“The poverty of graduate school is often joked about. How many professors reminisce fondly about just scraping by in grad school? How many people joke about the number of people they fit in their hotel room at the conference or how many times they had to eat ramen?” For some students from poorer families, though, the poverty of graduate school is no laughing matter. It can be a prolonging of serious financial difficulties, rather than a temporary hardship. And it can also lead to class insensitivity, insofar as the superficial equality of grad students in terms of lousy pay masks real differences. A post at Tenure, She Wrote discusses things departments can do to help students from impoverished backgrounds, as well as suggestions for prospective and current students from such backgrounds. Further suggestions, and ones specific to philosophy in particular, are welcome.

(From what I can tell, none of the bloggers at Tenure, She Wrote is a philosopher, but the site touches on many issues in academia that will be of interest to philosophers.)