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Syracuse University has increased minimum wages for graduate student positions after more than a year of conversations between students and administrators.

SU’s Graduate Student Organization began discussions with the Graduate School last year about raising the minimum stipend for graduate student employees. This year, the university raised graduate assistantship stipends by an average of 2.5%, said Peter Vanable, dean of the graduate school, in an email to The Daily Orange.

But efforts to increase wages for graduate student employees at SU are years-old, and some students believe there’s still more work for the university to do. In 2018, GSO’s Employment Issues Committee found that 75% of graduate assistants earn less pay than the cost of attendance.

“We had some students making less than $14,000 a year, and they also have families,” said Mirjavad Hashemi, GSO president. “If that’s the only source of income for you to live with a family in Syracuse, that’s not sufficient.”

Although several graduate students consider the recent increase a step in the right direction, they said efforts to advocate on behalf of graduate employees will need to continue.

While the stipends have been increasing on average, the growth is not sufficient for many students, said Mackenzie Ess, the internal vice president for GSO. For some, the stipend is their primary source of income, but it doesn’t even cover their cost of living.

The university could do even more to recognize the extra labor expected from graduate students as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, Ess said.

“Highly-intensive research universities depend on the labor being done by graduate students to succeed, and a failure to recognize this is a failure to acknowledge how critical instruction, mentoring and research at SU is carried out by graduate students,” Ess said.

SU’s Graduate School is now in its second year of providing nearly $1 million in new doctoral student funding for both the academic year and summer, Vanable said. Funding includes $750,000 annually for 36 academic year fellowships and research assistantships across 16 academic departments, as well as funding for 50 fellowships with dissertations completed in the summer at $4,000 per award.

Terese Gagnon, a doctoral candidate in the anthropology department and a member of Syracuse Graduate Employees United — a group of student workers advocating for a union — was most involved in advocacy for graduate students from 2016 to 2018. She sees the increase in wages as a result of long-term organization by graduate students.

“I think we could count that as a win in a lot of ways for the organizing that has been going on,” Gagnon said. “We can kind of see through the history of SU moments where there was a lot of collective action and organizing that pay increases did follow that. I think that this is in some ways a continued response to some of that organizing effort.”

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Graduate students said wages can vary based on each department’s financial and funding situations. But GSO’s priority was to increase wages for the lowest-paid students, Hashemi said.

“Some of us have an okay stipend, but we’re really aware that people in certain programs really don’t have a living wage at all, and some people don’t have much security for their funding,” Gagnon said.

Stephanie Hilliard, a doctoral candidate in the writing, composition and rhetoric department who’s both a teaching assistant and consultant in the writing center, said it’s hard to generalize how the increased stipends have affected graduate employees since schools and departments handle funding differently.

Hilliard feels fortunate for the wages they’re making, but they know students in other departments may not be as fortunate. As a research assistant in a master’s program at a different university, Hilliard made just half of what they do now at SU.

The COVID-19 pandemic also made the summer months difficult for many graduate students, Hilliard said. Although Hilliard had a job, they relied heavily on money coming in from financial aid.

Living wage concerns among graduate students existed before the pandemic came to SU, but the urgent pandemic-related needs of graduate students have forced the GSO to redirect resources into areas of high priority, Ess said.

The organization has established the Graduate Pandemic Committee, which aims to ensure graduate workers have access to health and safety supplies that are fairly distributed across the university.

Hashemi thinks the university has done a better job than many of its peer institutions at preserving graduate student positions throughout the pandemic, when classes are mostly online and academic departments are facing financial pressure.

Graduate student organizers plan to continue their advocacy for living wages and more transparency from the university, and they plan to address other issues as they come up, Gagnon said. SU’s wage increases are a good sign, she said.

“I would say it’s good that wages have increased, but it’s definitely still the first step,” Gagnon said.

Published on March 1, 2021 at 11:38 pm

Contact Sarah: scalessa@syr.edu | @sarahalessan