Unions, Strikes, and the Financial Satisfaction of Philosophy PhD Students
In its 2023 and 2025 surveys, Academic Philosophy Data & Analysis (APDA) asked current PhD students to rate their satisfaction with their financial situation.
[collage by Mark Wagner]
Students in 2025 report being more financially satisfied than did the students surveyed in 2023. They rated themselves on a scale of 1 to 5, according to which 1=very unsatisfied and 5=very satisfied.
The results are:
2023: “a mean satisfaction of 2.96 (n=336). Qualitatively, roughly 15% are very unsatisfied, 24% unsatisfied, 20% neutral, 30% satisfied, and 11% very satisfied.”
2025: “a mean satisfaction of 3.36 (n=455). Qualitatively, roughly 8% are very unsatisfied, 16% unsatisfied, 22% neutral, 36% satisfied, 17% very satisfied. (They do not add to 100% due to rounding error.)”
APDA also looked at graduate student unionization and recent strike activity (noting some difficulty with obtaining the latter).
Regarding unionization, they found that “whether or not a graduate program is unionized does not correlate with financial satisfaction in either the 2023 or the 2025 surveys.”
Regarding strike activity, they found that “financial satisfaction negatively correlates with recent strike action for the 2023 survey… but not the 2025 survey.” What’s the explanation for that? Professor Zhao doesn’t have a definitive answer, but floats a few possibilities:
One possible explanation is that the financial dissatisfaction drove the unions to strike, though note that some of the recorded strikes happened before 2023. Another possible explanation is that, during and immediately after strike action, there is greater awareness of the financial situation in general. Yet another possible explanation is that it takes time for benefits gained through strike actions to take effect.
You can read the whole post here.
Often, when one graduate program unionizes and wins higher salaries through a strike, peer institutions give their students raises to dissuade union activity. For example, in 2021-early 2022 when Columbia and Harvard unionized and won higher salaries through strikes, Princeton gave their graduate students a ~$10,000 raise shortly after.
This helps explain why there wouldn’t be a correlation between unions and financial satisfaction, since the non-unionized institutions may see commensurate raises. This is an additional benefit of union activity: not only do unions improve their own working conditions, they also improve working conditions across their industries even for non-unionized employees.
Fully agreed with what you say here, Grad Student, especially the point about how improvements really put pressure on peer institutions. I’ll just add that places where the financial situation is especially bad might be more likely to strike but also not particularly likely to get to a good place financially, even if there is some improvement. The UC system is the clearest example of this dynamic.
Unionization is extremely important. But also, given the big disparities in cost of living increases in the last few years (i.e. some areas have been hit especially hard), there are so many confounding variables. Unionization, of course, or the threat thereof, can help address increases in cost of living.
I like the point about how unionization can lead to improved outcomes. However, remember that it can also lead to suspended admissions, which raises interesting questions about the benefits. In a sort of Parfit-inspired hypothetical, say existing graduate students get a $10k raise, but future graduate students–for whatever time period you like–cease to exist. Is it better that some graduate students make $40k while some can’t get into programs at all, or would it be better if more people made $30k? Does it depend on other stuff, like the job market? I’m not sure, just interested in the fact pattern.
See, e.g., https://dailynous.com/2024/11/19/boston-university-suspends-phd-admissions-in-philosophy-other-fields/ (following BU’s successful renegotiation of its contracts). For present purposes, let’s assume these are actual trade-offs, instead of fighting the hypothetical. Of course I realize some people are going to say “well, the University didn’t have to do that,” but, in fact, these sorts of consequences aren’t uncommon (or surprising).
“Is it better that some graduate students make $40k while some can’t get into programs at all?”
Yes. The disadvantage of being in grad school and not having sufficient funds is worse than the disadvantage of not getting into grad school, assuming that people who don’t get into grad school don’t experience significant financial precarity. The overarching principle here, I take it, is don’t inflict financial precarity on anyone. You could fiddle with the numbers to change my answer here, and some programs at prestigious places pay plenty now; but the basic point is that whatever grad students there are should be prioritized over admitting more. (Grad school in philosophy is a great good; but it’s also a risky good in many ways, and it becomes more risky when it pays less.)
I mean, while I get it to some degree, you’re also essentially shutting out people from the profession. I don’t think “we were here first” is necessarily a good answer. Increased standards of admissions is generally the lesser evil, but it really just intensifies the “ivory tower” feel which pervades philosophy and academia as a whole. I think raising standards is less terrible of admittedly hard to stomach options, but the greater question is why the tendency to punch down when it comes to solving these things.
