These are grad students. They are the academic equivalent of college athletes. They provide great benefits to the school. They generate substantial income. But they are not long-term employees, nor does the school want to turn them into such. The school wants to educate grad students, to turn them into something other than grad students. There is something to be said for not paying them too much, for not encouraging the profession of being a perpetual grad student.

Paying them enough to live off of though isn’t asking for much.

Paying enough to live is more than many jobs these days.

That some other employer doesn't pay well justifies all employers to do the same?

All employers should be paying living wages. I said as much in my first post.

Right, I’m agreeing with you.

>> They provide great benefits to the school. They generate substantial income.

But they won’t pay them enough to be able to feed themselves?

The student athletes aren't paid anything. The reality is that in academia there are a great many positions meant to be temporary, positions that in the past might not have been paid anything at all. Many undergrads generate massive amounts for their schools. Not every star athlete is on scholarship. Not every lap assistant is a paid grad student. Most are actually required to pay the school for the education they receive despite them also generating revenue.

'An injustice anywhere is a justification for injustice everywhere'

Surely there are plenty of potential mechanisms to discourage perpetual grad student-ism by just limiting the contracts and number of years one can be paid to work at a given institution, rather than paying so poorly that the rest of society has to pick up the tab. Particularly for an institution with tens of billions of dollars in the bank and other employees with multi-million dollar salaries.

I could be wrong, but per my assessment many Boston-area grads are spending way more than necessary living in "cool" flats. I don't understand why, though? Lofts, hostels or something less expensive (maybe live in Dorchester instead of Cambridge/Somerville?) would make more sense.

If they can get the welfare system to take over, why have temporary grad students? Grad students with 20 years TA (or research) experience could really reduce the number of tenured professors they need to pay.

In some countries the government funds the education system.You could call that welfare I suppose.

This is a good point. There is literally no difference between a grad student and a stray cat. In both cases if you feed them you’re responsible for them until they die.

Why is it disgusting? Do you think Harvard should tell them NOT to apply for food stamps?

At the current minimum annual salary of $40k, a single student wouldn't be eligible for SNAP amyways, the income threshold for a household size of 1 is $29,160.

You'd need a household size of at least 3 to be eligible, with total household income under $49k. So you, a spouse and 1 child, or you and two children, etc.

> Why is it disgusting? Do you think Harvard should tell them NOT to apply for food stamps?

This feels deliberately obtuse. The second half of the submitted article headline is "Even Though It's the Richest School In The World With A $53 Billion Endowment". Obviously people think Harvard should pay its graduate students more so that they wouldn't need food stamps.

There are a lot of comparisons to Walmart having employees on food stamps, but I think it's worth pointing out that if you are paying federal minimum wage $7.25/hour, that is just $15,080 annually at 40 hours / week * 52 weeks. It is quite shockingly low.

Harvard's minimum pay is almost 3x that amount. If we assume a 40 hour work week, it comes out to $19.23/hour. That is well within the range for what most advocacy groups are calling a living wage. For example, this site pegs it at $18/hour for Suffolk county in Massachusetts: https://livingwageforus.org/tier-i-certification/

The Federal minimum wage is irrelevant here, since Massachusetts law institutes a higher $15/hour rate. As you point out, even that higher wage isn’t enough to live on.

A more robust estimate suggests that the living wage is actually $22.59 in this area.

https://livingwage.mit.edu/metros/14460

"The high cost of living in Boston only adds to Harvard students' struggle."

"The average rent for a Boston one-bedroom is $3,215 a month. Ljunggren said it’s not uncommon for students to be paying $2,000 a month for a studio apartment, or living with multiple roommates to cover a $4,000-a-month two-bedroom." https://www.vice.com/en/article/93kwaa/harvard-tells-grad-st...

That latter paragraph is odd. It seems that the reporter is mentioning average rent in Boston, and I wouldn’t expect the HGSU president to use that as a benchmark: Boston is an unusual place for a Harvard grad student to live.

Perfectly nice Somerville 2BR units appear to be available for a bit above $2k/mo, and they quite a bit more conveniently located to Harvard than most of Boston is.

Maybe the federal minimum wage is also wrong?

The federal minimum wage is highly politicized and the 'right'/'Republican's'/'business' have always lobbied to keep it low. To have cheap labor.

