For all American grad students who get tuition waivers.
This is extremely important for you to be aware of. Please spread the word.Source: Twitter
Right now, I don’t think I know anybody who wouldn’t quit if this passed. Schools would lose their TAs and RAs en mass.
This would also make it impossible for disabled grad students - I can’t have roommates because of celiac (I tried, it didn’t work out), and so 2/3 of my paycheck goes right back out as rent. And I make even less than this guy per year - I make 25-28k/year in one of the worst CoL places in America. This will wreck the ability of people to go into research. This will make it even worse for people with medical expenses who want to go to school.
everyone’s talking about STEM, and that’s fair, but like a LOT humanities PhDs make under 26k in their stipend (26-27k a year is the elite programs, at least for Art History. I got about 21-22k for a PhD program and this was considered pretty good, & folks often expect more like 15-22k a year afaik. I’ve seen some PhD’s in the humanities offer as low as 12k. Master’s students, if they get a stipend at all, are usually looking at 10-15k/year).
32.5k is pretty much above and beyond what most humanities PhDs get or dream of. I’m not just pointing that out to be bitter about the way STEM is much better funded than the humanities, I’m pointing this out because this effectively obliterates all of the humanities. STEM will struggle, decay, stagnate. But companies who want to hire MAs and PhD’s for their industry will inevitably step in. Like hospitals who help folks pay for extra nursing or doctor’s credits, like businesses that help subsidize your MBA, like any other arrangement where the employer will gain control of who they do and don’t finance, and how they finance it, and equally, who gets to learn what. Capitalism will control STEM more than it does, which is dangerous and bad, but…
but it will stumble through, probably. Humanities probably won’t.
structures like that, like direct industries and multi-billion dollar companies generally don’t exist for Art History or Comparative World Lit, History, or Philosophy, or… you get the picture.
When I was in my humanities PhD program, I had a stipend of $20k a year and that was regarded as generous. I covered the rest by working part-time jobs, adjuncting, and living in cheap housing with several other grad students for roommates.
It wasn’t tenable. I dropped out of my program mainly for financial reasons, because my stipend ran out and I had to get a full-time job.
Yeah, this will definitely kill the entire humanities PhD ecosystem. It’s a terrible ecosystem to begin with, but it can always get worse.
I’ve been having conversations about this with people in my department. A significant number are seriously concerned that they will have to leave if this goes through, and we’re at a public university so our tuition isn’t nearly as high as at private universities.
This won’t just have ramifications for grad departments either. Who teaches undergraduate humanities classes? PhD students. When we’re gone there won’t be any of those either.
