> I am saying that the funding of current PhD students is irrelevant to whether their family is wealthy, not that familial background is irrelevant. I don't th

> I am saying that the funding of current PhD students is irrelevant to whether their family is wealthy, not that familial background is irrelevant. I don't think it's correct to equate having a graduate degree with being "wealthy", especially depending on which degree it is specifically. In any case, graduate student salaries aren't means-tested at all, and the weird form of backdoor familial means-testing that you're suggesting, i.e., don't raise the funding for humanities students, seems quite bizarre and extremely imperfect. Unless you're claiming, absurdly, that there are no STEM grad students of affluent background, I don't see that this form of means-testing has any place in union negotiations. The document you cited just shows averages, but individual graduate students of all fields clearly have parents with every different kind of educational attainment. On a personal note, I was a grad student in the humanities, neither of my parents has a college degree, and they certainly weren't affluent. Moreover, they didn't pay a dime for my grad school. I would have loved if there were means testing, because I would have benefitted, but it didn't exist. So it's difficult to avoid taking this personally when humanities students are wrongly stereotyped.