If you look closely this kind of argument, you will realize that by paying graduate student less, you are also shutting out people from the profession: those that aren’t already independently wealthy. To me, that looks much more like punching down than the alternative.
How is 30K plus free tuition something that only the independently-wealthy can do?
(a) Why don’t you compare that against overall cost of living, before you decide to be snarky about it?
(b) If that’s such a generous remuneration package, then I’m sure you wouldn’t mind your own salary being sliced down to similar levels, right?
Nice ad hominem. When I was in grad school, the stipend was 6,000. In contrast to undergrad, where you have to pay a ton of money to get your degree, in grad school they pay you to get your degree, but the complaint is that they don’t pay you _enough_? Lots of people live on 30K.
Nice misidentification of the fallacy. An ad hominem attack is only fallacious if personal biography doesn’t bear on what we’re discussing. In this case, it does.
Yes, I’m sure the stipend was lower when you were in grad school. But, if you happened to notice, my point was precisely that raw salary numbers don’t mean much on their own. You have to evaluate them against overall cost of living, if you want to determine how well you can actually live off a certain sum of money. Now, cost of living has indisputably gone up, and so have salaries. The problem is that salaries have (generally) not gone up commensurate to cost of living. This is a reasonable complaint, and hand-waving it away is extremely counterproductive.
But setting that aside for the nonce, it’s worth asking whether you enjoyed living on your 6k stipend. If not, why would you object to the new generations trying to build a better system? You suffered, so we have to, too?
And yes, your average graduate student is horrendously underpaid, when you consider how essential their contributions to the day-to-day operations of the university are.
Finally, the question was not “would you have liked 30k as a grad student,” the question was, “would you happily accept 30k now?” You haven’t answered that question. Presumably because the answer would be “no,” but you think you deserve better.
$6000 in 1989 is worth about $16,500 today. So yes, a lot of real growth in grad student stipends.
Also, a lot of universities do not consider graduate student contributions to be essential to day-to-day operations. That’s why some suspend graduate admissions during budget-tightening time.
I guess this brings us back to Fritz Allhoff’s Parfitian question. I just have one thought to add on that topic: if you let a program get below a certain size you risk losing viability. That is, whatever you think the costs are of denying admission to some, I think it jumps suddenly around a certain threshold.
If I were a grad student, yes, I’d be ecstatic about 30K. I get to go to grad school for free, _and_ they’ll pay me 30K? Sounds pretty great. The poverty line for a family of 4 is around 30K, so for just me as a 21 year old, I think I’d be fine. It means a few years of drinking cheap beer and eating ramen, but that was true when I was making 6K, so 30 would be an improvement. 6K then isn’t even close to 30K when you adjust for inflation. The claim that only someone who is from a wealthy family can afford to earn 30K while going to grad school for free is absurd.
Ah, so you’re recognizing that 30k is pretty abysmal. But the idea is that 30k is good enough for the grad student peons, but not for the full-time faculty members. Roger that. I should just shut up about silly issues, like material security, since I can technically survive according to the statistics.
If I’m ever lucky enough to have a TT position, I just hope to be more sympathetic to the grad students’ plight than this.
There are other factors to take into account. One is the local living costs (obviously 30k in New York isn’t 30k in other places). Another is one that you mention: whether you have dependents. There are many others: compared to when you were in grad school, more young people are in debt, it’s harder to build wealth (e.g., through buying a home), the academic job market is worse, healthcare is less affordable, and so on. Life is just generally a hell of a lot more precarious these days. So without disputing your experience, it’s just not enough to handwave away these cost of living concerns. Just go to any grad student union website and read the testimonials. These people aren’t making things up. They’re not just being greedy and refusing to eat ramen. So yeah, Sara’s point stands.
All of this is kind of beside the point anyway. Admin isn’t worried about some abstract moral question of what grad students deserve or have a right to; they will cut costs wherever they can (while assuring students and workers that they are all a “community”). So grad students need to look out for themselves and get what they can get. Unions and a credible strike threat are pretty good tools for doing that.
I certainly think the grad students should be covered by the university’s health plan. I 100% recognize that health care costs are rising, and it’s especially shitty if the school doesn’t give you medical coverage. But I think we’ve gotten off track here: I initially commented not to say what I think grad students deserve, or to pull a “walked to school uphill in the snow” thing, but merely to push back on the claim that only the independently wealthy can go to grad school. That strikes me as false.
