submission_r8b7c2
CUNY is really, really bad at paying its graduate students. We're suffering. There is no end in sight.
CUNY is really, really bad at paying its graduate students. We’re suffering. There is no end in sight.
When you’re a graduate student, especially in the sciences, the expectation is that you’re paid for your work. You’re working 40+ hour weeks, coming in on weekends, and generating the research that puts CUNY as an R1 school – top tier in terms of scientific output. It’s your full-time job, and then some.
Across all the sciences at CUNY, there are systematic problems with actually getting a paycheck. Graduate workers, the same ones who teach classes, or might mentor you for a research opportunity, often go weeks or months without getting a paycheck. They complain about it, take out predatory loans to buy food, or pay rent, are told “oh, we’re sorry for the mistake, we’ll pay you next week” and then when next week rolls around, they said “whoops, that’s gonna be another two weeks.
Unlike Columbia, who is on strike, we’re kinda not allowed to strike – I think it has to do with being state employees, technically.
The salary for a grad student is far lower than the cost of living in NYC – the base, most common amount is 30k/year. Imagine living on that, but then also you have to expect to go two months with no paycheck at all, because the funding system is broken and the bureaucracy is so entrenched that it’s hard to even know who to contact.
I know this subreddit is largely undergrads, but I wanted to post this just as sort of a testament to the shit that is going on at the Graduate Center. You sign a contract – you get paid X amount of dollars for the year. And you work hard.
And then…they just don’t pay you. If any business did this, the labor board would destroy them. You’d have a lawsuit on your hands. But, hey, we’re teaching classes anyway, even though many of us are not getting paid what we are owed. We go into work every day, publishing papers, mentoring students, and not getting paid. Sometimes, we even get sick, and go to the doctor only to find that, due to a bureaucratic oversight, we no longer have health coverage that we pay into with every paycheck.
Something’s gotta give. It’s really hard to be a PhD student when you are scared about how you are going to pay rent, because you haven’t had a check for the job you do six or seven days a week, for weeks and weeks.
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