And All I Got Was This Lousy PhD

The University of Chicago's new funding plan has grad students questioning their future in academia.

By Deanna Isaacs

Apples with protest messages, placed in the University of Chicago provost's office

In February 2007, the University of Chicago announced a new program that promised to transform the lives of its graduate students. Beginning the following fall, almost every entering grad in the humanities and social sciences divisions would receive an annual stipend of $19,000 for five years, along with free tuition, guaranteed teaching opportunities, and other benefits. The $50 million program looked downright princely, until it became evident that none of the university's 800 or so current grad students in those disciplines would be included.

The students began a series of polite protests (at their most riled, they marched into the provost's office and deposited 150 apples on his desk), and last May the administration convened a working group of faculty and students to consider whether they might share in the bounty. The group's report, issued in February, determined that very little could be done because including current grad students would cost roughly an additional $55 million.

But one of those students, political science major Daragh Grant, realized while perusing the report that a flaw in its assumptions had resulted in a significant overstatement of the cost. The flaw: certain grad students were added into the total at the full tuition rate of $37,000, when they actually pay only a fraction of that amount. This inflated the projected expense of the free tuition benefit by about $24 million.

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