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Graduate-student stipends in Canada below the poverty line

Brian Owens · January 8, 2025 ·

Students struggle to make ends meet despite recent boosts to federal scholarships, study finds.

Stipends for biology and physics graduate students at Canadian universities fall well short of a living wage, an analysis reports.

“All of the minimum stipends we found were below the poverty line after tuition, except for the physics department at the University of Toronto,” says Thomas Bailey, a PhD student at the University of Ottawa and an author of the work, which was posted on the bioRxiv preprint server last November and has not yet undergone peer review1. “People who want to study science in Canada have three options: hope for more support from their supervisor, take on big debts or emigrate.” Read more in Nature.

Nature Canada, careers, science

Copyright © 2025 · Brian Owens