Harvard University encourages grad students to go on food stamps | Hacker News Reader

Harvard University encourages grad students to go on food stamps

finance.yahoo.com

124 pointshaltingproblem147 comments

It's easy to blame Harvard and other universities. But if you focus on Harvard you ignore the plight of all other graduate students around the country who don't have a university with a massive endowment.

This is fault of the federal government.

We are not evil. We want to pay students more. We lived as students and it was terrible financially.

Our grants from the federal government are just not large enough to pay students well. And the federal government ties our hands.

Graduate student salaries are limited by the NIH cap. https://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/NOT-OD-22-1...

The NIH limits you to $56,484 per student. Out of this come taxes, some fees, etc.

Even if I decide that I want my students to live better and hire a few less (which by the way would hurt my ability to get future grants), I am not allowed to pay them more than that out of NIH grants!

Most grants (NSF, DoD, industry and foundation grants) are calibrated to the NIH benchmark.

I wish these articles would blame the real problem: federal science funding has fallen off dramatically. Even 20 years ago we used to spend about 0.9% of GDP on science. Now, we spend about 0.5%. 20 years ago, about 5% of the spending of the federal government was on science, now it's about 2.5%.

We need the federal government to step up science funding if we want students to be able to lead normal lives.

That is some grade A BS. Blaming the government.

Harvard is a private entity. They can pay whatever they want.

The link you posted, and description, is for the portion the government will pay. The portion they will pay for research.

It isn't some salary cap placed on the university like it's the Yankees. The University can pay on top of that.

Amen

Since we are already off topic, here is one more -- a certain government wanted graduate students to pay taxes on their "tuition" remission back in 2017, which could be hundreds to thousands of dollars, out of $20k-30k annual salary. Thank god it did not happen.

I'm split on this. Yes, a university as rich as Harvard should adequately support it's students. But other than that, there should not be any stigma associated with accepting any form of government support. Students sounds like the ideal group that the government should really support.

There should be no stigma for people in need taking help, but there should definitely be a stigma for wealthy people taking government support. Welfare is to help people who can’t get by one their own. Not to pad the pockets of the wealthy. Nobody is criticizing grad students for taking food stamps, they are criticizing Harvard for not paying a living wage and instead taking yet more federal welfare to bolster their massive pile of tax free cash.

Should wealthy people feel a stigma for attending public school?

The problem with food stamps is that they are designed to attach stigma to whoever uses them. The best way to sort out inequities in who receives a benefit is not through means-testing, but on the tax side.

...Except at a certain scale, it becomes productive to incorporate the Welfare mechanism into your compensation scheme. Or have people forgotten how both Walmart and McDonalds encourage their employees to utilize food stamps and other forms of welfare?

https://www.commondreams.org/newswire/2020/11/18/taxpayers-s...

Say it with me:

"Any system I implement to help the little guy will be abused or otherwise utilized to subsidize the big guy unless I specifically address that possibility."

It's positively disgusting behavior; but alas, here we are.

This is were the US Gov needs to do something. Especially for businesses doing the same, yes they exist and I am sure we all know one specific business.

I do not know how graduate students work, do they pay tuition or does Harvard pay them for their work ? Also is it for only certain majors. For example do STEM/Law/Business majors get better pay if Harvard pays them ?

In anycase, if Harvard pays these students, then yes they should get a livable wage or at least free housing.

Grad students are both apprentices and employees. Typically the university charges tuition which is waived if they TA (teaching assistant) or their research advisor (or department) funds them out of their grant or operating budget. I don't know for sure if this is the reason but it is a sleight of hand to either get more grant money into the operating budget. Grants typically allow some percentage overhead, I don't know if research associates are included in that or separate chargeable "line items".

Anyway it is like this all across academia except for the "exceptional" students who are recruited. They tend to get everything paid for.