But Food-Stamps/Welfare is driven by what is the minimum to live.

In a perfect world, yes the Minimum Wage should be high enough to match what it takes to live. Then there would not be a need for Welfare (if working). Minimum Wage should match the maximum for qualifying for Welfare.

But since different groups have different goals in driving the two programs, they do not match.

It's obvious to you that graduate student positions should pay enough to support a sole income provider for a family of three? Because according to the parent, that's what we're discussing here.

Yes. Graduate students are inherently older, since they first need to obtain an undergraduate degree, and then graduate school itself can take many years to complete coursework and especially to write a dissertation. You can't expect grad students to put off the rest of their lives indefinitely, not get married, not have a family.

Family formation is delayed across the whole population, but I do think it's worth asking what can be done to support earlier family formation. (Given that many people are saying they are not having the number of kids they would like to have.)

Easy: housing that can be afforded by a single income household, where the loan is serviceable at wages obtainable by someone 25 years old.

I certainly agree that Boston and Massachusetts should reduce, or ideally eliminate, their restrictions on what housing can be built and where.

The benefit of doing that instead is it would help approximately 1000 times the number of people than raising Harvard grad student pay would.

It's worth noting that Harvard grad students are the ones getting attention here, and not the average person getting squeezed by rent. Are you going to whack-a-mole every single employer in the Boston MSA to pay at least $60k? Even if you did this, the increased pay would just go to inflated housing costs.

The underlying problem is a scarcity of housing, you can't fix that by giving people (in aggregate) more money. It will just bid up the cost of the scarce good.

And none of this really affects whether or not grad students should be encouraged to apply for whatever government benefits they are eligible for. Harvard doesn't control where the federal government sets the income cutoffs for benefits.

Nevertheless I'm sure highlighting this is a good way to grab attention.

> It's worth noting that Harvard grad students are the ones getting attention here, and not the average person getting squeezed by rent.

This is a single article, and a single article can only usefully highlight a single issue. If news articles could only talk about the worst problems in the world, then perhaps every news article in the world would be about climate change. Which perhaps wouldn't be a bad thing! But still, this is a red herring, because other news articles do in fact talk about the average person getting squeezed by rent.

> Are you going to whack-a-mole every single employer in the Boston MSA to pay at least $60k?

Not every employer in the Boston area has a $50 billion endowment.

If you are paying your employees wages that are not in line with sustainable living standards, aligned with then image you are expecting them to give, you are shortchanging them. You are over-leveraging your attractiveness as a Brand to make them choose a few years as indentured servants, or walk away.

That attitude speaks very poorly of Harvard, but is not surprising. Just another data point that they only want the brethren of the rich, they don’t want smart but poorer talent.

When 50% of their admits are legacy (ie rich ppl) this is even worse.

Does this institution deserve any USG grant money?

Wealthy legacy families don't allow their kids to be grad students. They set them up with jobs and internships. Rich people generally do not teach. I'd bet that the percentage of legacy grad students is far lower than of legacy undergrads.

50% of the Harvard class are not legacy. It's nowhere close to that number.

Of course Harvard (one of the best universities in the world) deserves USG grants.

Isn't that for undergraduate admissions?

Correct me if I am wrong.

30% of those admitted to Harvard each year are recruited athletes, legacies, relatives of donors and children of faculty and staff.

Legacies are a subset of that 30%.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/25/us/politics/harvard-admis...

Legacy is closer to 15% of the class. You might be confusing the number with Legacy+Athlete+Faculty+Donor?

Its not a normal jobs, they're students.

Grad students are essentially like employees, just with shitty pay and a higher dependence on the goodwill of their bosses to get their PhD. A large part of scientific research in academia is performed by grad students.

To compare this with an area HN is more familiar with, the equivalent to a grad student would be a junior developer fresh out of college in their first 3-5 years. Of course they don't know everything yet and they need some education and mentoring. But that doesn't mean it isn't a real job they do.

The job grad students do is roughly the same they'd do later if they stay in research.

Being an RA, at least, is very skilled labor. I’d say the job is 80% work and 20% learning academic process and social mores from your advisor.

Why is it relevant that outside of their capacities as employees of Harvard they are also students of Harvard?

OK then quit and work for an employer that pays you more.

Why do that when you can go on food stamps and have the tax-paying public subsidize labor for one of the wealthiest institutions in world history?

