The Chronicle of Higher Education
November 23, 2015
University administrators don’t view Tania Aparicio as an employee, but she feels like one.
The sociology Ph.D. student at the New School teaches two undergraduate courses, holds office hours, answers students’ emails, and performs research unrelated to her dissertation for professors.
"When I had an issue with my pay stub," Ms. Aparicio says, "I was referred to human resources and payroll. I wasn’t referred to my adviser or my dean, because I’m an employee, and those are my wages."
To Ms. Aparicio’s frustration, however, she and other graduate assistants at the New School are not seen as employees and do not have a legal right to collectively bargain for better pay and working conditions.
That may change soon. Last month the National Labor Relations Board said it would review a bid by New School graduate students to unionize, a move that could reshape how graduate students are viewed at private colleges nationwide.
A 2004 ruling by the board involving Brown University found that graduate students at private colleges can’t unionize because their relationship with universities is primarily academic, not economic. (Unionization at public colleges, meanwhile, is governed by state law.) In taking the case, the labor board is signaling a willingness — and many labor experts say a likelihood — to overturn the Brown ruling.
The review of the New School case comes as graduate students at several other private universities like Yale, Harvard, and Columbia are seeking to unionize, fueled by hope that the Brown ruling will fall, and by the example of New York University, which in 2013 became the only private college to voluntarily recognize a graduate-student union.
Like students on other campuses, those at the New School say their frustrations grew over time, slowly boiling to the point where they decided to form a union and then take their case to the labor board. Yet Ms. Aparicio and others also say their situation stands out as something of a perfect storm of graduate-student woes in part because the New School offers relatively low financial support despite being located in an expensive city like New York.
Top administrators at the college acknowledge the hardships for the graduate students, but university lawyers argue that the money graduate assistants receive is actually financial aid, not pay. Moreover, according to legal briefs filed by the university, the purpose of these positions "is to assist students, and not create employment opportunities."
‘We Felt Powerless’
Ms. Aparicio says she lives frugally. She lives close to campus to save on commuting costs, in a rent-stabilized Chinatown walk-up that she shares with three roommates. Some weeks during her graduate program, she says, her food budget was tiny and she ate just one meal a day.
These days, she counts herself among the lucky students who have on-campus academic jobs. When she started at the New School as a master’s student in 2012, however, she worked at one time or another as a babysitter, a graphic designer, a researcher for a human-rights group, and a production assistant for commercials.
Even so, Ms. Aparicio has accrued more than $80,000 in debt to finance her graduate studies, and she’s not alone. About a third of the people who completed a Ph.D. at the New School from 2004 to 2013, the most recent period for which data are available, reported accruing more than $50,000 in debt during graduate school, an unusually high rate, according to federal data.
Moreover, many report difficult working conditions. Ms. Aparicio, for example, didn’t know she would have classes to teach until a week before they began this semester, making financial planning uncertain. "There’s no way for us to know how we’re going to make a living," she says, "or whether we should take a year off or a leave of absence because it’s not going to be possible to do both school and work outside the university."