It’s wicked expensive living near or around the City of Boston, so what are poor Harvard Grad Students to do when an institution with a 53 billion dollar endowment leaves them to fend for themselves? The cure is to sign them up for SNAP, the federal food assistance program.
The Health Services office sent a flier to graduate students, encouraging them to participate in the SNAP Benefits Sign-Up event in April. The flier read, “Fuel your body & stock your pantry. Did you know that grad students may qualify for assistance paying for food & groceries?”
Students paying Harvard-level tuition are destined (more than likely) for one-percenter jobs – if they even need to work – living at a university that could feed the entire student body like Kings and queens without blinking an eye need your money for food assistance. Few things could sound more backward. And according to Yahoo! Finance they get paid 40K a year which might admittedly isn’t much given the location.
But still. The optics and that goes both ways.
Times are so tough that Harvard grad students can’t afford to eat.
Approximately 30% of Harvard’s grad students are international, so they are ineligible to apply for SNAP. This means that the solution presented by the university fails to support about one-third of its graduate students adequately.
The solution to that seems simple enough. Leave and sneak back across the southern border. You’ll get a nice hotel room and free meals.