That’s fair; I didn’t mean to lead us astray. But I took Sara’s claim to just be that without raising pay and improving benefits, it will be difficult to attract those who aren’t relatively well-off.
Put another way, if you’re not child/dependent-free, debt-free, and willing to forgo 5+ years of savings for a meager chance at a job that won’t be lucrative anyway even in the best case scenario, then grad school is barely an option, unless there are better wages and benefits. I suppose you’re right that that description doesn’t totally overlap with “independently wealthy,” but I don’t think we should get too hung up on that terminology, especially given that in this economy, fewer and fewer people meet the above description.
Esteban, thank you for arguing on my behalf, as this is exactly what I meant. Given the current state of things, going to grad school for philosophy without the promise of a decent stipend is simply extremely irrational UNLESS you know that it doesn’t really matter whether you secure an economically viable job for yourself. So the lower the salaries for grad students, the more it is irrational for anyone who isn’t already “set” to consider an academic career. This incentive structure leads to most academic philosophers being people who were already relatively well-off and had robust family support.
That’s an obviously bad thing, IMO, not only because it means that only upper class people get to be in academic philosophy, but because it means that the pool of potential applicants is significantly smaller and will yield worse overall cohorts of grad students, i.e. talent will be wasted and the wealthy but less talented get to do as they please. This is a kind of dynamic we should al be wary of, though I understand that many people probably benefited from it and so are incentivized to preserve it.
As long as the stipend is technically livable, anyone, whether they are wealthy or not, can attend grad school. So, you are correct about that narrow question. But whether it is a good idea to attend grad school, and whether grad school will be insanely stressful, and whether an unexpected large expense in conjunction with a tiny grad school stipend means potential life ruination or a minor speed bump, and many other important questions, often hinge on whether someone is wealthy (or, rather, whether they have a wealthy supportive family).
So, it is misleading to frame things in terms of “can you go to grad school without a wealthy family?” The answer is usually yes: stipends are typically enough to prevent people from starving to death. But given the job market, the damage you do to your future earning potential and your retirement by spending X years as a PhD student rather than as someone with a more remunerative job, the precariousness of being very close to having nothing, and so on, very low grad stipends make it a much worse idea for people without a wealthy family to go to grad school. So, these people get effectively “shut out of the profession” as Sara puts it, not because they literally can’t go to grad school but because they have the capacity to make good decisions and often it is a good decision for them to avoid grad school.
I find the fixation on money from the young generation really bizarre. Or rather, it may be just an American thing, and it is bizarre. When I was at graduate school, I was simply amazed by the deal that we only TA for one class and got 16k per year, enough for me to survive living in a cheap rental. I did not understand why my union would call it “exploitation” at all. Now I am a faculty and I am even more amazed by graduate stipend because I know I am here to devote a large proportion of my time to serving them, and thus the university is paying me on behalf of them. Plus in many grad programs they get one year off TA (not something I got as a grad). I feel like either there is a BIG sense of entitlement, or that economy is super bad and people have to get as much money as they can even as a student. I know this is almost taboo for me to say which shows a lack of empathy. But I really think the stipend in the US is fair! And pushing beyond fairness usually backfires and leads to a really bad situation eventually.
Assuming this is a serious comment, rather than satire, not sure what else to say but:
“I feel like either there is a BIG sense of entitlement, or that economy is super bad and people have to get as much money as they can even as a student.”
Yes, this is so close to actually getting the situation of your students. I hope, for their sake, you do.
Referring to ‘wanting to have enough money to not worry about food insecurity, or a single medical event leading to bankruptcy, or being evicted, not to mention potential costs of child care, parental care, or god forbid wanting to save for a home or a family in the future’ as a “fixation on money” is really something.
Are you independently wealthy yourself, such that you think ‘thinking about money’ is a character flaw? Or did you just forget that in the US, things like food, housing, medical care, education, are not provided in any reliable and meaningful way by a ‘social safety net’?
My department certainly isn’t having any trouble attracting students who aren’t well-off (assuming that means independently wealthy). Maybe the stipend and benefits at Brown are over the threshold, or maybe our PhD students are irrational.
The Brown stipend is one of the highest in the country, so if anyone is over the threshold, they are.
Whew!
So our students aren’t irrational after all. It’s just grad students at other departments who are irrational.
Only not the rich ones. The rich ones aren’t irrational.
Yes, for many of us the love of wisdom does drive us to act in economically irrational ways. Ever heard of that old cliche, “labor of love”?