In many countries they are considered workers and have all the social benefits of regular workers.

As a teaching assistant before and a research assistant now, I say technically it's a job.

You're expected to perform atleast 40 hours of research, often if not 1.5x more. Experimental research involves setting up and conducting them, while theoretical research involves standardizing the set of rules that one should seek in an experiment: modeling. All works involve literature review, writing, designing plots, coming up with scientifically sound creative ideas. All that with tight deadlines too.

I don't see why this should be any less than a job.

I definitely worked harder when I was a grad student than now as a software engineer who finds time to slack.

In the nine states that responded about SNAP benefits — Arkansas, Georgia, Indiana, Maine, Massachusetts, Nebraska, North Carolina, Tennessee and Washington — Walmart was found to have employed about 14,500 workers receiving the benefit, followed by McDonald's with 8,780, according to Sanders's team.

All welfare for the working poor is corporate welfare in reality.

Walmart does pay a wage that would allow its employees to be housed, showered and fed as they report to work and yet, they get employees that are and all the benefits that come with it. They should be hiring exclusively from the homeless at the rate they wish to pay.

In a crony capitalistic world that makes perfect sense.

Why not underpay people if the taxpayers will pick up the slack?

Why not dump waste in the rivers if the taxpayers will clean it up?

It's not like there is a penalty for doing so, beyond the occasional slap in the wrist.

In those 9 states Walmart has 312000 employees, so that's 4.6% on SNAP.

As other comments have noted there are income limits for SNAP. A single person working at Walmart full time would make too much for SNAP. So would a family of two with both people working at Walmart. It looks like same for a family of two adults working at Walmart that has 2 kids (who do not work). A family of two adults with no kids with only one adult working would be right near the boundary.

Without more information on the distribution of family size and type among Walmart workers the Sanders numbers aren't very useful. To illustrate how much family composition can matter, I've known Mormon families that would have qualified for SNAP if the working parent had taken an entry level engineering job at Google, and no one would ever seriously say that an entry level Google engineering job does not pay a living wage.

>If you can’t pay your people a living wage, you deserve to go out of business.

I agree, which is why I'm not sympathetic if "AI" ends up driving most of the creative occupations (stereotypical destitute artist, replacable office drone, etc.) to extinction.

>Society should not be in the business of subsidizing businesses in this manner.

This framing doesn't make any sense. People need to eat regardless of whether they work for Harvard or not. If they didn't work for Harvard the government still need to pay for the food stamps. Therefore it's not really clear how we're suddenly "subsidizing" Harvard if the person in question decided to work for them.

Its subsidizing because Havard is getting their labor for less than its actual cost (the minimum cost of labor being the basic living needs of those doing the labor). The government is covering the difference - therefore subsidizing Harvard who absolutely have the means to pay they full cost (and then some) themselves.

Humans aren't ec2 instances that you can spin up/down at will. "the basic living needs of those doing the labor" exists whether or not they're working. It's a sunk cost, unless we as a society are willing to let them die of hunger.

This doesn't mean that Havard should get the benefits of people's hard work without paying the full cost for it.

Indeed. I wonder if those in this thread believe this logic applies to every government benefit / transfer.

If GM isn’t paying a single mom enough that her kids don’t earn out of receiving Pell Grants, is the Department of Education “subsidizing” GM?

Social Security is a net payout win (i.e. a transfer payment, long term) for most lower-income workers. Is it subsidizing employers?

The “living wage” argument is really an argument that the government should turn over the responsibility of running the social safety net to private businesses (e.g. Harvard must pay a single mother more—enough to level past food stamps). I don’t think this is actually anyone’s desired end-state.

>The “living wage” argument is really an argument that the government should turn over the responsibility of running the social safety net to private businesses (e.g. Harvard must pay a single mother more—enough to level past food stamps).

While I understand your argument and it's not factually wrong, it misses a few key details - chiefly the one that private businesses continue to try to lower costs by any and every means necessary, including seeking out and taking advantage of cheaper labor, and by participating in regulatory capture. Both of these are highly counter-productive to the overall health of the country's economy. If private businesses insist on being able to pollute, engage in anticomptetive practices, corrupt our lawmakers - all to ensure that they make more money, we have to as a society insist that yes, they MUST pay more to their laborers, especially if the businesses insist that they continue to pay their C-Suite an inordinate amount of money for no particular reason.

