Editor’s note: This article, originally published Oct. 25, 2023, has been clarified to reflect Technician was unable to confirm the accuracy of information stated by Timothy Reid.
Graduate student workers at NC State have long called on the University to get rid of graduate student fees and increase stipends, but they face a tangle of red tape that makes achieving these demands near impossible.
Some challenges originate at the University level, but other obstacles lie far above University administration, having been established by the North Carolina General Assembly.
Peter Harries, dean of NC State’s graduate school, said 65% of graduate students are self-funded, and 35% of graduate students at NC State — mostly doctoral students — are supported by the Graduate Student Support Plan, which provides a health insurance plan and tuition at no cost to the student for a defined number of semesters.
To be eligible for the GSSP, graduate students must meet certain requirements; a full-time, on-campus graduate student must hold a graduate assistantship or primary fellowship with an annual minimum stipend — $10,000 for master’s students and $15,000 for doctoral students.
Students enrolled in the GSSP are still responsible for paying student fees and have the option of deducting these fees from their paycheck. For the 2023-24 academic year, a full-time graduate student must pay $1,291.05 in fees per semester.
“I certainly understand from the students’ perspective that, yeah, the fees are high, without a doubt,” Harries said. “But they also supply, for the most part, really important resources that we wouldn’t have on this campus without the payment of those.”
The NC State Graduate Workers Union has campaigned to get rid of fees for graduate student workers, but hasn’t made much leeway.
Harries said to eliminate fees for graduate student workers, the University would need a hefty donation.
“The thing about fees is that they cannot be paid from any state money that flows to the University, and that’s really where the challenge comes in,” Harries said. “At one point, I did a back of the envelope calculation — we would need a gift of about $400 million to cover that because that’s really the only source we have, is basically money that’s raised from donors to cover that.”
In fiscal year 2023, only 2% of the University’s budgeted revenue came from gifts and investments. The majority of NC State’s budgeted revenue came from state appropriations, contracts and grants, and tuition and fees.
Timothy Reid, student body president and a fourth-year studying business administration, said since state appropriations can’t go toward paying student fees, if graduate student worker fees were removed, it would be difficult to find other sources of revenue to close the gap.
“They are still students at NC State, and those fees go to fund literally all of the student resources, support systems, activities that they’re able to take advantage of, and we see that they do take advantage of at rates at least as great as undergraduates do,” Reid said. “Like WellRec, for example, Campus Health, tutoring services — these are all things that are funded through student fees. So the likelihood that student fees will be removed for graduate students is relatively low.”
Technician was unable to independently confirm the utilization rates of student services.
Instead, Reid said he’s directing his focus toward raising stipends.
Reid said he thinks the biggest challenge to getting graduate student worker stipends raised across the board is the fragmentation of funding for graduate programs. Stipends are set at the individual departmental level, meaning how much a graduate student gets paid is contingent on how much funding the department has — and some departments, such as those in STEM fields, have more funding than others.
“You can get one department to agree to whatever percentage increase, but depending on what resources the other departments or academic programs have available, that may not translate,” Reid said. “You want to provide as much equity for all students across all academic areas, but that may not be the case, depending on what that specific situation looks like for each department.”
In Technician’s survey of 70 graduate student workers, respondents in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences reported an average monthly stipend income of $1,396, while respondents in the College of Engineering reported an average monthly stipend income of $2,059.
Students often point to the University’s $2.02 billion endowment as a way to fund initiatives like raising graduate student worker stipends, but that’s not a feasible solution, Reid said.
“It’s like, ‘Why can’t you just rearrange some of those funds or allocate those funds to these much-needed areas?’” Reid said. “But it’s not that simple because everything is earmarked. So the budget for stipends, you’d be looking at the college or the departmental level.”
Margaret Baker, president of the Graduate Student Association and a doctoral candidate in communication, rhetoric and digital media, said the GSA is an advocacy body for graduate students and has been in conversation with administrators at NC State about raising stipends.
“I live in the reality that our stipends are not enough,” Baker said. “Like, truly, deeply know this reality.”
The NC State Graduate Workers Union has also voiced concerns about low stipends, but it faces considerable challenges to negotiate with the University for higher pay because of long-standing North Carolina labor laws.
In North Carolina, public workers — including graduate student workers employed by a public university — are allowed to join a union, but state law prohibits government employers from entering into collective bargaining agreements with a union.
David Zonderman, an alumni distinguished undergraduate professor and department head in history, said the law significantly limits the strategies a union can use to advocate for certain issues.
“There’s a famous line in one of Charles Dickens’ novels ‘Oliver Twist’ where Mr. Bumble says, ‘Well if that’s the law, the law is an ass,’” Zonderman said. “That’s the way I feel sometimes about certain labor laws. It’s very strange.”
Zonderman said the power to eliminate the collective bargaining ban for public workers in North Carolina rests in the General Assembly.
“I think it will only change if the Democrats get a majority in the state legislature,” Zonderman said. “And then the second thing would be that, if you had a Democratic majority, you’d have to keep it unified and in favor of eliminating this law.”
Just because public worker unions can’t negotiate employment terms through collective bargaining doesn’t mean unions aren’t valuable, Zonderman said. He said unions can provide support to workers through other means.
“I would still say to grad students, if they want to organize, they should,” Zonderman said. “I don’t think it’s ever a bad thing. Just know that they don’t have a lot of options, and they don’t have collective bargaining.”