If anyone were to be sympathetic to such a situation, I would have thought it would be someone well-established in the profession, such as yourself.
Then again, I guess I ought to simply shut up and pipe down about all that, because some Ivy Leaguer on the DailyNous couldn’t bring himself to believe that I have anything to complain about! How great to get a glimpse of the empathy for those outside your special club for which you guys are so renowned!
(I’m simply answering snark with snark here, for the record).
Well, that was kind of my point. I don’t really know what you mean by ‘economically irrational’, but it’s obviously not the same thing as ‘irrational’.
It’s a good thing you explained to Aeon why your snotty ad hominems are not fallacious.
Oh, I get it, you have a monopoly on being snotty! Sorry, I was unaware. I’ll adjust my tone accordingly.
If your point is simply that we should have been talking about economic rationality, rather than rationality tout court all along, then that seems like a fairly minor gripe. Let’s just do the necessary terminological adjustments.
No, not saying what you should be talking about. I was expressing doubt that PhD students in philosophy are acting irrationally. I don’t know what you mean by ‘economic rationality’.
I mean that insofar as you think of “rationality” as “acting in your long-term financial best interest,” then yes, many graduate students would willingly confess to acting irrationally. Rationality, more broadly construed, probably includes things like pursuing one’s most ardent loves, etc. So yes, in the broader sense, we’re being rational. But given that the conversation up to this point has revolved exclusively around the financial details of graduate student life, it seems odd to jump in and question whether or not it is, in fact, irrational to pursue a graduate degree, unless you’re suggesting that the financial pressures under which graduate students exist are not actually all that concerning.
For the record, Bilingual edited his comment after I replied to it.
Here’s my reply to the new version.
I didn’t say or imply in any way that you have nothing to complain about.
For the record, I didn’t see your reply until after I was done editing. Apologies for the crossed wires.
Very strange that you cannot realize that it’s more irrational to take a 5-year job with lousy career prospects to live below the poverty line if you’re not already well-off. The consequences for a rich person in case of failure are miles better than the consequences for someone who has no financial cushion. That seems so obvious to me that I have a hard time even leaving this comment, it feels too condescending.
30K is not below the poverty line until it’s a family of 4. A single, recent college grad making 30K is above the median income for 22-year-olds. Also, literally no one in my grad school cohort was from a wealthy family.
You are ignoring the basic and general point I’m making, which is that if stipends get lower, fewer people with an insecure economic background are going to consider applying to grad school. That is what I am saying and it is plainly true – try thinking about the extremes of this idea. Imagine that stipends are 10k, or zero, or whatever. Is someone who has to support their family and send money back home going to consider this seriously? Or someone who know that at the first medical emergency they have, they won’t be able to continue with the programme for economic reasons? Maybe someone in this situation is going to do this at great personal cost, but most are probably not. On the other hand, the independently wealthy have no such great personal cost to consider. Making stipends equivalent or similar to other white collar job salaries makes the incentives different and allows everyone to consider going to grad school as a realistic and safe option. I am not going into detail about absolute amounts because that’s silly; what makes sense will depend on COL in a specific city. My general point stands and I do believe that too-low stipends lead to academic philosophy being discriminatory towards lower-class people.
I’ve heard the ole “you can’t ask for more money, it’ll hurt your fellow workers!” (it’s a classic), but “you can’t ask for more money, it’ll imply that your fellow workers are irrational!” is a fun new twist.
Esteban,
Is that what you think I said? That if grad students ask
for more money, it will imply that other graduate students are irrational?
Could I ask you to read through again?
Sara said that without (i) a decent stipend or (ii)
independent wealth, it is irrational to go to graduate school in philosophy. It’s not that Sara asked for more money and then I said she’s implying that other
students are irrational. She said they are irrational. Then after Bilingual jumped in to say these students might possibly have other incentives and motivations, like the love of the subject, Sara has doubled down. (I think Bilingual is saying that ‘irrational’ is ambiguous between something purely economic and something
more… fundamentally evaluative, but I’m filling in here so I could be misunderstanding.)
On some closer-to-the-ground issues:
Clearly right that Brown stipends are much better than the average philosophy stipends. And Providence does not have a terribly high cost-of-living (though it’s getting higher fast). Union representation is a significant contributor to this relative prosperity.
Also, are there PhD programs in the US that don’t provide health insurance as part of their benefit package?
