National Graduate Student Finances Survey

Why?

Graduate Students (both at the MSc and PhD level) are critical to the overarching research eco-system.

Unfortunately, Student stipends are not guaranteed, and often students must work additional teaching assistant positions to obtain them. These stipends often do not cover the cost of living, let alone cover additional tuition costs. In addition, after many years of post-secondary education, graduate students often carry debt from their undergraduate degrees. This can be incredibly stressful for students.

Despite this relatively little is known about the state of graduate student finances. Previous surveys have often focused on Tri-Council scholarships or a particular component such as payment errors.

The aim of this survey is to gain a more holistic, national, understanding of graduate student stipends and broader finances. The results will be published in a comprehensive report and to used as a basis of a campaign to seek better funding into the future.

How can you get involved?

Participate.

If you are a graduate student the best way to get involved is to complete the survey. This should take 15-20 minutes to complete and participants have the chance to win one of four $50 gift cards.

They survey does ask for values of tuition fees and stipend/scholarship amounts so it is probably a good idea to see what records you have before you begin.

Share.

The more students that complete the survey the more representative and impactful the results will be. Sharing the survey with other students is a great way to achieve this.

Partner with us

We welcome graduate student associations (or other equivalent organizations) to work with us and share our survey with their members. We have a load of useful resources (including a template email and social media graphics) that you can find here.

How the data will be used.

Your responses will be held in confidence by the Ottawa Science Policy Network (OSPN), a student organization at the University of Ottawa. Aggregated, anonymous or de-identified data may be shared with representatives of student associations, university administrations, advocacy groups, legislatures and governments across Canada, including data subsets where appropriate. We will ensure that no individual can be identified from these summarized results. A summary of survey data will be made publicly available on the OSPN website.

For more information about the survey, to ask any questions or to access survey results at a later date, please contact Ottawa Science Policy Network at ottawasciencepolicynetwork@gmail.com. Any participant who wishes to withdraw data following survey completion may do so at any point by contacting us and providing their unique identifiers.

A more detailed description of how your data will be used can be found here.