How it has come to this:
by Elena Corbett
This is my seventh year as a Ph.D. student in the NELC department where I am a Modern History concentrator. I began in Islamic Archaeology in 1998, obtained my M.A. in 2000, switched my concentration, completed my four years of coursework in Winter 2003 and took my comps in March of that year. From June 2003-June 2004 I was in Egypt on a Center for Arabic Study Abroad (CASA) Fellowship. I returned for Summer Session 2004 to teach in the Summer Arabic Program and the Graham School. In September 2004 I left to begin my dissertation research in Jordan.
In December 2002, after nearly two years of cohabitating to join our meager financial forces, my husband and I were married. He is in his sixth year as a Ph.D. student in the NELC department where he is a concentrator in Syro-Palestinian Archaeology. Prior to that, he completed degrees in Anthropology and NELC as a U of C undergraduate. We have both been ABD for a year.
As a 21 year-old senior at Bucknell University graduating with honors and accolades I could never have imagined the financial strain I would find myself in now. I was just ecstatic and honored to get into a program like Chicago’s NELC, which was my first choice, and ultimately the only program of the seven to which I had applied that accepted me (being that it’s the only program to which I had applied that accepts students it won’t fund). Everyone had told me that grad school ultimately should and would pay for itself. I didn’t think any differently; my father had done it at Syracuse and had emerged unscathed. Likewise he had sent many of his advisees to competitive graduate programs all over the world and none seemed to be suffering. The same could be said of friends I had who had taken similar paths. So when I received my acceptance letter from the U of C, regretting that there was no funding to give me either tuition or stipend but suggesting that hard work would earn them for me eventually, I decided to go for it, and took out all the loans I could to get me through the first year and give me a cushion for the next. When I arrived in NELC and saw that some students had so much funding while others had so little or, like me, none, I brushed it off by telling myself that, despite my undergraduate successes and previous experience in my chosen field, somehow my peers must be more special than I am. It only made me more determined to succeed. After what may have been the most miserable, labor-intensive, loneliest year of my life, I had accumulated an excellent G.P.A., but received only tuition and no stipend while others who had done no better than I were at least given a token from the department’s pockets. Some of us among the unlucky justified this by saying, “Well, so-and-so works hard. He/she deserves it.” I said, “Well, so do we.” This was the first straw.
My second year at the U of C is another tale unto itself; in summary it led me to switch my concentration after already obtaining my M.A. The downside was that I would now have to do the better part of four years’ work in the two years of potential funding I had left. The upside was that my studies finally made me happy. I also had my soul mate and finally managed to get some funding in the form of a Title VI FLAS Fellowship because I was studying Arabic. My husband was not so fortunate. He had also by now accumulated two years’ worth of loans to fund his graduate education. And despite his B.A. from NELC and his continued, more-than-adequate scholastic performance, he was shut out of funding yet again. Yes, the department cut him checks to send him on their digs or on travel related to digs, but aside from tuition, he never got anything to help get him through the academic year. That year the two of us lived on my $11,000 stipend and his work study. The following year we lived on my $14,000 stipend and his work study. While my fellowship covered some of my fees, we paid U of C health insurance fees for two people. With one person’s stipend and a few thousand dollars in lousy work study money, we paid university fees for two people. We also ate, maintained ourselves, paid rent, and paid the low insurance rates promised by the Gecko on a 17 year-old hand-me-down car.
At this point I must explain that once NELC students finish scholastic residence (generally after 3.5--4 years), except for a few who are accepted with major university grants, there is no more funding. More appropriately, there is no more potential for funding. This is compounded by a dearth of (low-paying, without-benefits) teaching opportunities that are open to all students. Likewise, once I had completed scholastic residence, I was no longer eligible for FLAS funding. It must also be explained that there is a high price to be paid for love and marriage; the University does not take into consideration that students are married to each other or involved in domestic partnerships. This becomes especially detrimental in light of a funding structure where insurance and fees are not covered by the University and only one or neither partner may have a stipend. The University has no provision for a reduction in one partner’s program, university or health insurance fees.
Taking my CASA Fellowship to Egypt and leaving my husband behind in Chicago to face all the necessary fees without funding was not an option, so, as he had to be in the region to work on his dissertation anyway, we both went. We bought STA Travel Insurance because there was no way we could afford U of C insurance. At any rate, U of C insurance, from the perspective of students living abroad, only comes in handy if you are so badly hurt you need evacuation or if your mortal remains require repatriation. Medical care in the places we go is quite adequate and cheap enough to pay for out-of-pocket. My stipend in Cairo was equivalent to 290 USD per month. While we were doing a world better than most of Egypt’s 74 million inhabitants, inflation there is rampant and we still had to struggle and come up with all kinds of strategies to maintain ourselves. Most of my fellow CASA students, on the other hand, were ecstatic to be living in a manner beyond which they are used to at their home institutions. Why? Most of them are in graduate programs at our peer institutions and other institutions we consider “beneath” us. Let me give you a few examples of what I learned about graduate programs in these other universities: grad students at several of these institutions can take their year-long FLAS’s abroad and can combine them with other substantial grants; FLAS covers insurance fees at most of these institutions; out of all the students I met from these institutions, my husband and I were the only ones who had ever had to pay program, university, or health insurance fees, especially when abroad; many of these institutions have very powerful grad student unions; all grad students at these institutions are required to teach; every student who enters a program like History at NYU is guaranteed the same basic level of funding as his or her peers, including fees, health insurance, and an adequate stipend; and funding packages at most of these places are good for five years. I could go on.
