What Graduate Students In Philosophy Are And Should Be Paid For Teaching


The graduate students in the philosophy program at the University of St. Andrews are concerned about their teaching conditions, some of them tell me, but they don’t have a good grasp on how their situation compares with that of philosophy students elsewhere, particularly in the UK.

They’ve asked that I post the following letter. Comments, especially from those with comparative information, is welcome:

PhD students at the University of the St Andrews have the option to lead one or more weekly hour-long discussion groups of around 7 first or second year undergraduates. The work is often incredibly fulfilling, but some of us think the university’s pay policies are borderline exploitative. We are hourly employees, paid at a rate of £13.82. Every week philosophy tutors are paid an hour to prepare a discussion based on a particular reading, the hours we are in the classroom, and an hour to meet with students or answer emails. In addition, we are paid 20 minutes per 1500 word essay graded. This means we are expected to provide meaningful and accurate feedback to undergraduates for 4.6 pounds.

We are curious how people in other departments (especially at other UK institutions) feel about these conditions. To many graduate students, it feels like the university is offloading energy-intensive work to graduate students for next to nothing because the university knows we need teaching experience on our CVs. We realize  £13.82 per hour is also significantly higher than UK minimum wage, but recently when we raised the issue that many of us spend significantly more than an hour to prepare material (because we are, for example, reading the papers about which we are leading discussions), we were told that this should be unnecessary because we were hired as experts in philosophy. £13.82 per hour is not a wage that reflects expertise.

Because our pay is actually better than the University of St Andrew’s minimum guidelines (the department is not required to pay us a weekly hour for student contact), and there are rumors that the university is planning on cutting back on the amount departments receive to allocate to tutor pay, next year we may get paid even less to teach more students. We have been considering collective action, but we are also worried that perhaps we should just count our blessings—that we have the opportunity to teach at all.

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Dale Miller
6 years ago

Is the teaching money on top of a stipend that all students receive, even if they are not teaching, or is this all that most students receive in order to live on?

Squaglax
Squaglax
6 years ago

A philosophy department in Ireland pays its teaching assistants (most of whom are currently not graduate students) as follows:
€30 per tutorial (1 hour teaching, 15-20 students, up from 12 students six years ago; the pay is down from €35 six years ago).
€6 per 1500 word essay marked (up from €5 last year for 2000 words, down from €8.50 six years ago)
€2 euro per student essay feedback meeting (up from nothing)
Irish law also stipulates that the final pay is 8% higher than the headline figures, to account for lack of holidays/benefits. Irish minimum wage is currently €9.25 per hour.
The university does not allocate any money for TA pay and expects it to be done by graduate students on scholarships, some departments do this while others use other funds if available.

“many of us spend significantly more than an hour to prepare material (because we are, for example, reading the papers about which we are leading discussions), we were told that this should be unnecessary because we were hired as experts in philosophy”
Irish law stipulates that it is the *actual hours worked* that must be used in the calculation of the rate of pay. Perhaps something similar in British law could help you with your situation.
We engaged in discussion with our head of department last year. The above was the result.

Former Oxford DPhil
Former Oxford DPhil
6 years ago

To answer Dale’s question, no, if a graduate student has a stipend it is not linked to teaching expectations. So this is the only remuneration graduate students get for teaching. In my experience at Oxford, we are also paid by the hour, but at a higher rate for more students. For a standard tutorial of 2 students, the pay is £32 per tutorial. This includes any time preparing for the tutorial and marking essays (of which there is one per student per week). There is no additional pay for emails/meetings with students or marking.

Dale Miller
Reply to  Former Oxford DPhil
6 years ago

Thanks, but this doesn’t answer my question. I understand that this is the only money that students receive for teaching, and that if they have some other stipend then it’s not conditioned on teaching. My question is whether the St. Andrews students do in fact generally receive other stipends. What they’re being paid for teaching might be too low even if they do receive other money, but the low pay would be more egregious if they do not.

Former Oxford DPhil
Former Oxford DPhil
Reply to  Dale Miller
6 years ago

Oh I see, sorry I misunderstood. If it’s anything like Oxford, it will depend on the student. PhD students in the UK are not usually given stipends as a matter of course. They often apply for funding from research councils/other trusts/their home countries and there are often a limited number of scholarships provided by the department or university. But each student will be in a different funding situation and many will not be fully funded at all.