UCLA, UCSC, all of them pay poverty wages. Grad students have started unionizing though to get better conditions. In reality grad school in the US is basically an immigration pipeline. We should import the best and brightest. The New York times says 80% of US grad students are foreign [1]. This is the reverse of 80% of all US college students being US citizens.

That's absolutely crazy to think about. Why aren't more US citizens going to grad school?

Either they are not qualified, which means we are not educating our college students to a sufficient standard, the poverty wages are so detrimental that only foreigners will put up with it. Something is clearly broken.

1. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/03/education/edlife/american...

> Either they are not qualified, which means we are not educating our college students to a sufficient standard, the poverty wages are so detrimental that only foreigners will put up with it.

The third possibility is of course that top 1% of the college students outside of US are better than 10th percentile of college students inside.

Or, fourth possibility: US universities are some of the best in the world, and whilst undergraduate education in one's home country doesn't have a substantial quality gap, graduate education very well may.

On average, rankings of the world's top universities are about 60% US universities and 30% UK universities (just from a quick survey of ~5 ranking systems). Given this, it makes sense that graduate programs would attract a larger share of immigrants than undergraduate programs, as the reputation of the university is far more important for grad students than undergrad.

Frankly, I struggle to see why a large share of immigrants is a problem: It's a good way for the US to absorb huge amounts of global talent. If even half of the students stay in the US for their academic careers, it's a major win for the US. I can't really imagine a non-racist reason to oppose this.

to put into perspective: phd graduants in Germany can earn 48k EUR per year in the beginning. (not every subject but certainly in CS), this is 10 % above average income in Germany and definitely decent. And yes, some phd student decided to stay in Germany because of these conditions.

CS is a rare exception, the common case is 50-66% of that.

Yeah, CS PhD students have way more leverage than students in other fields. A CS student can realistically drop out, join industry, and make more than their advisor right out of the gate.

So about the same as a Harvard grad student? The Graduate students in Germany get food stamps?

Adjusted for local cost of living, the Harvard grad students are much worse off. The median income for Cambridge is $112k, so these grad students are earning around a third of that. Said German grad students are earning more than the area median income.

If said student is in Munich or Frankfurt his cost of living is very similar to student in Cambridge. Also while Cambridge median is high, 30 min drive gets you to the place where median is less than 50k.

You also have to ask what the median income is for a 22-year-old in Cambridge and how that compares. It makes no sense to compare someone just starting their career to a median based on people that have been working for probably 20 plus years.

Sure it does. Higher median income in a given area means the costs of nearly everything go up comparably. Look at the cost of living in a place with a six-figure median income and compare that to the cost of living somewhere with a $30k median income.

The students have to live there so the cost of living is what matters, not trying to make it look marginally (and artificially) better by excluding people who earn more because they're old.

So you're you're saying that every job with 0 years of experience should pay the median for the local?

You raise the minimum and you raise the mean. The only time the mean and the minimum can be the same is if everyone is paid the same as the highest earner

Like the Simpsons episode where Bill Gates buys Homer's company. Bill says: I didn't get rich writing checks.

I can understand a person who is only able to work part time but the FTE of part time + part time should equate to some level of full time compensation. That includes a livable income. If something isn't livable it is because there is a race to the bottom which is happening now because company greed ensures profits above a fluid economy. The economy needs to flow not stagnate to ensure everyone has enough money.

There have been several articles over the years showing most Walmart employees are also on food stamps.

It's the American way, privatize the profits by paying as little as possible, socialize the costs by making everyone get on income supplementation for necessities like food.

Food prices have doubled, so has rent prices, but minimum wage, general income, that certainly has not doubled.

Do I understand that right that with a minimum wage for grad students of $40,000 they would still be eligible for food stamps in many cases? I don't have a good grasp of the living costs here, but it seems to me that this income is likely too high to qualify for SNAP based on a quick and rough search.

Include a spouse and a child and it easily falls over the poverty line.

Which is likely not that common for grad students, at least in my experience. A grad student as the sole earner for a family is not the norm.

