Striking UC workers are underpaid
One of the largest higher education strikes in American history is taking place across the 10 campuses of the University of California. Some 36,000 graduate student workers are demanding fair wages, claiming that they are underpaid and can’t afford to live here. The university, where I work as a professor, argues that’s not true.
But I crunched the numbers — the workers are right.
Many of the striking workers are enrolled in UC doctoral programs. They are teachers and teaching assistants, researchers and scientists, and the work they do contributes to the reputation of excellence our university system has earned. But right now, many of them are not paid a living wage.
As a result, some UC doctoral students take on debt to make ends meet, while others take on side jobs that distract from their full-time academic jobs in research, teaching and coursework. Many rely on CalFresh/SNAP for food and some even intermittently sleep in their cars or on friends’ couches. Others simply decide that the University of California is no longer a place where they can reasonably pursue their professional goals.
As a professor of political science at UC Santa Barbara, I routinely evaluate data to understand social problems. Wanting to better understand the issues behind the strike, I turned to the numbers. Adjusting for cost-of-living data from the Council for Community and Economic Research and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, I compared UC doctoral student compensation data with doctoral pay data from the nation’s top universities.
The results are bleak. The average university income for UC doctoral students in my data from 2014 to 2022 was approximately $29,000 per year. That low pay becomes even more stretched when factoring in cost of living. According to the data, cost of living in counties with a UC campus is among the highest in the nation — 1.5 times higher than the average county in the U.S., and studio and one-bedroom apartments are 2.5 times as expensive. After adjusting for cost of living, the UC effectively pays the lowest adjusted average doctoral salaries in the nation. The only universities with a lower adjusted average doctoral pay are those in the nation’s most expensive area, Manhattan in New York City.
When comparing UC doctoral students’ pay against housing costs using HUD estimates for the fair market rent
The work they do contributes to the reputation of excellence our university system has earned.
for a one-bedroom apartment in a campus’ county, I found that the average UC doctoral student would need to pay nearly $1,800 a month on rent — constituting the vast majority of their monthly university income. But even that calculation does not fully reflect many students’ reality because it includes the relatively less expensive university towns of Merced and Riverside. For students who live in some of the state’s most expensive places, like San Francisco, Santa Cruz and Santa Barbara, the percentage of their monthly income required for rent is likely higher. This is important because a large majority of UC doctoral students live in off-campus rental housing and subsidized UC housing is in very short supply.
In response to the strike, UC proposed a 7% pay raise, stating that this would place its academic student employees “among the highest compensated among public universities in the Association of American Universities (AAU), with compensation similar to what top private institutions offer.” Later, UC increased its proposal to 7.5%. But at either percentage increase, the UC claim doesn’t hold up.
Nationwide, doctoral student salaries are generally difficult to live on but pay at the UC is particularly bad. For UC officials, this should raise alarm bells about failing to attract top students, and more seriously, the risk of housing insecurity and food insecurity among those pursuing graduate studies. But none of this should be surprising. Since 2000, multiple UC task forces have repeatedly emphasized the risk of a crisis in student pay.
California has the capacity to run a university system where everyone is provided with basic well-being. That world is not radical — it is simply humane and entirely within reach. To achieve it, the state Legislature must increase funding to the university system. Recent policy research has found that there are reasonable and affordable measures the state can take to do so. As a result, the university can improve pay for these academic workers without increasing undergraduate tuition or cutting pay and benefits for other vulnerable workers. More than a thousand UC faculty have already signed a letter calling on the Legislature to do so.
I believe in the University of California and want to promote its long-term excellence and leadership as the best public university system in the world. That excellence is in the interest of all California residents and means we need more funding to pay this workforce. Failing to rise to the occasion now will have dire consequences for the reputation of our flagship university system, the quality of undergraduate education in our state and the ability to continue attracting top talent into the California economy.