Tenured Professor
Tenured Professor
6 years ago

I agree with the comments above that in considering how just or unjust the situation is, it matters how much total money the university is giving to the graduate students. That is, it matters whether they are also receiving stipends that they can (modestly) live on. In the United States, it is common for graduate students to receive a fixed yearly amount of funding, which is sometimes just a fellowship and is sometimes conditioned on doing some teaching — so it is common to receive *zero* extra funds (above the standard fellowship amount) for teaching. The expectation of teaching is part of the funding package.

Tenured Professor
Tenured Professor
Reply to  Tenured Professor
6 years ago

Having said that, I will add that *if* St Andrews is framing the pay for teaching as hourly pay, they definitely owe pay for the actual hours that any reasonable person would work in the job. This *of course* includes hours spent reading the material. (And does it also include hours spent attending a professor’s lectures on the material? It would in the US.)

Sara L. Uckelman
Reply to  Tenured Professor
6 years ago

In my (English) university (I don’t know if this is a general rule), tutors are NOT paid to attend the lectures relevant to the material that they are tutoring on. I have had some tutors come to my lectures out of interest and a desire to give the best provision to their students; but this is unpaid.

Tenured Professor
Tenured Professor
6 years ago

. . . As an “expert philosopher”, I reread the texts I assign before teaching them. And I often assign texts I have not previously read, and thus I need to read them for the first time to teach them. Being an expert does not mean that one has read all the material being taught already, nor that one can teach it without reading it again, but rather than one has expertise in explaining the material, helping students to understand it, and providing feedback on student work about the material.
ALSO: 20 minutes is too short to give substantive feedback on a paper.

Someone
Someone
6 years ago

Fun fact, in France graduate students don’t get paid for grading essays or supervising exams (including oral exams). Often the main professor will “unload” his pack of essays on the graduate students shoulder…

DC
DC
6 years ago

It’s hard to evaluate their complaints without knowing their total compensation package at the University. Is this on top of a livable-on stipend? I mean, I voluntarily taught a full upper-level class for free in my last semester as a PhD student, and was thrilled to have the opportunity. But I got a perfectly adequate stipend that functioned as my salary.

APhD
APhD
6 years ago

PhD student at another Russell Group here. At our institution, we’re in effectively the same boat. We’re given 2-3 groups of 12 (max.) students for every module we teach on; teaching those groups once a fortnight each for an hour. For each new tutorial (type, not token), we get 2 hours pay for preparation (that’s 45 minutes paid prep time for every tutorial token), then 1 hour pay (per module in general) for administrative work. And, like you, we’re expected to mark essays of 1,500 words with full feedback in 20 minutes. Rate is £14.31 per hour.

I could go on about a lot of reasons that this is exploitative (which it is) and how it fails to represents that actual hours (which it does), but one thing drowns that out: I’ve become completely disillusioned. Though the work is (and feels) productive, it feels devalued by the amount of time the university is unwilling to pay me for and the lack of recognition of teaching as a meaningful part of academia. All this strikes me as particularly egregious when institutions sell themselves on teaching excellence (amongst other things). When you feel devalued in your work, it suffers, regardless of how much you’re willing to put into it. This means that (however much I try to let it not) my students’ education suffers. I doubt that I’m alone, in my institution or elsewhere.

In direct response to the letter’s last sentence though, there’s something that’s not been mentioned thus far. The thought that we should ‘count our blessings’ is a common view amongst both PhDs and staff (I’ve found), but our work is vital to the functioning of a university. They need us as much as we need the work (because otherwise they’d have to hire more expensive faculty!). It’s often said in response that our mentors and advisors were exploited, unpaid teaching is part of the learning process, a trial everyone must face, but no. No instance of exploitation justifies any other instance of exploitation.

My best piece of advice is to unionise (if you aren’t already). UCU works on these issues and has had a successful campaign in Warwick. PhDs of St Andrews, you are not alone.

DC
DC
Reply to  APhD
6 years ago

I’ll be honest, I’m a little confused still; the teaching job you don’t like is optional, right?

APhD
APhD
Reply to  DC
6 years ago

Teaching is nominally optional insofar as it’s not a term of a stipend or something, yes. But given that we’re expected to have teaching experience before going onto the job market, its not as simple as that.

DC
DC
Reply to  APhD
6 years ago

Honestly, I usually side with graduate students on these kinds of things but it doesn’t really sound that onerous. Though I don’t think any of us will be changing each other’s opinions.