If they are married and their partner works, then it doubles the income. Also if they have a small child there is probably some form of government support. And they should have tax deductions too.

Boston/Cambridge is a very expensive area to live, but this doesn't nessecarily factor into SNAP eligibility, afaik.

A single person making $40k would not qualify for SNAP, but if they had a kid it looks like they likely could get it based on this eligibility chart:

https://www.mass.gov/how-to/apply-for-snap-benefits-food-sta...

That's rich for "Know your place, grad students. We, like Walmart, condone taking tax payer money (also known as "welfare for the poor for the rich") as indirectly part of your compensation."

If you want to be rich, avoid being a grad student for very long or entirely unless it's pivotal to a tangible financial path where the opportunity cost is significantly worth it.

One of my friends told me at one of the FAANGs, some of the employees were openly asking on financial-planning internal mailing list in how to qualify their kids for financial aid or grants because they made too much.

That's true, there's a niche business for consulting on gaming tuition and aid (as well as college admissions in general).

FAANG engineers certainly earn enough that gaming the system isn't necessary, but "don't hate the player, hate the game" applies.

For normal middle-class families, planning for future tuition is a massive undertaking.

Biggest hack: go work for Stanford for enough years as an FTE.

https://cardinalatwork.stanford.edu/benefits-rewards/tgp/ben...

personal experience..in one of the school systems i went to (grade K-12), i had to pay $2.50 for lunch because my parents had a certain income. $2.5 was still a lot to me, so i rather not eat and felt really bad for using my parent's income. i think about it from ($2.5 * 5 days a week) for a whole school year.

most of my friends didn't have to pay as their parents didn't meet the income threshold. they just have to show a certain ID for school lunch and get a pass.

i remember, i did have some sort of resentment...and the smell of food that my friends ate during lunch even made me more hungry!

From how this is treated by commentators, I wonder how Chèque Repas systems common in Europe would be received. (basically, a lunch voucher that's part garnished-wages, part employer contribution, and mostly a tax-deduct from the government. in a €1/€2.4/€5 ratio)

It's only visibly similar though, since they're meant to be used on prepared food, and everyone tends to get them from the c-suite to interns.

This seems like a rewrite of better reporting by Motherboard:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/93kwaa/harvard-tells-grad-st...

It’s not just grad students, postdoc pay is crap too. Back when I was at Princeton a few years ago, postdoc salary in the physics department was a bit above $50k IIRC. It really sucks to be in a field where you’re expected to do at least two stints of postdoc after getting your PhD (when you’re already 27 or older).

https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2021/10/harvard-endowment-su...

Just like with immigrant visa sponsors, any source of full time engagement should be liable for recovery of any public assistance money. Why should an individual be liable but an institution such as Harvard or Walmart not?

Harvard is a very poor university, they only have a $50 Billion endowment. They could not possibly afford to give their students a tray of free cafeteria slop three times a day.

Yes, we should probably get used to the idea of rationing. In a world where resources are getting increasingly scarce it would be foolish to assume we can let the market solve scarcity issues, and let the rich have all the fun without repercussions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationing

I feel like the more productive answer here would be to simply not allow the rich to own all the resources and have all the fun.

Americans aren't on food stamps because there's a shortage of food, but a shortage of access to food due to wage and value theft by the capitalist class.

Late Stage Capitalism is Socialism.

Capitalism drives wealth distribution to the Top. The wealth moves from the masses to the few.

Then, the poor get so poor that society starts to break down. The 'workers' can no longer afford to live where the work is.

But this upsets the rich -> "why can't I hire dishwashers? why can't I hire house keepers".

So, the Rich start actually supporting 'socialist' type programs like 'food stamps' in order to keep some bare minimum of surviving population to serve them.

If a population is starving, then it is can quickly turn into violent revolution.

The Rich would rather chill and have a nice lunch, so they allow a limited amount of re-distribution of the wealth back to the poor (socialism), but just at the minimum needed to reduce the poor's desperation enough to keep them from turning into the violent revolution.

