Graduate students at NYU and at Columbia are on strike right now. Their demands include better pay, healthcare coverage, and the right to have discrimination and harassment cases evaluated by a third party mediator (instead of an employee of the university). Because of this, I was researching the history of grad student union organizing; in short, I found some data that looked wrong, investigated, and now am going to tell you about it.

We’re taught in school that sites ending with .gov are trustworthy, right? In this case, the data came from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. So it’s literally their whole job to collect accurate information about labor-related topics.

The article I was reading that cited the BLS said that graduate assistants in the United States (like me) made an average of about $35,000 per year in 2015-2016. This immediately rang my alarm bells– the only grad assistants I know who make anywhere near that much money are at private universities in expensive areas (like Columbia). When I was getting my master’s degree in 2016-2018, I was paid $12,000 per year. So that couldn’t possibly be the real nationwide average.

I went to the BLS website, and found their 2020 data, which says the average graduate assistant in the U.S. makes $39,460, and that graduate assistants in the NYC area make an average of $52,170. This is not true!! Through my fellowship as a CUNY PhD student, living in one of the most expensive places in the United States, I am paid $27,548. This is low compared to students at places like Columbia and NYU, but not even the graduate students at those schools make $52,170 per year. I and every other graduate student I know work additional jobs in order to pay our bills.

So WTF is going on with this data? How is the “average” higher than anyone’s actual pay?

The answer was in the footnotes, at the very bottom of the page. This is why they tell you to always read the fine print. The BLS calculated these salaries by taking hourly wages and multiplying by 2,080 — the number of hours worked if you work 40 hours a week, 52 weeks per year. But this is not how graduate students are actually paid. We are part time employees, paid part-time salaries, who are expected to spend the rest of our time studying/doing our PhD program responsibilities. Yet the income data they are reporting is how much we would make if we were paid full time salaries. So, the data they are reporting doesn’t represent anybody’s actual experience. (Lots of people who are graduate students do work full time jobs on top of their studies, but not as part of their fellowships. Fellowships are always part time.)

Why does this matter?

Anyone who doesn’t have direct knowledge of grad student pay probably wouldn’t bother looking at the fine print and probably would just trust that the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics was reporting accurate– and not misleading — information.

This means that newspapers, policy institutes, and other people/organizations looking for this info are reporting misleading information, likely without knowing it. The ALICE Project estimates that a basic necessities + emergency money budget for a single adult living alone in Manhattan is $53,844 per year. By the BLS’s numbers, graduate students in New York are pretty close to that! But in real life, we are not — unless we work extra jobs. This is especially important when it comes to grad student strikes, since the NYU and Columbia workers are demanding a living wage. When discussing salary and whether or not people are paid enough, it’s important to have accurate information about how much money people are actually getting paid!

In Conclusion

1. Always read the fine print– information can be technically “true” but still misleading depending on what’s in the fine print
2. Just because information is from the government doesn’t mean you can take it at face value
3. If you need a math credit and aren’t sure what to take, take statistics. You’ll learn about many of the funky ways you can make real numbers say fake things.

Many of you wrote in your responses and reflections that you particularly liked the analysis of memes that we read in Unit 1. I was looking up “lifespan of a meme” tonight (for a book chapter I’m writing about online bisexual culture), and found this much longer/more detailed analysis of memes: https://baec.aua.am/files/2018/11/Noubar_Ounjian_Analysis-and-the-Elements-of-the-Lifespan-of-Memes-from-the-scope-of-Semiotics-and-Darwinian-Theory_Capstone.pdf

If you’re interested in linguistics and semiotic theory, take a skim through the text, but if not, it’s worth a scroll-through just to see the screenshots of a bunch of good memes that are included and some interesting charts on the different memes’ popularity over time. This was written as somebody’s senior thesis for an English and Communications degree.

In thinking about our discussions on misleading science, I wanted to share with you this graph I came across today while reading about Biden’s proposed budget for 2022.

This makes it look like Biden wants to invest a ton of money into education, commerce, health and human services, and the EPA, right? Certainly things that many Democrats support.

However, what these actual bars and percentages represent is not what PROPORTION of the budget Biden wants to invest into these things– he’s not proposing that 40% of all federal discretionary spending go to education.

As the label says, it’s “2021 enacted discretionary spending budget vs. Biden’s 2022 proposal.” So, what these actually show is how much Biden wants to increase these areas COMPARED TO the current year. It doesn’t tell us anything about how much is actually being spent in each area.

For example, the 2021 “enacted budget” (so, not what Trump proposed for this year, but what actually happened for this year) for education was $73 billion, and Biden’s proposal for 2022 is $102.8 billion– the 40% increase in the chart. However, these numbers are just on a different scale than the Pentagon budget– which is a very small bar in the chart. The 2021 budget for THAT is $703.7 billion, and Biden’s proposal is $715 billion.

So, Biden’s proposed budget for military spending looks very small in the chart (1.6%), but it’s only small in relation to this year– the total amount of spending is still very high, and still 7 times higher than education spending.

So, it’s not FAKE/LIES, the chart is saying TRUE information, but it does send particular messages that obscure other facts!