I worked at Dartmouth College in the CS dept and grad students there were paid and treated as employees (they got health insurance, not sure if they got any oth

I worked at Dartmouth College in the CS dept and grad students there were paid and treated as employees (they got health insurance, not sure if they got any other benefits) out of grant funds. It wasn't a lot of money though (the school took a large cut of the PhD student grants for overhead). The profs would often joke that they could guarantee full attendence at meetings if they announced there would be free pizza (for both grads and undergrads). Students often kept boxes of the cheapest breakfast cereals at their desks/workspaces. If test subjects were needed for experiments or people needed to clean the lab just offer them pizza. It gave them power over the students, and they didn't really seem to care that students were always hungry, maybe some of them just assumed young people are always hungry. They sometimes made grad students buy supplies necessary to their work with the students own funds. I believe the grad students are now unionized there, so things may have changed. Loans often cover tuition and sometimes a cafeteria food plan. If you don't like the food you have to buy your own. If you have to pay for the food plan you might not have enough. Paying for food competes with other things also, books, travel, drinks with friends, concerts. Kind of miserable if you have to trade off food versus life, it created a lot of stress. There was a lot of inequality there even though it is an ivy league college, some students had SUV's and would go on trips to France for holidays, some had bicycles/skateboards and boxes of cereal and didn't go anywhere on holidays.