Salaries for PhD students in the biological sciences fall well below the basic cost of living at almost every institution and department in the US, according to crowdsourced data
). The study found that although students at three universities in the northeast generally earned living wages, students in other regions fared much worse. In the south, PhD students were nearly $8,000 short of a living wage, on average. The average shortfall nationally was just over $4,500.
The current state of PhD salaries threatens to undermine US efforts to increase diversity in science, Gaynor says. “If programmes aren’t meeting the basic cost of living, who are we selecting for? People who have financial support or external fellowships.” Co-author Michelle Kirchner, a third-year PhD student in entomology at NC State, says their graduate-student contract prohibits taking on a second job to make ends meet. “How am I supposed to support myself?” she asks. “The university should be required to pay the cost of living.”Last December, to better understand the situation, Petzoldt helped to conduct a survey of 35 students in the entomology and plant pathology department at NC State.
In comments, many respondents highlighted the gap between stipends and the cost of living. One wrote that “graduate students are needlessly suffering and the university can do far more than it is doing to lessen the burden”. Another wrote: “Pay your graduate students a liveable salary! Getting a doctorate is hard enough … [worrying] about finances makes this experience loathsome and diminishes my opinion of this university.
Kawahara joined an early bargaining session at which, he says, there were roughly 100 students present, but he didn’t notice any other faculty members. “I’ve had students who also worked for DoorDash [a food-delivery company],” he says.
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