Note: Click here to see the Louisiana Illuminator’s original reporting.
In 1994, Jim Henderson was offered a graduate assistantship that came with a stipend the equivalent of almost $16,000 today. He turned it down.
Nearly 30 years later, Henderson is now president of the University of Louisiana System, where graduate assistants are sometimes paid as little as $10,000.
As the cost of living has steadily increased, the wages of graduate student workers — who do much of the labor required to keep a university running, including teaching many freshman courses — have not.
More than 20 former graduate assistants at Louisiana universities told the Illuminator in interviews that their salaries were too small. An analysis of data provided through these interviews indicates that what was a small salary in the 1970s and 1980s is still more than what many grad student workers make today when adjusted for inflation.
Check out this interactive timeline to see how much graduate assistants have made over the past several decades — and how much that stipend would be worth today. 
LSU, the state’s flagship university, is raising its minimum pay for Ph.D. students, but those working on master’s degrees or enrolled in post-graduate programs at other state schools are struggling to keep up.
Thanks to $8 million included in the state operating budget, LSU will raise the pay of terminal-degree seeking students — this usually means Ph.D. candidates — to $23,000, which university Provost Roy Haggerty believes to be the highest minimum pay among schools in the Southeastern Conference.
But students seeking master’s degrees, who do similar work, are paid as little as $11,000, a salary some would have struggled to live on even many years ago. In the era of COVID-19, inflation has further depleted their meager compensation.
After mandatory student fees totaling as much as $2,000 per semester, graduate assistants must budget carefully to afford rent and food. According to Rent Cafe, the average rent in Baton Rouge is $1,169 for a one-bedroom apartment. That often means LSU students forgo health insurance, unable to afford the $3,000 it costs for the university’s student health insurance plan.
Without prompting, several of the former graduate students interviewed shared that they were only able to scrape by because they qualified for food stamps or by taking a second job, an action generally prohibited by department policy.
Michael Henson, who got a Ph.D. in Biology from LSU in 2019, said tuition waivers offered as part of student’s compensation package were counted as post-tax income, so many students were over the poverty line and unable to qualify for support services.
Rocky Hinds, who lived off a stipend from 1978 to1980 that, when adjusted for inflation, is higher than what many graduate assistants make today, said he had to stop working as a GA at LSU and get a better paying job because he got a surprise $35 speeding ticket he couldn’t afford.
The University of Louisiana System is also slated to receive $1.6 million for graduate assistant pay. In an interview, Henderson said the funds will be allocated to each institution based on the number of graduate assistants they currently have, but no further plans have been made on how to spend the money.
Henderson said universities should reevaluate the compensation of graduate assistants regularly to ensure that their pay is ethical.
Critics of the current graduate assistant pay level — including LSU President William F. Tate, who has called it unethical — say the low rate denies opportunities to disadvantaged students who don’t have outside support.
Adam Dohrenwend, a geography graduate assistant at LSU who earns a $15,000 stipend, said as much at an event last year held to highlight compensation problems to university leaders.
“Education isn’t just supposed to be for people with money and people whose parents have money, people whose parents wear suits to work, right?” Dohrenwend said. “Students whose families … get their hands dirty… first-generation, lower working class students should be able to get an education.”