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.