Stop Lifestyle Discrimination! May 6
Today on the front page of the dailycal is an article discussing the hardships student parents wil face as a result of UC budget cuts. The people interviewed in the article seem to think we should be moved by the unfairness of reducing the child care subsidy provided to graduate student parents and support the Graduate Assembly’s resolution to exempt child care from the proposed budget cuts. While I can empathize with any graduate student who faces tough choices because of our low wages (particularly at UC Berkeley) the universities subsidy of child care is blatantly discriminatory against people with other lifestyle choices and should be totally abolished not saved. I mean we surely wouldn’t tolerate a program that offered straight couples who wanted to have their own apartment (rather than rooms in a shared house) a subsidized low rent apartment but denied gay couples the same benefit so why do we tolerate a program that discriminates on this lifestyle choice?
My fiance and I will never have children but this hardly means that graduate school imposes no hardships on us. She is a graduate student at Harvard and I am finishing up at UC Berkeley and just as the low salary of graduate students makes it difficult to raise a child it also makes it tough to afford flights across the country. Yet does the university offer me a subsidy to visit my fiance the way it does to graduate student parents? No! Worse, this term UC Berkeley gave me a MWF teaching assignment (instead of the Tuesday one I requested) that made it impossible to visit my fiance over the weekends. But long distance relationships don’t get any consideration by the university while graduate students with children get automatic first dibs on teaching slots that are convenient for their child care arrangements. Moreover, the department is expected to bend over for graduate students with children if they need a particular day free while it’s just tough luck for me if I want to visit my fiance but can’t find anyone to substitute.
In light of this blatant unfairness does the article offer us any particular justification as to why we should subsidize those students who make the choice to have children? No, we are merely given a string of observations about how difficult it is to raise a child as a graduate student.
“If you have an infant, it’s $20,000 a year just in child care fees,” Keeley-Saldana said. “(The cost) really prohibits students from seeking their higher education degrees.”
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With a new baby on the way, Cruz said the heightened costs would be “impossible” for he and his wife to meet.1
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Senior Dana Parsons, 32, said campus child care services are essential for student parents such as herself.
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“Had it not been for subsidized care on campus, I would not have been able to attend school full-time,” she wrote in an e-mail.
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“There is no good solution,” she said. “I’m not saying that I don’t think it’s fair for Early Childhood to be spared from cuts, but I’m hoping that they really do value the children on campus.”
First of all let’s make this absolutely clear. Failing to subsidize child care doesn’t force anyone to stay at home, leave graduate school or otherwise deny them the benefits of higher education. The lack of subsidized child care merely forces people to choose between the benefits of using their resources to have a family or attend school. This is no different from the fact that without subsidies or special considerations Sharon and I must choose between graduate school and getting to see each other more than rarely during the school year. It’s blatantly unfair to offer monetary subsidies and preferences to one lifestyle choice without the slightest official consideration for the other.
Of course sometimes radically unfair policies can be justified if they offer sufficient benefit for the society at large. However, in order to overcome the presumption against unfair policies such as this one would need compelling evidence that this was really the most cost-effective way to increase the number of US graduates in math/science or the equivalent. Since women make up a majority of graduate students even finding that subsidized child care did more to retain women than men wouldn’t justify the program.2 Even restricting such subsidies only to the fields where women were underrepresented and granting the bizarre idea that numerical underrepresentation is ipso facto unfair3 one would need to establish that this kind of subsidy was particularly effective (more so than just giving women extra pay) to justify discriminating against those women who didn’t plan to have children.
I’m not going to even go into how this policy implicitly discriminates against those who have a more difficult time having children (the infertile, gays and lesbians). However, I will note that offering these benefits only to parents and not to those of use with other lifestyle preferences goes directly against the valid feminist justifications for legally required maternity leave and other bars against the implicit discrimination against women smuggled in via career punishment for maternity. However, unlike the lauditory goal of stopping corporations from imposing unfairly excessive penalties for one lifestyle choice (partially because of female stereotypes) we have a situation where the university is unfairly benefiting one lifestyle choice over another.
Of course I realize that few people are likely to be convinced by a logical argument in this situation. Most people want to have children themselves so, as is common with discrimination, it seems right and proper to them that people like themselves should receive a benefit. Moreover, the people who benefit from this program are easy to see while the small cost that all graduate students pay as a result is diffuse. So if you aren’t yet convinced just ask yourself this. How would you feel if things were reversed? Suppose I got subsidized air fare to go visit my fiance and got first pick of teaching assignments so my schedule would allow these visits but graduate student parents received no official consideration at all. If you find that disturbing tell me what’s different about this situation.
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I’m open to the idea of continuing to support families who relied on the existence of this program when deciding to have children at the current rate by borrowing money and making up the shortfall in future years by totally eliminating the program for future students ↩
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This certainly wouldn’t show that not providing such subsidies somehow discriminated against women any more than the fact that higher graduate student pay might preferentially increase the retention of CS graduate students would show we are discriminating against CS graduate students. In the absence of other evidence we should assume that female graduate students would be rationally choosing to have a family rather than stay in graduate school suggesting that the correct way to look at the situation is that female graduate students are more likely than male graduate students to have an even better option. ↩
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As opposed to the more reasonable model where we assume that we want to provide equality of opportunity. In which case to the extent that women are leaving graduate school only because they decide (perhaps in non-coercive discussion with their husband) that they would prefer to devote their time to raising a family that isn’t a problem to be rectified. Of course I don’t think this is really that significant a cause of the underrepresentation of women in math/science but that goes hand in hand with thinking it’s not a cost-effective approach to increase the number of women. ↩