Fury as Harvard University encourages students to apply for food stamps from government despite $53bn endowment

• At an event earlier this year hosted by the university’s student health center, graduate students were encouraged to sign up for food stamps 
• The graduate school union at the school has gone on strike twice in recent years over livable wage disputes 

By Sophie Mann For Dailymail.Com

Published: 23:38 EDT, 14 August 2023 | Updated: 08:55 EDT, 15 August 2023

An event at Harvard University encouraged some graduate students to apply for food stamps, despite the school’s $53billion endowment.

Earlier this year, Harvard University Health Services reminded grad students that they could fuel their bodies and stock their pantries by using government assistance to pay for groceries.

‘Did you know that Grad Students may qualify to receive assistance paying for food & groceries?’ read a flier for the event.

Harvard’s endowment makes it the richest university in the world, a fact that sparked outrage among community members who argued that paying graduate students a livable food stipend would barely even register in the school’s massive budget.

Graduate students are also paid a $40,000 yearly wage by the university.  

Harvard University has an endowment of $53.2billion – making it the richest university in the world

An event last year hosted by the university’s student health center encouraged grad students to sign up for food stamps in order to afford groceries

‘Harvard’s endowment is over $50 billion. Undergraduate tuition is over $55k a year. Yet the grad students who do most of the teaching, advising, and mentoring at Harvard are so underpaid that they’re eligible for food stamps,’ wrote one Harvard student on Twitter.

Harvard has some 21,766 graduate students. If the university were to sacrifice 1/50th of its $53.2billion endowment, it could, in theory, pay each student $48,883 – a nearly $9,000 increase over their current stipends of $40,0000. 

The Harvard Graduate Student Union has gone on strike to advocate for higher wages – once in 2019 and again in 2021.

The more recent strike, which was a three-day work stoppage, amounted to the union vowing to strike again if the school did not agree to its bargaining terms.

The school then forced the strikers to sign an agreement allowing Harvard to retain salary funds in an amount equal to the time students withheld labor.

A student at the time wrote on Twitter: ‘@Harvard’s $53B dollar endowment is larger than the GDP of dozens of countries, but it’s trying to force underpaid student workers to repay three days of wages from last week’s strike.’

Harvard’s current yearly grad student wage is arguably not enough to live on in  Cambridge, Massachusetts, where the average rent is $3,477.

Graduate students at the University of Michigan, Rutgers and MIT also recently launched similar protests against their institutions.

Graduate students in Cambridge – where the average rent is close to $3,500 – earn $40,000 a year

Food stamps are designed to help low-income Americans afford basic groceries

Famously, Harvard added $10billion to its endowment during one year of the COVID-19 pandemic. The same year, 2021, ended with a $283million operational surplus.

Food stamps, or what the government calls the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, is a service intended for low-income people and families. It helps those living in poverty afford basic food items.

According to Pew Research, more than 41million Americans currently use food stamps. 

Ivy League students at one of America’s most expensive colleges will be taught by AI next year.

The teachers of Harvard University’s popular intro-level coding course — which typically gets about 1000 students each semester — are ‘experimenting’ with a ChatGPT-powered teaching assistant.

Professor David Malan, who runs the course, justified plans for the introduction of the ‘CS50 bot’ by noting that the course has often deployed new software in its syllabus. 

A ChatGPT AI teacher, he said, was simply an ‘evolution of that tradition’, he said in a statement. 

‘Our own hope is that, through AI, we can eventually approximate a 1:1 teacher:student ratio for every student in CS50… providing them with software-based tools that, 24/7, can support their learning at a pace and in a style that works best for them individually.’ 

The teachers of Harvard University’s popular intro-level coding course, CS50, are ‘experimenting’ with a ChatGPT-powered teaching assistant. Above, the Radcliffe Quad undergrad housing at Harvard University in Fall 2013, before the AI teachers came

In his statement to the Crimson, Harvard’s newspaper, Professor Malan specified that he and the course’s staff were ‘currently experimenting with both GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 models.’

Outside of the Ivy League, however, developers and software engineers have struggled to incorporate maker OpenAI’s new ChatGPT-4 into their workflow, calling into question their new algorithmic co-worker’s ability to code.

‘Is it just me or GPT-4’s quality has significantly deteriorated lately?’ asked one user of the Silicon Valley start-up incubator Y-combinator’s Hacker News forum.

Outside of the Ivy League, developers and software engineers have struggled to incorporate OpenAI’s new ChatGPT-4 into their workflow, calling into question their new AI co-worker’s ability to code

‘It generates more buggy code,’ the user wrote, ‘and overall it feels much worse than before.’

Others in the community described the AI’s software skills as  ‘significantly worse‘ than past versions of ChatGPT, prone to ‘superficial responses‘ and nearly ‘lobotomized‘ in its answers to coding prompts.

With the full cost of a four-year degree from Harvard hovering somewhere $334,000, based on rates for the 2022-23 school year, paying students will likely want and expect that the CS50’s staff’s ‘experimenting’ with ChatGPT will have fully worked out the kinks by September.

CS50, according to the Crimson, is one of Harvard’s most popular offerings on the online learning platform edX, which the school launched in collaboration with MIT in 2012.

The two universities sold off edX to educational technology company 2U for $800 million in 2021 — with the stipulation that the platform be run as a public benefit entity that also offers its courses as ‘free to audit.’

While Prof. Malan did acknowledge that ‘early incarnations’ of AI programs like ChatGPT have been likely to ‘occasionally underperform or even err,’ he nevertheless voiced his belief that his own AI teaching assistant will cut down on busy work. 

‘[A]ssessing, more qualitatively, the design of students’ code has remained human-intensive,’ Malan said. 

‘Through AI, we hope to reduce that time spent, so as to reallocate [teaching fellows’] time toward more meaningful, interpersonal time with their students, akin to an apprenticeship model.’

College, as the saying goes, is not about teaching students what to think, but how to think — and Malan’s parting comments on the new CS50 bot echoed this teaching philosophy.

‘We’ll make clear to students that they should always think critically when taking in information as input,’ Malan said, ‘be it from humans or software.’