GSAS To End Daycare Stipend

A pilot program that provided childcare stipends to graduate students with children will be discontinued after this spring, removing an income supplement on which some students have come to rely.

The Doctoral Child Care Student Scholarship Program was founded in 2006 to help graduate student parents in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences fund daycare costs that often surpass the student stipends.

The pilot program—planned to last three years but extended this academic year to last for a fourth—is limited to graduate students with an approximate income below $80,000 whose children are enrolled in one of the six competitive daycare centers associated with Harvard.

But the program only provided stipends to 17 students this year, and University spokesperson Kevin Galvin said that administrators decided in December that the University’s resources should benefit a larger number of individuals in the community.

“We recognize that many graduate students are also parents, and there are new programs under consideration that would help address their needs,” Galvin wrote in an e-mailed statement.

Many graduate student parents learned of the decision to end the scholarship on Tuesday when a parent applying for the scholarship—which offers up to $5,000—forwarded a letter across an email list of student parents explaining that the scholarship had been cut.

“Although the pilot provided significant financial support to some doctoral student parents, it is not possible to continue the program in its current form,” wrote Natalie Beaumont-Smith of the Office of Work/Life Resources, adding that a working group was “actively exploring new strategies to support doctoral student parents.”

Harvard University currently supports six childcare centers for faculty, staff, and students, for which costs can reach as much as $2,000 a month. The centers provide their own financial aid plans in addition to any funding the parents can secure.

Susannah L. Rose, who heads the Graduate Student-Parents Organization that includes 400 students and spouses, said she would appeal to the GSAS administration.

“Several hundred dollars a month is the difference between buying food or not paying your electric bill,” she said.

Concerns over childcare are not limited to GSAS students. April M. Griffin, a single parent at the Medical School, said she is dependent on a similar scholarship program at the Medical School that has not indicated whether it will be discontinued.

“If they take it away from me, honestly I won’t be able to finish my PhD,” she said.

MAKING ENDS MEET

In December, Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Michael D. Smith—under whose purview GSAS falls—pledged to increase graduate student stipends by 3 percent.

At the time, GSAS Dean Allan M. Brandt said that the stipend increase would help Harvard attract the most sought after graduate students.

“Generally, the programs we compete with are making similar offers,” Brandt said, and the stipend that is currently offered “is generous but hard to live on.”

The life of a graduate student-parent can involve extensive juggling to make ends meet.

Sebastian Velez is in his sixth year as a PhD student in Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, and he has been a parent for the entirety of his studies. His daughter, now six, has “been taking my classes with me since she was born,” he said.

“She draws on the board and interacts with the students. I teach biology so she plays with the skeleton,” Velez said. I’m teaching [Invertebrate Systematic] this semester and so we get live animals like tarantulas. Today she was playing with a leech.”

Velez, a single parent, did not apply for the daycare scholarship. He said he was concerned that if he did not receive the scholarship, which requires preregistration at a daycare center, he would have been obligated to pay for a month of childcare—a cost he could not have afforded.

Making ends meet is hard to do as things stand, Velez said. He currently serves as a resident tutor, assistant resident dean, and sophomore advising coordinator in Kirkland House; acts as a teaching fellow for an undergraduate course; and grades Life Science 1b exams. Last semester, Velez also taught a nighttime course at the Harvard Extension School.

“I didn’t come here to be a tutor, as much as I enjoy it. I came here to research,” Valez said. “I am behind but I’m doing it. I arrive in the lab at eight in the morning after I drop the daughter at school. But I can’t be there until four in the morning. I can’t compete with that.”

—Staff writer Noah S. Rayman can be reached at nrayman@fas.harvard.edu. —Staff writer Elyssa A.L. Spitzer can be reached at spitzer@fas.harvard.edu.