifice is social life, but that’s not typically enough.”
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