Fury as Harvard University encourages students to apply for food stamps from the government despite a $53 BILLION donation

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

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

“Did you know that graduate students may be eligible for help paying for food and groceries?” read a flyer 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 a living food allowance to graduate students would barely be factored into the school’s massive budget.

Graduate students also receive an annual salary of $40,000 from the university.

An event organized last year by the university’s student health center encouraged graduate students to sign up for food stamps to pay for groceries

Harvard’s endowment is over $50 billion. Undergraduate tuition is over $55k a year. But the graduate students who do most of the teaching, counseling and mentoring at Harvard are so underpaid that they qualify for food stamps,” one Harvard student wrote on Twitter.

Harvard has about 21,766 graduate students. If the university sacrificed 1/50th of its $53.2 billion endowment, it could theoretically pay each student $48,883 — an increase of nearly $9,000 from their current $40,000 allowances.

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, basically involved the union vowing to strike again if the school did not agree to the terms of the negotiations.

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

One student wrote on Twitter at the time, “@Harvard’s $53 billion endowment is larger than the GDP of dozens of countries, but it’s trying to force underpaid student workers to pay back three days’ wages from last week’s strike.”

The current annual salary of a Harvard graduate student is arguably not enough to live in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where the median rent is $3,477.

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

Cambridge graduate students — where the median rent is nearly $3,500 — earn $40,000 a year

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

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

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

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