The growing trend of vast numbers of people with full time jobs that also need welfare to eat, is the indicator that society is reaching the end game. They are no longer employees, there is no longer a free market for the supply/demand of labor, it is all supply, and all are reduced to slaves. Just happily ignorant of it, because just enough money is allowed to trickle down.

But it isn't earned money, labor no longer has value, it is a determined measured trickle down, that is just enough to keep people working.

Not sure why there is disagreement.

It is clearly happening.

https://www.foxbusiness.com/markets/walmart-mcdonalds-larges...

I'm not pro Socialism, or Capitalism. I'm saying they are part of the same system. The rich use "socialist" type programs as another means of control. To support the system that benefits the rich.

In this case, Harvard (the Rich) benefits from the Government subsidizing the Harvard workforce with welfare (Socialism).

Here's Mariner Eccles, one-time Fed chair (the current Fed building is named after him), agreeing (IMO) with you:

"It is utterly impossible, as this country has demonstrated again and again, for the rich to save as much as they have been trying to save, and save anything that is worth saving. They can save idle factories and useless railroad coaches; they can save empty office buildings and closed banks; they can save paper evidences of foreign loans; but as a class they can not save anything that is worth saving, above and beyond the amount that is made profitable by the increase of consumer buying. It is for the interests of the well to do – to protect them from the results of their own folly – that we should take from them a sufficient amount of their surplus to enable consumers to consume and business to operate at a profit. This is not “soaking the rich”; it is saving the rich. Incidentally, it is the only way to assure them the serenity and security which they do not have at the present moment." [0]

Technically, he's quoting another economist, in congressional testimony.

[0] https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/files/docs/meltzer/ecctes33.pd...

Socialism*

*for the rich, and social Darwinian abject poverty for everyone else. Occasionally, crumbs are thrown to mollify the unresolved grievances. (Social Security was just a big crumb, and Medicare isn't single-payer and is for-profit considering how it's structured.)

I feel for them. Groceries are prohibitively expensive right now.

I typically only eat one meal a day now or not at all.

My salary is on the higher end so I can't imagine what its like for those that are less fortunate.

Higher end for a grad student? Or higher end like a FAANG engineer? Because “higher end salary” and “can only afford one meal/day” isn’t something you hear often.

He's on the higher end but is paying a mortgage on a million dollar house and has a 150k SUV sitting in the driveway, it's tough out there right now :P

I think one point is what you eat instead of the meals.

This is disgusting. For any institution and any job. If you can’t pay your people a living wage, you deserve to go out of business. Society should not be in the business of subsidizing businesses in this manner.

In the nine states that responded about SNAP benefits — Arkansas, Georgia, Indiana, Maine, Massachusetts, Nebraska, North Carolina, Tennessee and Washington — Walmart was found to have employed about 14,500 workers receiving the benefit, followed by McDonald's with 8,780, according to Sanders's team.

All welfare for the working poor is corporate welfare in reality.

Walmart doesn't pay a wage that would allow its employees to be housed, showered and fed as they report to work and yet, they get employees that are and all the benefits that come with it. They should be hiring exclusively from the homeless at the rate they wish to pay.

In a crony capitalistic world that makes perfect sense.

Why not underpay people if the taxpayers will pick up the slack?

Why not dump waste in the rivers if the taxpayers will clean it up?

It's not like there is a penalty for doing so, beyond the occasional slap in the wrist.

In those 9 states Walmart has 312000 employees, so that's 4.6% on SNAP.

As other comments have noted there are income limits for SNAP. A single person working at Walmart full time would make too much for SNAP. So would a family of two with both people working at Walmart. It looks like same for a family of two adults working at Walmart that has 2 kids (who do not work). A family of two adults with no kids with only one adult working would be right near the boundary.