What i meant (and clarified later, though it is being ignored) is that some (difficult to determine how many) potentially talented and passionate lower class people are turned away from academia because of the incentive structures involved, and in particular by how low stipends are. That does not imply that there aren’t any lower-class people in grad school, just that their attendance is personally riskier for them compared to what wealthier peers face, and that some people who are in a similar situation have probably taken that risk seriously. I guess nobody on the other side of thus argument wants to engage with the actual point i’m making here…
No snark–thank you, this is helpful, and yes, I misread things. What was driving my comment (though this came across poorly, thus making the situation worse) was the sense that the discussion was missing the more basic and important point, which Sara has articulated several times.
There are of course both advantages and disadvantages to reduced admissions. The obvious disadvantages are that many people are denied the chance to do what they want, that smaller cohorts mean less friendship and camaraderie within the program, and that TA work becomes more impersonal and less rewarding (because the university demands more “bulk” labor of teaching large sections rather than the more personal interactions that are possible with fewer undergrads per TA).
But many people have noted that grad school ends up being a bad choice for some number of students, particularly the ones who realize 4 or 5 years in that they’re not interested in completing the program, and the ones who complete the program and seek academic employment but never get it. The students who are denied admission when admissions are lowered will disproportionately be among those who would have these negative outcomes (though obviously not anywhere near 100%).
“The students who are denied admission when admissions are lowered will disproportionately be among those who would have these negative outcomes.” Any evidence for this?
I’m assuming that there is at least *some* correlation between being admitted to grad school and being someone who will have more successful outcomes in grad school, both when admissions are broader and when admissions are narrower.
If you think that admissions committees are no better than chance at identifying applicants who will be successful, then we should probably stop asking applicants to put so much information into their application, and should instead just randomize.
It would be interesting to see evidence for the claim that those denied admissions would reliably be those who would otherwise have had bad outcomes. Perhaps our program is an outlier, but our candidate rankings for admissions are in no way correlated to who ends up doing best in the program, who drops out, etc. I wish we were better able to ascertain this at the admission stage, but we certainly haven’t figured out how to do so.
I’d be interested in seeing that statistical analysis that found no correlation! As I said above, if there really is *zero* correlation, then we should save committees and applicants the many hours of labor we each spend in this process, and just replace it with randomization.
I’d be not at all surprised to discover that the correlation is relatively low, but to discover that it is *zero* would be shocking, and lead to a call for major change to the process.
I find the claim surprising. Among the 20ish finalists, the eventually admitted are often somewhat random (in terms of quality), and it is very likely that the rest of the finalists would have been just as successful if admitted
Well, the University didn’t have to do that.
Sorry, but I don’t see why we should give “the University” a pass, here. These sorts of consequences aren’t uncommon or surprising because “the University” works a certain way. It’s perfectly reasonable to advocate for change.
Here’s a daring proposal: When a university needs to save money, its first course of action should be to take a bloodthirsty hatchet to administrative bloat, not to put the squeeze on its most financially vulnerable (and most essential) workers. How about the president takes a paycut, for once?
Doing a quick spot check, I found that the president of UC Berkeley makes ~1.5 million, which, if he were to take a 100% pay cut, could perhaps pay for a ~$100 raise for each of Berkeley’s ~13,000 graduate students. I gather that a $100 raise would not be considered satisfactory.
Of course, “the president” could be a stand-in for the administration as a whole, and I am sympathetic to the idea of administrative bloat as an important cost driver, but I think this daring proposal significantly oversells how easy it is to identify and eliminate it or how much largesse that would generate for the noble graduate student. In other words, I am highly skeptical that there is an obvious alternative where graduate students all make assistant professor starting salaries without there needing to be any corresponding material tradeoffs in terms of cost, access, etc., because it just all comes out of an enormous pile of free money currently earmarked for administrative waste, fraud, and abuse.
“I get the gist of what you’re saying but I’m going to do some pedantry anyway.”
The point is about priorities. Administrative salaries should not be sacrosanct, when it comes time to cut budgets, and perhaps the plight of the “noble graduate student,” as you so jeeringly put it, ought to merit more robust consideration.
Is there any evidence that administrative salaries are being treated as sacrosanct? I think it would be interesting to see a time series comparing median grad student pay, median new assistant professor pay, median full professor pay, median administrative assistant pay, median dean pay, and median university president pay over time. I expect there are years and decades where the balance between these things has changed in one direction, and in another direction, but I really don’t have a strong guess at all about which decades are which.
(It would be particularly interesting to see which, if any, of these salaries has *ever* decreased.)