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By Kari Lydersen
Michael Gasper is a Ph.D. student and teaching assistant at New York University. Along with pursuing his degree, he teaches two undergraduate history courses, which take up three or more full days of work per week. Every two weeks, a check for $666.67 arrives in the mail, contributing to his $7,900 yearly salary, after taxes and insurance costs have been deducted.
Living on this amount in New York, he says, is "impossible." Other NYU students have it even worse. Gasper knows one student working as a census interviewer part-time to make ends meet - even though she is eight months pregnant. "There's no way you can survive without getting another job," he says, "unless you're lucky enough to have rich parents."
Gasper is one of the thousands of graduate students around the country who spend hours and hours every week teaching classes and doing research for highly paid professors. For their efforts, these students get stipends in the $500- to $1,400-a-month range and usually little or no health coverage. "We make a pittance for basically doing the work of professors," says Eric Smith, a Ph.D. student and research assistant at the University of Illinois at Chicago. "If universities can get really cheap labor, they will."
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In These Times ©
2000
Vol. 24, No. 13 |