By Tony Beacon

Editor, The Beacon Report  |  International Journalist  |  Podcaster & Social Media Influencer

Johannesburg, South Africa  •  September 25, 2026

From Johannesburg, the American graduate school system still looks, from a distance, like one of the world’s great academic engines. Up close, a quieter reality is harder to ignore: tens of thousands of graduate students—many of them international—are performing essential teaching and research work for stipends that frequently fall below a living wage, while their legal status and academic progress remain tightly controlled by the same institutions that employ them.

This is not a story of isolated bad actors. It is a structural feature of how large parts of U.S. higher education have chosen to staff undergraduate instruction and research laboratories: with highly educated, often visa-dependent labor that is cheap, flexible, and difficult to organize against.

The Stipend Reality

Graduate assistantships typically combine a modest monthly stipend with a tuition waiver and, in better cases, health insurance. On paper this package can look generous. In practice, many nine-month teaching or research stipends leave students well below local living-wage thresholds once rent, food, and health costs are factored in. At some public universities, base stipends have hovered near or only slightly above poverty-line calculations used by state assistance programs.

Students report second jobs—bartending, warehouse work, even more precarious side gigs—to make ends meet while carrying full course loads and grading or research responsibilities that routinely exceed the formal “20-hour” limit. The formal limit itself is often theoretical. The work expands to fill the needs of the department.

International Students and the Extra Layer of Vulnerability

For international students on F-1 or J-1 visas, the power imbalance is sharper. Their ability to remain in the United States is tied to full-time enrollment and, frequently, to the continuation of an assistantship. Losing the funding can mean losing the visa. That reality makes many reluctant to push back on excessive workloads, delayed payments, or unclear expectations.

Under the current Trump administration, heightened scrutiny of student visas, increased revocations linked to criminal records or status violations, and tighter practical-training rules have added another layer of anxiety. Graduate employee unions at several major universities have responded by making protections for non-citizen workers a central bargaining demand—paid leave in the event of detention or deportation proceedings, legal-aid funds for visa issues, and stronger limits on campus cooperation with immigration enforcement without judicial warrants.

A System Built on Contingent Labor

Universities have long described graduate assistantships as “training.” Critics and a growing number of labor historians and organizers describe something closer to a dual labor market: expensive tenured faculty at the top, and a large, lower-paid, contingent workforce of graduate students and adjuncts carrying a substantial share of the teaching and research load below.

The economic logic is straightforward. A teaching assistant grading hundreds of undergraduate papers or a research assistant keeping a laboratory running costs far less than hiring additional faculty or professional staff. When federal research funding becomes uncertain—as it has under successive budget proposals and policy shifts—the pressure to stretch existing graduate labor further only increases.

Pushback and the Limits of Reform

Graduate student unions have won meaningful gains at some institutions: higher base stipends, better healthcare, clearer workload limits. Strikes and contract campaigns at places such as Harvard, the University of Illinois Chicago, the University of Michigan, and the University of California system have forced public attention onto the gap between the prestige of the degree and the material conditions of the people producing the work.

Yet the structural incentives remain. Universities facing declining international enrollment, volatile federal research budgets, and rising operating costs continue to rely on the same model. International students, who often pay full tuition when unfunded and who cannot easily change employers without jeopardizing their status, remain particularly exposed.

A View from Outside

From South Africa, the pattern is familiar in outline if not in detail. Highly educated young people are drawn into systems that promise advancement while extracting significant unpaid or underpaid labor along the way. The difference in the American case is the global prestige of the institutions and the legal vulnerability created by temporary student visas.

The quiet exploitation at the heart of American graduate education is not a secret to those living inside it. The question is whether the combination of union pressure, public scrutiny, and shifting federal policy will force a more honest accounting of what the system actually costs the people who keep it running—or whether the model will simply adapt and continue.

Tony Beacon is the editor of The Beacon Report, a Johannesburg-based international journalist, podcaster and social media commentator covering global education, migration and labor. This is the second in a series examining the intersection of international student mobility and U.S. higher education under the current administration.