
Opinion Graphic
At present, more than 9,500 graduate students learn and work at North Carolina State University. Because they provide vital services to departments and colleges – including but not limited to grading assignments, teaching courses, leading labs, conducting research and writing grants – these graduate students are not simply students. They are workers. Put simply, without the labor of graduate students, North Carolina State University could not function as an elite research or “R1” university.
While they undeniably bring value, the university does not appreciate the contributions of these graduate student workers. Within a decade, graduate student fees nearly doubled, from a $684 fee for a 9-hour (full time) course load in 2007 to a $1,273 standard fee for the same load. Many, if not most, full-time graduate students at North Carolina State University must thus pay $2,546 per year in fees alone.
Despite the immense increase in graduate student fees, raises to graduate student work stipends have not kept pace. Invariably, this inequity puts graduate students into precarious situations, forcing them to choose between going into debt or abandoning their work at NC State. While some graduate student workers seek part-time work outside the university, many colleges actively discourage this practice because it inhibits progress through the program. Moreover, the rise in fees puts students from working-class and poor backgrounds in especially untenable positions and thus serves to reproduce long-standing inequalities across socioeconomic backgrounds.
High fees for graduate students at North Carolina State University have become a fact of life to the point where the Graduate Student Association now considers them ensconced in the very fabric of the university. Graduate students typically do not know where their money goes, and the university provides vague explanations at best. Perhaps they contributed to the obscene raise of NCSU Chancellor Randy Woodson, whose salary went up nearly $32,000 last year. A “victory” for graduate student workers is, at best, a year where our representatives convince the powers that be to not add further increases to an already unreasonable series of fees. The Graduate Student Workers Union at North Carolina State University instead calls for decisive action.
We, the Graduate Student Workers Union, call upon the graduate school to abolish obscene graduate student fees immediately, as of the 2020 Spring Semester. If the university is confused as to how to implement such a plan, it need only look as far as our neighbors at UNC-Chapel Hill. In 2019, our sister school eliminated their graduate student fees to, in their words, ease “the burden of those fees that erode the full value of the stipend” in order “to recruit the best graduate students” possible. We believe NC State should do the same.
— Graduate Student Workers Union at NC State.