Without more information on the distribution of family size and type among Walmart workers the Sanders numbers aren't very useful. To illustrate how much family composition can matter, I've known Mormon families that would have qualified for SNAP if the working parent had taken an entry level engineering job at Google, and no one would ever seriously say that an entry level Google engineering job does not pay a living wage.

>Society should not be in the business of subsidizing businesses in this manner.

This framing doesn't make any sense. People need to eat regardless of whether they work for Harvard or not. If they didn't work for Harvard the government still need to pay for the food stamps. Therefore it's not really clear how we're suddenly "subsidizing" Harvard if the person in question decided to work for them.

If you turn it around that way, a person who is working for Harvard but not getting enough money from them to pay for the basics is the one subsidizing Harvard. It's giving them the benefit of the work and undercharging them for it, and making up the difference with food stamps.

> making up the difference with food stamps.

in other words, the gov't is subsidizing the cost of said person, who in turn, is "subsidizing" harvard. So by the transitive rule, the gov't is subsidizing harvard.

The home mortgage interest deduction is the same thing, mathematically. Is Harvard also being subsidized by the Feds via rich professors living in Cambridge?

Yes!

OK well, now all government benefits (and roads, and defense, and NIST, …) are “subsidies”, and it’s not clear why taking advantage of one—by Harvard or anyone else—is somehow counter to the reason the government is spending the money in the first place or otherwise worthy of scorn.

Now you've got it. We're a democracy and we tax ourselves to buy things for ourselves.

Its subsidizing because Havard is getting their labor for less than its actual cost (the minimum cost of labor being the basic living needs of those doing the labor). The government is covering the difference - therefore subsidizing Harvard who absolutely have the means to pay they full cost (and then some) themselves.

Humans aren't ec2 instances that you can spin up/down at will. "the basic living needs of those doing the labor" exists whether or not they're working. It's a sunk cost, unless we as a society are willing to let them die of hunger.

This doesn't mean that Havard should get the benefits of people's hard work without paying the full cost for it.

It isn't just Harvard. I think you are saying this person could be working anywhere, so why is this Harvard's problem?

But other companies are also doing this, Walmart being biggest example.

If there is entire group of people that is subsidized labor, then yes all the companies are benefiting. Harvard just seems like extra disgusting because they are a rich institution of learning, and should do better. While for Walmart, we kind of expect them to use slave labor, it is expected.

I've seen a lot of commentary on Walmart over the years FWIW,

https://www.mic.com/articles/104994/walmart-workers-have-a-b...

https://www.foxbusiness.com/markets/walmart-mcdonalds-larges...

There’s also the condition that graduate students can’t simply leave to find better work. This is very shitty behavior from the school.

It’s shitty to advise them to take advantage of government benefits available to them? What’s special about TANF in this regard? As others here have pointed out, for some families in Cambridge the eligibility ceiling for some benefits is quite high.

> If they didn't work for Harvard the government still need to pay for the food stamps.

This is a bizarre argument. Harvard graduate students aren't doing it for graduate student pay, as if they couldn't get better paying jobs. Graduate school is just a temporary gig, a pit stop for the sake of their much higher life ambitions. They wouldn't be on food stamps if they weren't grad students.

>Graduate school is just a temporary gig, a pit stop for the sake of their much higher life ambitions. They wouldn't be on food stamps if they weren't grad students.

If you're putting it that way, being an undergraduate is even worse. Like graduate students, their program is "just a temporary gig, a pit stop for the sake of their much higher life ambitions", but unlike graduate students you don't even get paid. Should we also be mad that undergraduates are on food stamps?

> unlike graduate students you don't even get paid

That's because they aren't doing work for the university, unlike graduate students.

> Should we also be mad that undergraduates are on food stamps?

Yes? Of course! It's strange that you didn't seem to anticipate this answer.

Indeed. I wonder if those in this thread believe this logic applies to every government benefit / transfer.

If GM isn’t paying a single mom enough that her kids don’t earn out of receiving Pell Grants, is the Department of Education “subsidizing” GM?

