MIT CS PhD student here. Pretty similar story in Boston/Cambridge. Every grad student spends most of their income on rent. What's worse is that MIT and Harvard own a lot of the land in Cambridge and literally have thousands of students that live outside campus increasing the rent demand. MIT is trying to do something about it by building new grad dorms with their most recent one opening up next year but guess what...the rent is insane ... 2.6K a month for 1 bedroom and this is a student dorm... The justification is that its 'below market rate' but stipends are not at market rate.