UT-Austin Faculty & Staff Solidarity with Graduate Student Workers

A living wage for graduate students is just the bare minimum. If this university wants to attract the best minds to do the best work, UT Austin should be leading by example. What would a thriving wage look like? Let's reach for that goal.

Our graduate students are deserving of better wages for their excellent work.

If we do not pay our students a living wage, our programs will certainly fall off the "top ten" list.

Meeting these much needed requests will improve our university as a whole.

A stipend increase is definitely necessary!

Graduate students deserve better. Horns down for an administration who cares only for world rankings and not for real, tangible equity. It is hard to not be furious about this issue.

The fact that our university has never closed the affordability gap, despite multiple pushes over the years only proves the necessity of this project. Our grad students deserve the same dignity that faculty and staff are afforded; annual increases to their salary.

Graduate students need to be recognized for the accomplished and talented people that they are! And that recognition includes a basic living salary.

I've seen how graduate students are getting displaced in this fast-changing city. As an advisor, I need them to have enough stipend so they can stop having to move from apartment to apartment and instead focus on their research.

If UT wants to continue to attract top students to our top tier graduate programs, we must treat our students well, beginning with a living wage.

This is an extremely important topic. We must support our students.

Our students are facing an extraordinary high cost of living, one that many of us don’t fully appreciate because we are not trying to rent. As well, recruitment and retention relies on being able to offer competitive funding. For the purposes of funding graduate students, our peers are not Midwestern universities (as has been suggested). Prospective students (and faculty) are uniformly concerned about the cost of living and there’s not much anyone can say to alleviate those concerns without actively lying.,

We must provide better for our graduate students, upon whom our teaching and research programs depend so much!

The current level of stipend for graduate students at UT Austin does not take into account the hikes in cost of living in the city. The mismatch puts graduates students in precarious living situations and harms the competitiveness of our PhD programs.

Graduate students are an important part of education and research and provide a great deal of essential work. I strongly support the aims of this petition.

I express my solidarity with our graduate students and their demands for more adequate and fair financial support to cope with sky-rocketing costs-of-living at Austin, TX.

As the richest public university in the world, UT should provide all of its graduate students a living wage.

As the head of a graduate program at UT, we often lose recruits to other R-1 Universities because our funding is still not competitive with peer programs at peer institutions. Prospective students always ask about cost-of-living concerns in interviews.

Solidarity and Support. If we are going to be a top university then we must treat our graduate students the best we can as well. This can't happen without a living wage

This is the right thing to do, and we need to do it now.