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.
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.
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.