With nearly nothing left in our bank account and no paycheck to look forward to until at least late July, we returned to Chicago at the beginning of June to teach in the Summer Session. My resentment only grew. What little faith I had left that academia would at least manage to keep some distance from the corporate model of administration was dashed when I saw how much my students were paying, what kind of services they were getting in return, how little I was getting paid relative to what I was doing and what they were paying, and even worse, the crap which my supervisors didn’t get paid enough to take. Really, it’s mind-boggling that the University manages to run at all and hasn’t completely alienated those highly competent, dedicated souls who keep us all afloat. That’s another story.
Despite the fact that we desperately miss our friends and the faculty and administrators we’ve grown close to over the years, my husband and I were so happy to leave Chicago again. You can only pay $10 out of the $290 you’re making every month so many times to have a transcript mailed from Admin to Wieboldt to apply for the money you so desperately need to make it through next year, only to be told that there were too many qualified applicants so you’re only getting a fraction of what you’d asked for. You can only be told to “not expect any money from the University” and to “use what’s leftover from your Fulbright” to pay your additional research expenses without screaming and shaking someone and trying to make them understand that you plan to use “what’s leftover from your Fulbright” to pay off what amounts to a fraction of the truly astonishing debt that you and your spouse have accumulated simply because of your U of C graduate education. You can only be made to feel ungrateful for your pro forma status and the Division’s “generosity” in picking up the tab so many times without wondering aloud, when you and your spouse write the $193 check each quarter for his pro forma fees, “What the hell are we paying $200 for when we’re not even there???” You can only take so many hits before you have nothing left to say or remember or expect except for the worst.
Now, despite the Fulbright, despite the fact that we’re only a couple years away from defending, we often lay awake at night, wondering if we’re actually going to finish our degrees. You see, my husband will have used up all of his pro forma at the end of the academic year. When my Fulbright ends, so does my pro forma. Then the $193 per quarter becomes something like $700 per quarter per person plus Student Activities Fees for two people, Student Clinic Fees for two people, and U of C insurance fees for two people (at current rates, a couple in our situation would have to pay more than 9.5 thousand dollars per year out of pocket just in fees to the University; by comparison, most TA positions, if one can obtain them, pay $1500 before taxes). As long as we are abroad, we can maintain the comprehensive travel medical insurance we have thanks to the memberships in Triple A that my parents got for us. Unlike the U of C’s plan, our plan is affordable, student-oriented, and we as a couple can hold one policy, the spouse costing about half of the policy-holder. When we are done overseas, we can no longer hold this plan. As long as we are registered U of C students, we are required to be insured. There is no way of guaranteeing that we will be able to obtain fellowships to support ourselves to the completion of our degrees. “What is leftover from the Fulbright” will only take us so far in this situation, and then there’s the unimaginable amount of educational debt we have incurred and the impact this is already having on our credit. We’re working on these dissertations as fast as we can, but despairingly we’ve recently come to the realization that it is more than likely that one of us, if not both, will have to quit and move on with life. Just which one of us will go first is still mostly undecided. While we’ve somehow managed to just make ends meet to this point, too many things have to happen in exactly the right way over the next couple of years to keep us from irretrievably sinking under our financial burden. In light of our debt, the sick nature of the academic job market and the tenure system, and the things we want out of our lives together, we simply can’t trust in the alignment of the stars.
We concede that yes, we should have been smarter, probably should have gotten out sooner. But we like what we do, we get a kick out of teaching, and we naively continued to think that despite everything, things would work themselves out. And we know that had we not been at U of C, we wouldn’t have met each other, wouldn’t know what we know, wouldn’t have lived overseas, wouldn’t have the friends we have, or have had the honor of knowing some of the professors we know. At the same time, we cynically wonder if, when one or both of us has to give up, anyone but these people will care. Will it weigh in the slightest on the consciences of our department or the University that two students who did all that was demanded of them and more got so close to finishing only to miss making ends meet? And will anyone be motivated to fix the situation so it doesn’t happen to someone else?
The word on the streets is the the Social Science division will be providing some form of full health insurance coverage to incoming PhD student with stipend funding. This is good news and a positive step forward. We hope that the other divisions follow with similar plans and that the administration also soon focuses on how it can help current students, especially those in the first 3-4 years of their programs to defray the rising costs of health care insurance.