For Many Graduate Students, Covid-19 Pandemic Highlights Inequities (The Chronicle of Higher Education)

April 10, 2020
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As higher education reels from the effects of the coronavirus pandemic, graduate students say they face a unique set of challenges, including difficulty getting access to research materials, concern about finishing their degrees on time, and pressing financial troubles. Administrators are focusing attention on faculty members and undergraduates, some grad students complain, reinforcing the feeling that they are second-class citizens.

Anna Meier, a fifth-year doctoral candidate in political science at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, said her peers are preoccupied with paying their rent and the fees graduate students pay each semester for the use of campus facilities. The supports her department has announced thus far — doubling conference-travel funding for 2021, extending deadlines on papers — are, she said, “missing the point.”  Read more.