In the course of the past year, the administration of the University of Chicago has made great strides in acknowledging the needs of student parents. Years of student advocacy resulted in a December 2013 announcement that the University would fund student stipends for childcare, provide student-accessible lactation space, and move the Family Resource Center to a new and improved space. The response from student advocates was exuberant. “Could this really mean affordable child care for graduate student employees?”

The answer, we have discovered, is “no.” Graduate Student Affairs (GSA) and the Office of the Deputy Provost for Graduate Education did not respond to several student requests for a statement of the amount being offered. However, our own research indicates that PhD student applicants with a household pre-tax income below approximately $55,000 have received $500/ quarter in funding. The same amount has been awarded regardless of number of dependent children, number of caregivers in the household, and income size below the cutoff (families with an income of $20,000 receive the same stipend as those with an income of $53,000).

Of course, $500/ quarter is not a negligible amount. One student parent estimated that this stipend would afford her one more weekly afternoon of childcare for her twins while their older sibling is at school. The Co-op for Early Learning , a facility that reduces costs by requesting parents to volunteer, costs $650 per month at 2 days a week. Parents of singletons who use nanny shares may be able to stretch the funding for 3-4 weeks of part-time (20-hour) childcare, and families who use time-consuming childcare co-ops will be able to stretch this funding even further. But the great majority of child care expenses still lies with graduate students, especially those with multiple children or particularly low incomes.

Graduate Students United (GSU) and members of the Student Parent Group (SPG) commend Debbie Nelson, Michelle Rasmussen, Beth Niestat, Brooke Noonan, and Lizanne Phalen for their hard work and responsiveness to student advocacy. Nonetheless, the existing measures do not meet the need for truly affordable child care at the University of Chicago. This underscores that when students and workers take collective action on issues of access and equity, they can win concrete improvements.  Further collective action - most promisingly in the form of Graduate Students United and administration negotiating the terms of a contract that would govern our wages, benefits and working conditions - constitutes the best chance of enacting further meaningful change.

With this need for true representation in mind, GSU and SPG recommend GSA the following measures to make the campus a more equitable place for all its student workers:

• Seek an additional source of funding for the child care stipends, enabling all students to access affordable and reliable child care. An analogous stipend program at a peer institution, the University of Michigan, offers $4762 annually for a single child, and almost twice as much for three children. The recognized graduate employee union at University of Michigan successfully negotiated this benefit as part of their current contract.

• In future applications for the child care stipend, take account of number of children, number of household caregivers, and income gradation.

• Seek funding to extend the stipend to MA and undergraduate student parents. Since Debbie Nelson has acknowledged doctoral students to have the greatest need for child care, this is unlikely to be an expensive measure.