Social Security is a net payout win (i.e. a transfer payment, long term) for most lower-income workers. Is it subsidizing employers?

The “living wage” argument is really an argument that the government should turn over the responsibility of running the social safety net to private businesses (e.g. Harvard must pay a single mother more—enough to level past food stamps). I don’t think this is actually anyone’s desired end-state.

>The “living wage” argument is really an argument that the government should turn over the responsibility of running the social safety net to private businesses (e.g. Harvard must pay a single mother more—enough to level past food stamps).

While I understand your argument and it's not factually wrong, it misses a few key details - chiefly the one that private businesses continue to try to lower costs by any and every means necessary, including seeking out and taking advantage of cheaper labor, and by participating in regulatory capture. Both of these are highly counter-productive to the overall health of the country's economy. If private businesses insist on being able to pollute, engage in anticomptetive practices, corrupt our lawmakers - all to ensure that they make more money, we have to as a society insist that yes, they MUST pay more to their laborers, especially if the businesses insist that they continue to pay their C-Suite an inordinate amount of money for no particular reason.

I’d rather just eliminate the regulatory capture!

A system where corporations take on government responsibilities in return for monopoly powers and other market barriers is something like the worst of all possible worlds.

It is a bad system, for sure, but the problem is that the stock markets reward corporations time and time again for entrenching themselves into monopolistic positions within their respective economic sectors.

Regulatory capture sucks, but good luck telling a congressman that they can't accept ~bribes~ donations or promises of cushy future employment situations (or jobs for their relatives) in exchange for favorable legislation. Those who are uniquely positioned to end the problem are also uniquely positioned to reap tremendous rewards from ignoring the problem.

Its not a normal jobs, they're students.

Why is it relevant that outside of their capacities as employees of Harvard they are also students of Harvard?

OK then quit and work for an employer that pays you more.

Why do that when you can go on food stamps and have the tax-paying public subsidize labor for one of the wealthiest institutions in world history?

Grad students are essentially like employees, just with shitty pay and a higher dependence on the goodwill of their bosses to get their PhD. A large part of scientific research in academia is performed by grad students.

To compare this with an area HN is more familiar with, the equivalent to a grad student would be a junior developer fresh out of college in their first 3-5 years. Of course they don't know everything yet and they need some education and mentoring. But that doesn't mean it isn't a real job they do.

The job grad students do is roughly the same they'd do later if they stay in research.

In many countries they are considered workers and have all the social benefits of regular workers.

Being an RA, at least, is very skilled labor. I’d say the job is 80% work and 20% learning academic process and social mores from your advisor.

As a teaching assistant before and a research assistant now, I say technically it's a job.

You're expected to perform atleast 40 hours of research, often if not 1.5x more. Experimental research involves setting up and conducting them, while theoretical research involves standardizing the set of rules that one should seek in an experiment: modeling. All kinds of work involve literature review, writing, designing plots, coming up with scientifically sound creative ideas. All that with tight deadlines too.

I don't see why this should be any less than a job.

I definitely worked harder when I was a grad student than now as a software engineer who finds time to slack.

>If you can’t pay your people a living wage, you deserve to go out of business.

I agree, which is why I'm not sympathetic if "AI" ends up driving most of the creative occupations (stereotypical destitute artist, replacable office drone, etc.) to extinction.

When 50% of their admits are legacy (ie rich ppl) this is even worse.

Does this institution deserve any USG grant money?

Isn't that for undergraduate admissions?

Correct me if I am wrong.

30% of those admitted to Harvard each year are recruited athletes, legacies, relatives of donors and children of faculty and staff.

Legacies are a subset of that 30%.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/25/us/politics/harvard-admis...

50% of the Harvard class are not legacy. It's nowhere close to that number.

Of course Harvard (one of the best universities in the world) deserves USG grants.

Wealthy legacy families don't allow their kids to be grad students. They set them up with jobs and internships. Rich people generally do not teach. I'd bet that the percentage of legacy grad students is far lower than of legacy undergrads.

