National Opinion

Every undergraduate here is striving for the same thing: a degree.

But what comes next? Pushing papers at a desk job in a gray cubicle? Or will it be the equally gray future of attending graduate school?

Each of us who are lucky enough to cross the stage and pick up a diploma, that hard-earned slip of paper, will face the question. But a lot of us won’t be prepared to say which is better; a job or grad school. A lot of us won’t even be able to say what a graduate student does.

That’s due in part to graduate students on campus lacking a real voice. They’re a marginalized group whom the university doesn’t keep the same meticulous statistics on that it does with undergrads. They’re asked to do overwhelming amounts of research for an underwhelming stipend. And, they’re asked to do it silently.

Grad students have a tough job. They’re educating themselves while educating others, not to mention researching for the advancement of their department. The Counsel of Graduate Schools says more than half of graduate students nationwide drop out.

Yet, at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, it’s tough to grasp the real attrition rate. Concrete numbers aren’t kept on the comings and goings of grad students.

It’s tough to keep track of so many students on so many individualized tracks across a campus consisting of 30,000 students, but we need those numbers to know where our graduate programs stand, to know what can be improved and fixed.

But, going beyond hard numbers, the university needs a committee of these marginalized grad students to speak directly with the administration to voice its concerns.

We propose that a committee, the Chancellor’s Commission on Graduate Student Issues, should be started to give a voice to the graduate students on campus.

A group of a few dozen grad students from a variety of the many different tracks available could compose this committee. It wouldn’t take much time from these already-busy students to sit down with campus leaders once a month to discuss graduate issues.

The university could set an example for other institutions to follow by pulling a marginalized population and significant portion of its teaching labor force out of the sidelines and into the vanguard. The university could examine the inequities and challenges facing today’s graduate students while helping them gain autonomy…