San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
International students get shafted
UC strikers say the extra fee they pay is unfair
It’s been a big month for union organizing in the Bay Area. Employees at the Glide Foundation, a San Francisco nonprofit that serves homeless and low-income people in the Tenderloin, voted overwhelmingly to unionize, citing low wages and burnout. Staff at a Starbucks in the Castro walked off the job over slow-moving efforts to negotiate contracts. And on Monday, the largest academic strike in the nation’s history launched at University of California campuses.
The scale of the UC strike is hard to comprehend, even after witnessing a noisy contingent in person. On Thursday afternoon, the dull roar of union protesters at UC Berkeley could be heard blocks away. Approximately 48,000 postdoctoral candidates, researchers and graduate student instructors canceled classes, put projects on hold and hit the streets to bargain over low wages and expensive childcare costs.
It’s the Bay Area, after all, where one has to earn $61 an hour to “comfortably” afford rent, and daycare can cost thousands of dollars each month. So these asks are easy to understand.
But one union complaint is trickier: “No NRSTs.” Unpacking this nuanced financial request is not easy, but it’s important.
NSRT is an acronym for nonstudent residential tuition. It applies to any student who attends UC from outside of California and can cost up to $15,102 a year. This may seem fairly standard; the system is designed, of course, to be more accessible for California students. But for international students, this fee can make or break their ability to stay in school. Without legal permission to apply for federal loans or food stamps, many rely on private lenders with highinterest rates. And F-1 student visas only permit them to work
20 hours a week on campus, making outside work illegal.
As a result, many international students employed by universities return nearly their entire paychecks to pay their fee. I’ve heard stories of international students relying on the UC Berkeley food pantry and of not being able to fly home to attend family funerals, even as they’re working just as hard as their Californian counterparts.
Kavena Hambira, a fine arts graduate student from Namibia who teaches two classes, has seen this struggle firsthand.
“Folks are coming from countries where the exchange rate is vastly skewed,” he told me. “As a result, a lot of international students can’t travel back to their home countries because they just can’t afford to be away from their work.”
Hambira is one of the lucky ones; his program paid his fee for him, and around 60% of
UC Berkeley’s international students have found similar workarounds. But that system is not implemented across all departments and UC campuses, leading to gray areas, and international students fall through the cracks trying to make ends meet.
“The university talks about being inclusive, diverse, a world-class institution,” Hambira said. “How can you possibly say that when the majority of your graduate students are living in poverty?”
Yuanqi Lyu, a third-year doctoral student from China researching condensed matter physics, is also one of the lucky ones. His fee was paid for by the grant holder funding his research. But that setup can get tricky; by having to pay extra for international students, Lyu worries fewer people are being given research opportunities.
“How can we just work in the same lab doing the exact
same work and receive totally different treatment?” Lyu said. “The NRST just broke your dream of equity and inclusiveness.”
Lyu has been on the front line of the strike each day this week at UC Berkeley starting at 6:45 a.m. He’s lost a lot through his participation; he had to pause research that will set him back weeks, a decision he said is stressful and heartbreaking. But the choice was easy — Lyu is fighting for a clear policy that centers equity.
“At UC Davis, many Ph.D. students have to pay their own NRST from the beginning, which is horrifying to me,” he said. “Imagine having an average salary of $34,000 and paying $15,000. Where do you live? It’s not possible. It’s basically a ticking time bomb for every international student. I would go back to China immediately, and it would ruin my future.”
In June, the University of California system reported an
$18.2 billion endowment, which Hambira wryly noted is larger than the gross domestic product of Namibia.
UC campuses are huge engines for social mobility and social change, and their students provide some of the most cutting-edge research in the country. But the system for international students needs reform. At the very least, the NRST could be weighted by a student’s family income and policies made consistent across campuses. The university suffers if only those international students with inherited wealth can attend.
“People are working to get a cure to cancer,” Hambira said, “but they’re forced to choose between paying off international fees, paying rent or buying food.”