Legacy is closer to 15% of the class. You might be confusing the number with Legacy+Athlete+Faculty+Donor?

These are grad students. They are the academic equivalent of college athletes. They provide great benefits to the school. They generate substantial income. But they are not long-term employees, nor does the school want to turn them into such. The school wants to educate grad students, to turn them into something other than grad students. There is something to be said for not paying them too much, for not encouraging the profession of being a perpetual grad student.

Paying them enough to live off of though isn’t asking for much.

Paying enough to live is more than many jobs these days.

That some other employer doesn't pay well justifies all employers to do the same?

All employers should be paying living wages. I said as much in my first post.

Right, I’m agreeing with you.

>> They provide great benefits to the school. They generate substantial income.

But they won’t pay them enough to be able to feed themselves?

The student athletes aren't paid anything. The reality is that in academia there are a great many positions meant to be temporary, positions that in the past might not have been paid anything at all. Many undergrads generate massive amounts for their schools. Not every star athlete is on scholarship. Not every lap assistant is a paid grad student. Most are actually required to pay the school for the education they receive despite them also generating revenue.

'An injustice anywhere is a justification for injustice everywhere'

Surely there are plenty of potential mechanisms to discourage perpetual grad student-ism by just limiting the contracts and number of years one can be paid to work at a given institution, rather than paying so poorly that the rest of society has to pick up the tab. Particularly for an institution with tens of billions of dollars in the bank and other employees with multi-million dollar salaries.

I could be wrong, but per my assessment many Boston-area grads are spending way more than necessary living in "cool" flats. I don't understand why, though? Lofts, hostels or something less expensive (maybe live in Dorchester instead of Cambridge/Somerville?) would make more sense.

If they can get the welfare system to take over, why have temporary grad students? Grad students with 20 years TA (or research) experience could really reduce the number of tenured professors they need to pay.

In some countries the government funds the education system.You could call that welfare I suppose.

This is a good point. There is literally no difference between a grad student and a stray cat. In both cases if you feed them you’re responsible for them until they die.

Why is it disgusting? Do you think Harvard should tell them NOT to apply for food stamps?

At the current minimum annual salary of $40k, a single student wouldn't be eligible for SNAP amyways, the income threshold for a household size of 1 is $29,160.

You'd need a household size of at least 3 to be eligible, with total household income under $49k. So you, a spouse and 1 child, or you and two children, etc.

> Why is it disgusting? Do you think Harvard should tell them NOT to apply for food stamps?

This feels deliberately obtuse. The second half of the submitted article headline is "Even Though It's the Richest School In The World With A $53 Billion Endowment". Obviously people think Harvard should pay its graduate students more so that they wouldn't need food stamps.

It's obvious to you that graduate student positions should pay enough to support a sole income provider for a family of three? Because according to the parent, that's what we're discussing here.

Yes. Graduate students are inherently older, since they first need to obtain an undergraduate degree, and then graduate school itself can take many years to complete coursework and especially to write a dissertation. You can't expect grad students to put off the rest of their lives indefinitely, not get married, not have a family.

Family formation is delayed across the whole population, but I do think it's worth asking what can be done to support earlier family formation. (Given that many people are saying they are not having the number of kids they would like to have.)

Easy: housing that can be afforded by a single income household, where the loan is serviceable at wages obtainable by someone 25 years old.

I certainly agree that Boston and Massachusetts should reduce, or ideally eliminate, their restrictions on what housing can be built and where.

The benefit of doing that instead is it would help approximately 1000 times the number of people than raising Harvard grad student pay would.

It's worth noting that Harvard grad students are the ones getting attention here, and not the average person getting squeezed by rent. Are you going to whack-a-mole every single employer in the Boston MSA to pay at least $60k? Even if you did this, the increased pay would just go to inflated housing costs.

The underlying problem is a scarcity of housing, you can't fix that by giving people (in aggregate) more money. It will just bid up the cost of the scarce good.

