Our graduate students are grossly underpaid

Graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, who are responsible for most of the labbased research in this country, are one group that deserves far more financial support, particularly in the face of rising inflation.

They are the trainees in science, engineering and medical research who are creating the knowledge on which we build future prosperity and better health.

They toil long hours in the lab, running the experiments, analyzing the data and making the unexpected observations that are often at the root of the biggest and most important discoveries. To put their financial state into perspective, a typical graduate student in my field of chemistry is paid a stipend $30,000 to $35,000. Stipends and the value of scholarships have not kept pace with rising costs. While a small number get very prestigious fellowships that pay more, they are few and far between. From the above stipend, students pay tuition. They are living on $25,000 or less to pay rent, food, transportation, taxes and associated living expenses.

Imagine how far that money goes in expensive cities like Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal (never mind increasingly expensive places like Waterloo, Hamilton, Halifax, Calgary or Quebec City)? The situation is dire.

To an outsider the solution seems very simple. Faculty at university should just pay a better stipend. An important piece of information will challenge and might dispel that solution.

The average discovery research grant in the sciences is around $65,000. Grants are higher in the medical sciences, but the success rate getting them is far lower.

While the costs of doing research have increased over the past 30 years, the size of research grants for fundamental research has remained stagnant for decades and left our researchers woefully behind.

It would be easy to blame our federal granting agencies who distribute funds, but they find themselves in a delicate balancing act. They have a mission to fund a broad base of research while also rewarding and incentivizing our best researchers to remain in Canada and compete with the world.

How to do both?

The most direct solution would be for the provinces and federal government to put new money into the “training” aspect of graduate studies. While research students are not traditional “apprentices,” the skills they gain are crucial to the future of the Canadian capacity to tackle our toughest challenges.

Universities are in the knowledge creation and knowledge transfer business. But the knowledge is only created with the contributions of these historically underfunded people. More support for them means more skilled researchers, at a better standard of living.

Companies also need to do more. They can’t expect sufficient trainees, of the high quality they demand, paid only from the public purse.

University presidents and politicians love to say we in Canada punch above our weight. Maybe so. But as it concerns stipends for graduate students and other trainees, we are at best punching in the middleweight class. MARK LAUTENS IS ASTRAZENECA PROFESSOR AND J.B. JONES DISTINGUISHED PROFESSOR, UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO. HE HAS