Demand 4A - Guarantee 12-month funding for all PhD programs offered at MIT

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Our support for DEI must not stop with admissions, we must support all of our students so they can thrive here too. Students at MIT on stipends paying less than 12-months per year, concentrated in SHASS and SA+P, make less than a living wage. This lack of material support creates exclusionary barriers to entry for students from poor and working class backgrounds and creates unnecessary burdens of financial precarity and uncertainty.

 

Demand 4B - Establish non-competitive internal dissertation completion fellowships

 

While many programs at MIT provide their students with consistent sources of funding throughout their education, far too many students, particularly in the humanities and social sciences where much of our anti-oppressive research is done, have no guaranteed funding source for their final years of study. Non-competitive internal dissertation completion fellowships would allow students in these fields to focus on their research, reduce time to degree, and reduce uncertainty for students. Lack of guaranteed dissertation funding puts MIT well behind its peers in these fields and devalues these areas of knowledge.

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Demand 4C - Guarantee a minimum annual cost-of-living adjustment for all graduate stipends

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As some of MIT’s lowest paid employees, many graduate students live near the living wage and can easily fall beneath it as the cost-of-living rises. A guaranteed minimum COLA must be established to ensure that graduate students can stay above water.