A separate pot of money funded by the federal government for graduate student pay could bring them out of poverty.
by Laura Nilson, Rebecca Maymon, R. Bruce Lennox. Originally published on Policy Options
November 30, 2024
Canada’s graduate students, specifically those in master’s and PhD thesis programs, carry out original research as they work toward their degrees. They are knowledge creators who make critical contributions to Canada’s collective research and innovation ecosystem. Most receive a modest stipend intended to cover their living expenses, with the goal of helping them to focus on their work, increase their productivity, and enter the labour market more quickly.
This training model produces highly qualified researchers with a broad range of skills, who go on to contribute to every sector of our economy. But graduate student stipend levels have been outpaced by inflation, leaving many graduate students either living below the poverty line or choosing to take their talent elsewhere.
Why have stipends remained stagnant? Graduate student stipends can be funded by various sources, including federal and provincial fellowship programs, but are typically paid from research supervisors’ federally funded research grants. But supervisors pay these stipend costs from the same fixed budget that funds their other research operating costs, so increasing stipend levels would force them to either cut graduate student numbers or cut other research costs. It is not hard to see that either option will decrease overall research productivity.
A way forward
Continuing to underpay our graduate student researchers is not an option. But finding room to increase stipends within the existing budget structure is a major impediment.
We propose that the federal government create a new funding envelope earmarked exclusively for graduate student stipends. Such a “Graduate Trainee Allocation Fund” would deliver to each university a funding envelope targeted exclusively to graduate student researcher support. This dedicated pathway from research funds to graduate student stipends would build clear expectations for support into the funding model and allow supervisors to focus their spending decisions on research operating costs.
Graduate student researchers have been underfunded for decades, but recent advocacy and media attention have generated an increased recognition of this issue and a call for solutions. Indeed, this attention has generated some movement, including a recent injection of funding that will increase the number and dollar value of competitive federal graduate student fellowships that fund the stipends of their recipients.
If you’ve heard of these fellowship increases, you might think this problem is solved. But in fact, these increases are not reaching all students: federal fellowships currently fund only approximately 10 per cent of Canada’s graduate student researchers, and the proposed increases will raise this number to roughly 15 per cent.
And the increased dollar amount of each of these fellowships is putting a new strain on research budgets. Because the remaining 85-90 per cent of research graduate students continue to be funded through other sources – mainly their supervisors’ research budgets – the benchmark set by these newly-increased fellowship values is generating pressure to increase stipends for all students in the research environment, therefore putting even more strain on research budgets.
Funding needs to be targeted
This strain was recognized to a certain extent in the 2024 federal budget, which proposed increases to federal research grant funding. In principle, increased research budgets would allow for increased stipends. However, while this attention is encouraging, it is not clear whether such across-the-board budget increases would translate into increased spending on graduate student stipends.
Indeed, this issue is the focus of a recent open letter from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), Canada’s federal funding agency for health research, which recognizes this limitation and encourages applicants to submit budgets that include a fair stipend while the agency “continues to work closely with the other granting councils and our partners in government on the details of how these investments will be implemented.”
At the heart of this discussion is a clear policy gap: our current research funding system lacks a mechanism to ensure that budget increases positively impact graduate student stipend levels. Our proposed “Graduate Trainee Allocation Fund” aims to address this gap by providing a separate funding envelope and dedicated pathway for targeted investment in graduate student stipends.
Our proposed fund would be calculated in relation to 1) a university’s total dollar amount of federal research grant funding, and 2) the number of students enrolled in master’s and PhD research (i.e. thesis) programs. Universities would administer this amount for the sole purpose of increasing graduate student stipends to a defined appropriate level. This allocation would be provided outside the federal research grant budgets, analogous to the existing federal “research support fund” that offsets indirect costs of research.
Not only would such a strategy ensure that funding increases benefit graduate students directly, but it would also avoid a complex re-engineering of the federal council grant programs, and their respective evaluation processes.
The timing is right for such a change. The 2024 budget, in addition to its plan to increase research funding, also proposed a plan to introduce a “capstone” research funding organization that will oversee the three federal councils (CIHR, NSERC, and SSHRC) that currently fund Canada’s research and innovation enterprise.
Graduate student researchers drive Canadian research and innovation, and they are active participants in the scientific community. A targeted investment, delivered in this manner, will help position Canada to become increasingly competitive in the recruitment and retention of emerging researchers who play such a vital role in advancing our knowledge economy.
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This article first appeared on Policy Options and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.