And none of this really affects whether or not grad students should be encouraged to apply for whatever government benefits they are eligible for. Harvard doesn't control where the federal government sets the income cutoffs for benefits.

Nevertheless I'm sure highlighting this is a good way to grab attention.

> It's worth noting that Harvard grad students are the ones getting attention here, and not the average person getting squeezed by rent.

This is a single article, and a single article can only usefully highlight a single issue. If news articles could only talk about the worst problems in the world, then perhaps every news article in the world would be about climate change. Which perhaps wouldn't be a bad thing! But still, this is a red herring, because other news articles do in fact talk about the average person getting squeezed by rent.

> Are you going to whack-a-mole every single employer in the Boston MSA to pay at least $60k?

Not every employer in the Boston area has a $50 billion endowment.

There are a lot of comparisons to Walmart having employees on food stamps, but I think it's worth pointing out that if you are paying federal minimum wage $7.25/hour, that is just $15,080 annually at 40 hours / week * 52 weeks. It is quite shockingly low.

Harvard's minimum pay is almost 3x that amount. If we assume a 40 hour work week, it comes out to $19.23/hour. That is well within the range for what most advocacy groups are calling a living wage. For example, this site pegs it at $18/hour for Suffolk county in Massachusetts: https://livingwageforus.org/tier-i-certification/

"The high cost of living in Boston only adds to Harvard students' struggle."

"The average rent for a Boston one-bedroom is $3,215 a month. Ljunggren said it’s not uncommon for students to be paying $2,000 a month for a studio apartment, or living with multiple roommates to cover a $4,000-a-month two-bedroom." https://www.vice.com/en/article/93kwaa/harvard-tells-grad-st...

That latter paragraph is odd. It seems that the reporter is mentioning average rent in Boston, and I wouldn’t expect the HGSU president to use that as a benchmark: Boston is an unusual place for a Harvard grad student to live.

Perfectly nice Somerville 2BR units appear to be available for a bit above $2k/mo, and they quite a bit more conveniently located to Harvard than most of Boston is.

The Federal minimum wage is irrelevant here, since Massachusetts law institutes a higher $15/hour rate. As you point out, even that higher wage isn’t enough to live on.

A more robust estimate suggests that the living wage is actually $22.59 in this area.

https://livingwage.mit.edu/metros/14460

Maybe the federal minimum wage is also wrong?

The federal minimum wage is highly politicized and the 'right'/'Republican's'/'business' have always lobbied to keep it low. To have cheap labor.

But Food-Stamps/Welfare is driven by what is the minimum to live.

In a perfect world, yes the Minimum Wage should be high enough to match what it takes to live. Then there would not be a need for Welfare (if working). Minimum Wage should match the maximum for qualifying for Welfare.

But since different groups have different goals in driving the two programs, they do not match.

If you are paying your employees wages that are not in line with sustainable living standards, aligned with then image you are expecting them to give, you are shortchanging them. You are over-leveraging your attractiveness as a Brand to make them choose a few years as indentured servants, or walk away.

That attitude speaks very poorly of Harvard, but is not surprising. Just another data point that they only want the brethren of the rich, they don’t want smart but poorer talent.

It's honestly a hard problem to solve.

From the government perspective, is better to have someone making low income with food stamps then entirely unemployed and relying on more social benefits.

Businesses raise wages when no one will accept the job at that wage. Social benefits like food stamps allow individuals to take jobs at lower wage, and therefore drive down the price.

I mean conclusion seems simple here, raise minimal wages. Preferably by area too, if minimum wage doesn't allow to subside in reasonable commuting distance it means it is too low.

> Social benefits like food stamps allow individuals to take jobs at lower wage, and therefore drive down the price.

So subsidizing corporate workforce exploitation with taxes. Terrible idea.

Late response, but not every workers situation is identical. Someone might be single and someone might have 10 children with disabilities.

This is why programs like food stamps and disability support take into account the situation of the individual