MAP compensation (#1325)

Topics/tags: Rants, Grinnell

This coming summer, I’m planning to take on MAP and 299 students once again [1]. Since few faculty in CS are taking summer students this year, I’m in charge of the forthcoming summer MAP session. It’s been four years since I had summer MAP students, and that was in the midst of a pandemic [2]. Since time has passed, I thought I should do some research on current procedures and policies. In this case, do research means ask people questions.

A summer MAP is ten weeks of full-time work, so about 400 hours. Grinnell’s current negotiated hourly wage is $13.50. But I know from experience that our MAP stipends don’t necessarily follow our hourly wages; we had many years in which we were bumping hourly wages but not changing MAP stipends. Still, hope lives eternal. Is our summer stipend $5,400? Nope, it’s still $4,000.

Housing is sometimes an issue for students. Do we still make on-campus housing available and is enough available? Yes, we make summer housing available for $1300 [3] for the ten weeks of summer research plus the gap week between finals and summer semester. We even make gap week housing for students who plan to live off campus during the summer. In terms of the second half of the question, everyone who requested summer housing from the College last summer got such housing. $1300 seems reasonable; it’s about what students will pay if they rent [4] or sublet. There’s also an optional meal package of 130 meals for $1500 [5,6].

Grinnell’s financial aid package traditionally requires students to contribute $2,500 from each summer of work. However, we used to exempt some high-need (and perhaps moderate-need) students doing summer MAPs or unpaid summer internships. Do we still do so? The answer appears to be No.

That worries me. It more than worries me. It frustrates me. It angers me.

Let’s do the math.

We start with the $4,000 stipend. Let’s assume that no taxes are due on that $4,000. We must set aside $2,500 for the summer contribution. That leaves $1,500. Housing is $1,300. That leaves $200, or $20 per week for food and entertainment, less than two meals in the marketplace [7]. Not enough. Not nearly enough.

Grinnell claims to be concerned about food insecurity amongst our students. That concern even led the institution to require that every student be on a meal plan during the academic year. Shouldn’t we be concerned about food insecurity during the summer, too?

For low-need students, this funding model may not be a problem. They can rely on family resources to make up additional costs. For high-need students—or even moderate-need students—family resources may not be available. (If I’m being honest, they may not even be available for low-need students.) It seems like our MAP compensation model effectively discourages our high-need students from pursuing summer MAPs.

The College says that student-faculty research is important, perhaps essential. At one point, we made it a goal for every student to have a significant student-faculty research experience. The College also says that it cares about social justice and wants to support our high-need students.

In this instance, it’s failing to meet those values.

The failure isn’t intentional. Rather, people make decisions on one part of campus and folks elsewhere on campus don’t necessarily consider the implications.

Is there a solution? One obvious one is to reinstate the summer contribution exemption. How much would that cost? Let’s say we have 50 high-need and moderate-need students doing MAPs or 299s each summer. at $2,500 each, that’s $125,000. Not a huge amount, but also not a trivial amount. Unfortunately, Grinnell is currently in cost-cutting mode, not cost-expanding mode. I assume that’s why the summer contribution exemption disappeared.

I hope we can find a solution … and soon.

Please?

Postscript: For comparison, the National Science Foundation (NSF) supports Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REUs) over the summer. A typical REU includes a stipend of $7,000, summer housing, either board or a budget for board, and travel to and from the research site.

Postscript: If you’re wondering why we don’t seek NSF REU funding for our summer research students, even if we got such funding, Grinnell would require us to match Grinnell norms, not REU norms. Perhaps more importantly, we already have significantly more demand for summer MAP/299 positions than positions. REUs require that at least half the students come from outside the institution, so REU funding would effectively decrease the number of opportunities.

[1] For those who don’t recall, MAPs are Mentored Advanced Projects, student-faculty projects with a goal of published work. 299’s (also Guided Research or Mentored Introductory Projects) are student-faculty projects for students in their first or second year.

[2] Perhaps the tail end of a pandemic. How do you think of summer 2021?

[3] Well, it was $1300 last summer. It might be more this summer. Don’t you love it when expenses go up but compensation doesn’t?

[4] Are students still allowed to rent?

[5] About $11.50 per meal. Is that reasonable? The moderate academic-year meal plan is 14 meals per week plus $200 per semester in dining dollars for $4,157. If we count finals week and spring break, that’s seventeen weeks. Let’s see … ($4,157 - $200) / (17 * 14) is $16.60 per meal. So it’s definitely more reasonable than academic year meals. Then again, there’s probably less variety over the summer.

[6] Again, it was $1500 last summer. We assume it will be similar this year. It’s a meal plan; those usually go up by 5% each year.

[7] Alternately: $4,000 minus $1,300 for housing and $1,500 for the meal plan (no breakfasts) leaves $1,200 of the $2,500 that a student must contribute. How are they supposed to come up with the other $1,300?

Version 1.0 of 2025-01-17.