UT Dallas Salary Increase Request
Since the University of Texas at Dallas was founded, teaching and research assistants (TAs and RAs) have been a crucial ingredient of the university’s tremendous success. We are proud of being part of this great institution, and are always encouraged to give our best effort as recognition to the place we consider as our home. Over the years, we spent countless nights working in our labs to improve our research, worked through weekends and holidays so we can accomplish our works before the deadlines, and tried our best to come up with innovative ways to teach our outstanding students in classrooms. We never considered that as extra work; this was just our way of expressing our gratitude to the place that embraced us in its world class research labs and classrooms.
Recently, the TAs and RAs have been struggling with the fairly low stipend paid by the university. In the past two years, a significant increase in the apartment rental prices has occurred, and there was no salary increase in return. Yet, we believed our role as part of the UTD family was to endure the increase in the cost of living without adding up to the pile of the UTD expenses. For the same reasons, we did not comment on the $300 graduate international special service fees thatinternational studentspay annually, although they are supposed to receive full coverage of the tuition as well as the university fees.
We have received a shocking email from the student health center on July 2, informing us that the health insurance requirements have been changed. Under the current requirements, international students have no options other than purchasing the student health insurance policy (SHIP) which cost them $1860 per year. It is worth mentioning that in order to cut our expenses, most of the non-resident TAs and RAs used to purchase the cheapest insurance plans in the market that satisfied the old waiver requirements, which were around $1450 cheaper (per year) than the current insurance policy available by UTD. We believe the deficit that will be caused by the new requirements is impossible to overcome, given our $1570 average monthly salaries. Hence, we kindly request that the university considers one of the following
1. Return the old health insurance waiver requirements.
2. Waive the health insurance costs for the TAs and RAs.
3. Increase the stipend so as to cover the increase in the health insurance cost and living expenses.
Since we understand the previous requests cannot be fulfilled immediately, we propose as a quick resolution postponing the new health insurance waiver requirements for the 2014 fall semester till the university comes up with a decision regarding this crucial issue.
We hope that the university takes our requests seriously. We are seeking no more than a settlement that enables us to cover the most basic expenses (food, clothes and shelter). It is actually very sad that the students are endangered of securing these basic rights. However, we are sure that UTD, the place we consider as our home will act considerably to the problem we are having.
Kindly find attached the signatures of the UTD TAs and RAs who share the same feelings and agree with the requests mentioned above.
Comment