APhD
APhD
Reply to  DC
6 years ago

Its just a bit galling that I got better terms of employment working in the service sector (and the healthcare sector, both on temporary contracts) than teaching.. I suppose it’s one way of cutting down on applicants for each faculty job listing longer term, by seeing if they’re willing to do unpaid labour.

I agree though, I guess we’re not going to change each other’s minds

canadian
canadian
Reply to  APhD
6 years ago

Unionizing is not always the best idea. Here in Canada, there are unionized and not-unionized grad students (depending on the university). The non-unionized ones tend to be better paid.

(The same is true for professors).

DC
DC
Reply to  canadian
6 years ago

Are you sure the worse-paid grad students and professors aren’t just more likely to unionize?

AlsoCanadian
AlsoCanadian
Reply to  canadian
6 years ago

It depends heavily on the union, both its size and its structure. The Canadian institute I was at had an active, small-scale, grassroots union. As a result we were (reasonably) well paid with healthcare benefit, caps on tutorial size, caps on total students, etc. A friend of mine from a different university doesn’t even know what sort of things a union is supposed to do.
All this said, I agree with the statement “unionizing is not always the best idea”, or at least won’t solve all problems. I still think it’s a lively option — possibly the option with the best chance of success.

William Bell
William Bell
6 years ago

(Second hand information – not a grad student)

$40 CAD an hour at my school in Canada for graduate students, where you’re expected to have one hour prep time, one hour in tutorial, and one hour marking each week (regardless of how much you actually spend on those things). That works out to $120 CAD a week.

Grad Sockpuppet
Grad Sockpuppet
Reply to  William Bell
6 years ago

$25 CAD/hour at my Canadian grad school, for either 90 or 180 hours a semester. 90 is generally just grading for ~70 students; 180 is the grading for ~70 as well as two weekly one-hour discussion groups (each one with ~35 students).

Tenured Professor might think that 20 minutes per paper is too little time, but it’s what’s usually allotted for us in our contracts by the profs in charge of the courses. Be the change you want to see!

Canadian
Canadian
Reply to  Grad Sockpuppet
6 years ago

In my school graduate students are paid 24 C$/hour.
40 C$/hour is unheard of.

Grad Sockpuppet
Grad Sockpuppet
Reply to  Canadian
6 years ago

Well, not entirely. I did my MA at a school that paid 40 for around 100 hours of work.

abfgpq
abfgpq
6 years ago

At St Andrews, some students receive stipends and some don’t. I strongly suspect that far fewer than 50% receive full stipends that would suffice to cover living costs.

Most of the stipends that are available are not from the university, rather they are from government funds and other third party organisations such as charitable trusts.

UK TA
UK TA
6 years ago

Just a response to people suggesting that whether or not this situation is just depends on how much grads are getting as a stipend from the university. Part of the confusion here might be relate to the difference in how UK and US PhD students are funded, but stipends are and should be considered completely separate from teaching pay. For a start, many if not most funded grads in the UK (and a not insignificant proportion of PhD students don’t actually have funding) receive their stipend not from the university but from other bodies; in particular, from research councils or, for international students, from their home country. Furthermore, stipends are awarded only for research and maintenance – teaching for grads at every department I know is an entirely optional extra. Therefore even if someone was on a generous stipend and it came from the university, this really shouldn’t bear on what kind of working conditions or pay can be seen as just or how egregious potential exploitation in this respect is.

In response to the original post, arrangements at my department are broadly similar except we don’t get any money for responding to emails etc. So, we get paid at similar rates hourly for the hours in seminars, marking, and one hour’s prep/ admin per course per week.

Dale Miller
Reply to  UK TA
6 years ago

Surely however exploitative the situation might be if all of the students had stipends large enough to live on and could afford to choose not to teach, or not to teach any more than needed to get a bit of experience before hitting the job market, it is morally worse if that’s not the case and they really can’t afford to turn the teaching down (as it seems might be the case for many).
For what it’s worth, by the way, I calculated out what a part-time instructor with no Ph.D. makes at my university per hour, using our quasi-official assumption that instructors work two hours out of class for every hour in class. Of course there are many differences between teaching at American and British schools, and that assumption probably isn’t very accurate, but the result was £23.80 per hour. This is what a graduate student who didn’t hold a TA-ship would receive, as well as any non-student instructor who had an M.A. and not a Ph.D. So the St. Andrews students are paid considerably less than instructors who most American academics believe are being exploited.