I’d rather just eliminate the regulatory capture!

A system where corporations take on government responsibilities in return for monopoly powers and other market barriers is something like the worst of all possible worlds.

It is a bad system, for sure, but the problem is that the stock markets reward corporations time and time again for entrenching themselves into monopolistic positions within their respective economic sectors.

Regulatory capture sucks, but good luck telling a congressman that they can't accept ~bribes~ donations or promises of cushy future employment situations (or jobs for their relatives) in exchange for favorable legislation. Those who are uniquely positioned to end the problem are also uniquely positioned to reap tremendous rewards from ignoring the problem.

> If they didn't work for Harvard the government still need to pay for the food stamps.

This is a bizarre argument. Harvard graduate students aren't doing it for graduate student pay, as if they couldn't get better paying jobs. Graduate school is just a temporary gig, a pit stop for the sake of their much higher life ambitions. They wouldn't be on food stamps if they weren't grad students.

>Graduate school is just a temporary gig, a pit stop for the sake of their much higher life ambitions. They wouldn't be on food stamps if they weren't grad students.

If you're putting it that way, being an undergraduate is even worse. Like graduate students, their program is "just a temporary gig, a pit stop for the sake of their much higher life ambitions", but unlike graduate students you don't even get paid. Should we also be mad that undergraduates are on food stamps?

> unlike graduate students you don't even get paid

That's because they aren't doing work for the university, unlike graduate students.

> Should we also be mad that undergraduates are on food stamps?

Yes? Of course! It's strange that you didn't seem to anticipate this answer.

If you turn it around that way, a person who is working for Harvard but not getting enough money from them to pay for the basics is the one subsidizing Harvard. It's giving them the benefit of the work and undercharging them for it, and making up the difference with food stamps.

> making up the difference with food stamps.

in other words, the gov't is subsidizing the cost of said person, who in turn, is "subsidizing" harvard. So by the transitive rule, the gov't is subsidizing harvard.

The government heavily subsidizes every university, both directly (in the form of research grants, student loans, etc.) and also by setting up a favorable tax structure. Governments subsidizing universities results in large social benefits, and should generally be applauded, though the form of those subsidies could use some structural changes.

The home mortgage interest deduction is the same thing, mathematically. Is Harvard also being subsidized by the Feds via rich professors living in Cambridge?

Yes!

OK well, now all government benefits (and roads, and defense, and NIST, …) are “subsidies”, and it’s not clear why taking advantage of one—by Harvard or anyone else—is somehow counter to the reason the government is spending the money in the first place or otherwise worthy of scorn.

Now you've got it. We're a democracy and we tax ourselves to buy things for ourselves.

There’s also the condition that graduate students can’t simply leave to find better work. This is very shitty behavior from the school.

It’s shitty to advise them to take advantage of government benefits available to them? What’s special about TANF in this regard? As others here have pointed out, for some families in Cambridge the eligibility ceiling for some benefits is quite high.

It isn't just Harvard. I think you are saying this person could be working anywhere, so why is this Harvard's problem?

But other companies are also doing this, Walmart being biggest example.

If there is entire group of people that is subsidized labor, then yes all the companies are benefiting. Harvard just seems like extra disgusting because they are a rich institution of learning, and should do better. While for Walmart, we kind of expect them to use slave labor, it is expected.

I've seen a lot of commentary on Walmart over the years FWIW,

https://www.mic.com/articles/104994/walmart-workers-have-a-b...

https://www.foxbusiness.com/markets/walmart-mcdonalds-larges...

It's honestly a hard problem to solve.

From the government perspective, is better to have someone making low income with food stamps then entirely unemployed and relying on more social benefits.

Businesses raise wages when no one will accept the job at that wage. Social benefits like food stamps allow individuals to take jobs at lower wage, and therefore drive down the price.

I mean conclusion seems simple here, raise minimal wages. Preferably by area too, if minimum wage doesn't allow to subside in reasonable commuting distance it means it is too low.

> Social benefits like food stamps allow individuals to take jobs at lower wage, and therefore drive down the price.

So subsidizing corporate workforce exploitation with taxes. Terrible idea.

Late response, but not every workers situation is identical. Someone might be single and someone might have 10 children with disabilities.

This is why programs like food stamps and disability support take into account the situation of the individual