ITHACA, N.Y.—Outside of Cornell University’s College of Veterinary Medicine, where a meeting of the University’s Board of Trustees was underway, hundreds of graduate students rallied to demand higher pay for their work on Friday. The university recently announced that it would be giving all graduate students an 8% increase in their stipends for the 2023 – 2024, but that is not enough — not even close — many graduate students contend.
The rally was organized by the Cornell Graduate Students United, the union representing the school’s graduate students. Nathan Scinto-Madonich, a graduate student at Cornell’s School of Integrative Plant Science, described his role at the university as being a mix of lab manager, research associate, educator, and an advisor to students.
“All of those in and of themselves can be individual job titles, but grads across the university are being asked to do all of them at once,” said Scinto-Madonich. “And so while the 8% stipend adjustment that was recently made is in the right direction, it’s still not enough to support grads.”
In response to a request for comment from The Ithaca Voice, Cornell University Vice President for Community Relations Joel Malina said in a written statement that “Cornell graduate students exercised their freedom of expression today in demonstrating peacefully outside a meeting of the University’s Board of Trustees. Now, and always, we affirm students’ right to protest and speak out on matters important to them.”
Speaking to ralliers on Friday, Alec Pollak, a graduate student at Cornell’s Department of Literatures in English, said the 8% increase, “does not feel accountable to worker needs, it does not feel accountable to making sure that we are not rent burdened, that we can afford vision and dental insurance, that we can get to campus safely and reliably to do the jobs that we came here to do skillfully and proudly.”
Graduate student stipends range from about $30,000 to about $38,000 at the university. Cornell announced in February that those stipends would increase by 8%, which the Cornell Chronicle wrote was the largest jump in stipends since 2006.
According to the 2022 Tompkins County Living Wage study from Alternatives Federal Credit Union, for workers to afford living in Ithaca while being able to save some money, they need to make a wage of $16.61 which, working 40 hours a week, converts to an annual income of about $34,548 a year.
Set against the cost of living in the Ithaca area, grad students at Friday’s rally described having to scramble to pay rent, not being able to afford groceries, and working grueling hours.
“All those things are said to be a right of passage,” for graduate students, said Scinto-Madonich. But to him and the other hundreds of grads that turned out, “it’s not acceptable.”