Recovering Grad Student
Recovering Grad Student
6 years ago

Just to add to the above voices confirming that your situation broadly matches my experience as a grad TA at a Russell Group university, both in terms of pay and (which was often a point of contention), the discrepancy between the preparation and administrative time that we were paid for and what we actually did. On the occasions when this was discussed with relevant faculty members, however, we were told that our best course of action was to only work the time we were paid for (which, although not ideal, is rather more to my taste than being told that more time shouldn’t be necessary as we should already be ‘experts’ in the material as you report). As a result, I often made it known to my students that although I would be *leading* seminars, I would not necessarily be *reading* all the material that they would be discussing, and exactly why that was the case.

PhD student
PhD student
6 years ago

I agree with ‘recovering grad student’ above. I’m a PhD tutor on the same conditions as original post but am really strict with timings and do only the work I’m paid for. I mark essays faster than what I’m paid for and students rarely bother me in the weekly contact hour so it evens out as not too bad.

PhD student
PhD student
6 years ago

*Office hour

Untenured
Untenured
6 years ago

At an Ivy League school in the US, the standard rate is $30/hour for grading papers. Generally, we expect grad students to grade two papers an hour. So the going rate is $15 per paper. This is on top of a (pretty good) stipend, which often requires other teaching duties apart from the extra grading.

M.A. Grader
M.A. Grader
6 years ago

I was an M.A. student at an American Ivy League (paying full tuition). I took a grading job for which I was paid a 1,500 USD per semester stipend plus 1,500 USD in tuition remission. I was told that we were expected to work 5-10 hours a week. We were expected to attend the biweekly classes, for a total of 3 hours a week (~36 a semester), but not to do the readings or meet with students. The stipend was not based on anticipated workload as far as I could tell – if there had been fewer graders each grader would have had a greater workload. As it was, I ended up having to grade roughly 40 ~1000 word papers and 40 exams over the course of the semester – I was told that the expectation was for each to take me 20 minutes or so, and on average that’s about what it came out to.

Jon
Jon
6 years ago

Is tuition included as part of their contract? If so, what’s that valued at? In other words, the hourly cash might realistically be construed as only *part* of the overall remuneration package.

Idk how it works in the UK, but say an American got $20/hr, plus tuition of, to make the math easy, $24,000. Further suppose the TA position was 0.5 FTE for 30 weeks/year. That’s 600 hours. So the TA’ing would pay $20/hr, *plus* $40/hour of in-kind support. This is a significantly different way of looking at it and significantly dampens the exploitation worry. Adjust the hours/rates as you like.

Sure, had Sanders won, college would be free and the $24,000 goes away. Sure, some people think this is a stupid way to look at it. Sure, from an accounting perspective, it’s plausible.

Julia
Julia
6 years ago

I went to graduate school at a private university in the US. The only time I was paid on an hourly basis was when I took over a sick graduate student’s grading, and I got $25 an hour.
It seems to me that it would be more reasonable to pay for twice as much class prep time, i.e. two hours of prep for each hour spent in the classroom. The expectation that a 1500 word essay can be graded in 20 minutes seems not that unreasonable, assuming the expectation is to only give broad feedback, not sentence by sentence comments.

Chris Surprenant
Chris Surprenant
6 years ago

Sorry, but these complaints are absurd. If you don’t like what the university (or any employer) is offering as compensation, decline to work for that amount. It’d be one thing if the university was offering a stipend for doing X, and then misrepresenting the amount of time or work that X required. But that’s not happening here.

Academics need to learn to say no more often and otherwise stand up for themselves and their own interests. As Kant says, “One who makes himself a worm cannot complain afterwards if people step on him.”

Former Oxford DPhil
Former Oxford DPhil
Reply to  Chris Surprenant
6 years ago

This is simply not realistic in an environment where one is expected to have teaching experience to have any chance at a permanent job, and where many students are unfunded and therefore must teach in order to support themselves. Even funded students are usually only funded for 3 years of a PhD with most taking 4 years to complete. Lots of students find themselves in a situation where they have to do so much teaching in order to support themselves in the final year that they don’t have enough time for research, drawing out their PhD even longer, and continuing the cycle. If teaching were paid more fairly, they could do fewer hours of it and finish more quickly.

APhD
APhD
Reply to  Chris Surprenant
6 years ago

I think that contemplating strike action (which is how I read ‘collective action’ in the OP) *is* academics learning to say no and stand up for themselves, when they’re in a position whereby the employment conditions of academia demand teaching experience.

