Times are changing and colleges and universities are scrambling to keep up — at least when it comes to family benefits for employees, including graduate students who work as research and teaching assistants.
In April, the Graduate Student Senate at The University of Texas at Arlington passed a resolution calling for the university to plan for graduate teaching and research assistants to receive maternity or paternity leave while they are under contract.
Graduate benefits
For Vivian Ta, a UT Arlington Ph.D. student in psychology, the resolution represented a major step. She is president of the Graduate Student Senate, and it was that organization’s first resolution since 2007. “If anything, this resolution sends a message to the administration that it would definitely help graduate students who have children, or are planning to have families, to transition through parenting and through their studies as well,” Ta told Diverse a month after the resolution was passed.
Many other universities already have similar policies, which the UT Arlington graduate students researched for six months before voting on the measure. One of those institutions, Purdue University, states on its website that its policy is “to provide Paid Parental Leave to benefits-eligible employees, including graduate student employees, due to the birth of an employee’s child or the placement within an employee’s home of an adopted child.”
At the University of Iowa, graduate students who are experiencing a new child entering the home and have a teaching or research assistantship may be eligible for paid and unpaid leaves, according to university policy, “although the UI does not adjust the time-to-degree clock for graduate student parents.”
