It's easy to blame Harvard and other universities. But if you focus on Harvard you ignore the plight of all other graduate students around the country who don't

It's easy to blame Harvard and other universities. But if you focus on Harvard you ignore the plight of all other graduate students around the country who don't have a university with a massive endowment. This is fault of the federal government. We are not evil. We want to pay students more. We lived as students and it was terrible financially. Our grants from the federal government are just not large enough to pay students well. And the federal government ties our hands. Graduate student salaries are limited by the NIH cap. https://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/NOT-OD-22-132.html https://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/NOT-OD-22-1... The NIH limits you to $56,484 per student. Out of this come taxes, some fees, etc. Even if I decide that I want my students to live better and hire a few less (which by the way would hurt my ability to get future grants), I am not allowed to pay them more than that out of NIH grants! Most grants (NSF, DoD, industry and foundation grants) are calibrated to the NIH benchmark. I wish these articles would blame the real problem: federal science funding has fallen off dramatically. Even 20 years ago we used to spend about 0.9% of GDP on science. Now, we spend about 0.5%. 20 years ago, about 5% of the spending of the federal government was on science, now it's about 2.5%. We need the federal government to step up science funding if we want students to be able to lead normal lives.