Totally agree with Oxf DPhil above too.

Derek Bowman
Derek Bowman
Reply to  Chris Surprenant
6 years ago

Chris Surprenant: “It’d be one thing if the university was offering a stipend for doing X, and then misrepresenting the amount of time or work that X required. But that’s not happening here.”

The St. Andrews grad students: “Every week philosophy tutors are paid an hour to prepare a discussion based on a particular reading…” “…but recently … we raised the issue that many of us spend significantly more than an hour to prepare material (because we are, for example, reading the papers about which we are leading discussions)

Lizzy
Lizzy
Reply to  Chris Surprenant
6 years ago

You’re suggesting that they should stand up for themselves… on an article about how they’re trying to do exactly that.

Iwao Hirose
Iwao Hirose
6 years ago

Dear St Andrews Grad Students,
As a former St Andrews grad student, who acted as a pay-rate negotiation rep in 2002, I feel I ought to say something. The current situation is more or less the same as 2002. Surprising. I believe that the current pay rate is too low for what you are expected to do, regardless of whether you have a BA scholarship. For your info, my current employer (McGill) pays C$2,574.90 for 90 hours of work over a 13-week semester (i.e. 15 quid per hour) IN ADDITION TO 4-year scholarship and tuition fee. 20 min per 1,500 word essay is perfectly normal at McGill. For 3 years of my 5 years in St A, tutorship was the main source of income and therefore I lived in a shitty Angus House room. When I moved to North America, I was absolutely shocked by how financially well-off grad students are. Having said this (and observed many grad programs in my post-St-Andrews years in England, US, Australia, and Canada), would I do a PhD at St A (or elsewhere in UK) rather than financially secure US or Canada programs, if I had a chance to re-do it? Yes, absolutely. The St Andrews program is academically more challenging than most of North American programs (probably, most North American philosophers disagree because they don’t know the programs outside North America). I wish you the best of luck!

another PhD
another PhD
6 years ago

I think there’s an unfortunate culture of going “above and beyond” in graduate teaching, as others have mentioned. When I teach, I don’t work more my contracted hours. I’m sure my teaching would be better if I put more hours in than I’m paid for, but I’m also aware that if everyone is paid $20 for a one hour teaching task and many of them spend three hours on that task, then it unreasonably raises the expectations of universities about what the quality of teaching should be given the hours that they are paying graduate students for, which seems bad for one’s fellow graduate students in the long-term. There are incentives to defect in this way: e.g. to get better teaching letters and to satisfy the needs of students (though I’ve found I manage to get decent letters and keep students happy while just working my contracted hours). Given that this is a collective action problem, a partial solution might be for graduate students to get together and agree to only work the hours that they are paid for. If the university isn’t happy with the level of teaching that results, then they should increase the number of preparation and grading hours that they pay the students for.

UK Postdoc
UK Postdoc
6 years ago

Having recently received my PhD from a Russell group university, I can echo what others are saying: the pay for teaching is exploitative both in the hours tasks are officially supposed to take and in the amount paid per hour, and doubly exploitative if you work the hours the tasks really take.

I did try to work just the hours for which I was paid but was harassed with forced unpaid ‘disciplinary’ meetings as a result.

The situation is simply that the university knows we have to get teaching experience and so takes advantage of that situation by paying us fast food wages.

Nothing is going to change. There are way too many people wanting to be academics and no jobs to speak of. Thus, economic theory dictates that we will be taken advantage of (supply and demand and all that), and the reality is that there is no power that gives a Sh****t about us.

Birkbeck PhD
Birkbeck PhD
6 years ago

At Birkbeck, University of London we get paid just over £40 an hour, but only for the hour long seminars that we lead. Attending the course lectures, preparation time, answering student’s emails, and marking essays and exams are apparently all included in this pay rate.
I have calculated that last term I was paid £7 an hour before tax, and that is with me keeping preparation time to a minimum and marking very quickly.
I have over 3 years of experience as a TA, albeit overseas.
Is this even legal?

Bbk alum
Bbk alum
6 years ago

To Birkbeck Phd:
If you haven’t done so already, talk to the UCU branch at Birkbeck, particularly if you can find one of the branch officers who came from the old Continuing Education / Lifelong Learning faculty. They are well aware of the problem of how unpaid hours lead to low effective average rates of hourly pay.

Also, it is worth looking for work at some of the other University of London colleges. In one Birkbeck department other than philosophy, arguably the most effective upward pressure on PhD student pay came from what LSE and UCL were willing to pay for teaching by experienced Birkbeck graduate students.

Alex Gregory
6 years ago

Some people have asked for the wider context in the UK: By far the main source of funding for UK PhD students is the AHRC, which pays graduate students £14,553/yr for three years (plus their fees). If you are working on your PhD for 40 hours/week, that amounts to £7/hour for being a PhD student. That said, it’s a bit confusing because this money is tax-free, so that’s probably the equivalent of more like £17,000/yr; £8/hr. If you take four years to complete your PhD, they do not offer any extra funding for that year. These rates are universal across the UK and not decided by any individual university.

Competition for PhD funding is still, in these circumstances, extremely tight.

Two other minor things, which do not settle the issue: (1) Some of the relevant teaching prep (e.g. reading papers) is also work students should do for their PhD anyway (reading around the subject is a good thing). (2) If prepping for class, or grading, is taking far longer than the time you are assigned, it might be that you should ask for advice from your supervisor (or others) about how you can work more efficiently.

Former Oxford DPhil
Former Oxford DPhil
Reply to  Alex Gregory
6 years ago

Yes and no. If there is new material you haven’t read before (hence (1)), reading this to the level that you can assist students, and plan the class will take more than the one hour that is allocated. At Oxford we’re expected to read and give feedback on students’ essays every week. In a tutorial of 3 students, that’s 3 essays plus whatever preparatory reading is necessary. An hour is unrealistic. Full time teaching-only lecturers are given 12 contact hours per week. This suggests they expect approx 2 hours preparation for each contact hour. This means for a hourly-waged person earning £25 for a single student tutorial, the hourly wage is £8.

PGBB
PGBB
6 years ago

I was a temporary teaching fellow – ie on a full-time, temporary contract at St. Andrews – over 15 years ago. At the time, the TAs who were PhD students asking for higher wages for hourly-paid teaching, The university’s offical position, stated in negotiations was that they were paid more than their equivalents in pother institututions. I was in a position to tell them that the wages paid to students doing something equivalent were lower at St. Andrews than they were in the instituion where I did my PhD. I’m fairly sure that they were, at that time, being paid more than 13.82 an hour, though I don’t have documentation to prove it., (Someone presumably will)

London Grad Student
London Grad Student
6 years ago

At King’s College London, the hourly rate is £16.25 and GTAs are paid for two hours prep for every seminar (type, rather than token), for 5 hours of meetings with the module convener (per every 10 weeks of term) and for marking (at a rate of 4000 words per hour). Lecture attendance is generally expected (if not strictly mandatory), but is not paid.

There is a general sense that GTAs work more hours than they are paid for (especially when it comes to preparation time). However, organising amongst GTAs across the college has led to improvements in conditions: the paid module convener meetings and a doubling of prep time (from one hour per seminar to two) are a direct result of a college-wide campaign to improve GTA conditions. Applying pressure on the university can successfully yield results.

FACE (Fighting Against Casualisation in Education) are a country-wide network of casualised/precariously employed academic staff, who organise for improvements in conditions. GTAs might find it helpful to access these resources and/or get involved: https://fightingcasualisation.org

London Grad Student
London Grad Student
Reply to  London Grad Student
6 years ago

Addition: GTAs are also paid for 10 office hours per term.

Jennifer Nagel
6 years ago

Graduate students at the University of Toronto, Canada, make $43.22 CAD per hour (plus our mandatory 4% vacation pay = $44.95/hour). All of our graduate students are unionized. We have a complicated variety of graduate funding packages, thanks to various internal and external scholarships, but no PhD student gets less than $21.5K in package funding, and the average PhD student gets over $25K. These are the amounts before any (optional) summer teaching: a summer course instructorship would bring in just over $7K, and there are generally various levels of hourly TA work available for those who do not get instructorships. The standard package funding involves roughly 9K in teaching work (about 190 hours over the Sept-May year), with the rest of the funding supplied as stipend (and all tuition/fees paid for the prescribed duration of the program). Exception: our first-year students get a teaching buyout, so they don’t have to teach to earn their package funding of $21.5K+; however, some do elect to teach to make more money (at the guaranteed union rate of $44.95 with vacation pay). Details of the collective agreement are here: http://cupe3902.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/Unit-1-CA-2014-17.pdf