Composition Vendor Newgen KnowledgeWorks (P) Ltd. PLoS One plos plosone PLOS One 1932-6203 Public Library of Science San Francisco, CA USA 10.1371/journal.pone.0313972 PONE-D-24-49904 Research Article Social sciencesEconomicsFinance People and placesPopulation groupingsEducational statusGraduates People and placesGeographical locationsNorth AmericaUnited States Science policyScience and technology workforceCareers in researchScientists People and placesPopulation groupingsProfessionsScientists Science policyResearch fundingResearch grants Science policyResearch fundingInstitutional funding of science People and placesPopulation groupingsProfessionsSupervisors Science policy Canadian natural science graduate stipends lie below the poverty line Canadian natural science graduate stipends lie below the poverty line https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2007-3616 Fraass Andrew J. Formal analysis Investigation Methodology Resources Software Validation Visualization Writing – original draft Writing – review & editing 1 2 3 * ‡ Bailey Thomas J. Conceptualization Data curation Formal analysis Investigation Methodology Project administration Validation Visualization Writing – original draft Writing – review & editing 4 5 ‡ Karunakumar Kayona Investigation Methodology Writing – original draft Writing – review & editing 4 Wishart Andrea E. Data curation Formal analysis Investigation Methodology Validation Visualization Writing – original draft Writing – review & editing 5 Conceptualization 6 School of Earth and Ocean Sciences University of Victoria, British Columbia, Victoria, Canada School of Earth Sciences, University of Bristol, Bristol, England, Invertebrate Paleontology, The Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States of America Department of Physics, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada Support Our Science, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada Department of Biology, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada Swift-Gallant Ashlyn Editor Memorial University of Newfoundland, CANADA

I have read the journal's policy and the authors of this manuscript have the following competing interests: Andrew Fraass is a tenure track professor who receives funding from Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC Canada, RGPIN-2022-03305 and DGECR-2022-00141) and has received funding from National Science Foundation, United States of America. Thomas Bailey is a graduate student who receives funding indirectly from NSERC. Thomas Bailey, Kayona Karunakumar, and Andrea Wishart are involved with Support Our Science, a not for profit grassroots advocacy group for graduate student and postdoctoral funding. They do not receive any financial compensation from this organization. This is discussed in the positionality statements of the paper. This does not alter our adherence to PLOS ONE policies on sharing data and materials.

‡ These authors are joint senior authors on this work.

 * E-mail: andyfraass@uvic.ca 2252025 2025 20 5 e0313972 4112024 1032025 2025 Fraass et al This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Despite the critical role of graduate students in the Canadian research ecosystem, students report high levels of financial stress. As a case study, we collected graduate minimum stipends and tuition data from all university graduate programs in Canada in Ecological Sciences/Biology and Physics, along with cost of living measures for the cities in which they reside. These data are heterogeneous, complex, and in many cases simply not publicly available, making it challenging for potential graduate students to understand what support they should expect. We find Canadian minimum stipends are at values almost exclusively below the poverty threshold. Only two of 140 degree programs offered stipends which meet cost of living measures after subtracting tuition and fees. For graduate programs which offered a minimum guaranteed stipend, the average minimum domestic stipend is short ~Can$9,584 (international ~Can$16,953) of the poverty threshold after accounting for payment of tuition and fees. On average, approximately 33% of a minimum stipend is returned to the university in tuition and fees by a domestic Canadian student and 76% (59% median) by an international student, though there are important caveats with the international student comparison. While international comparison is difficult, the highest Canadian minimum stipend found is roughly equivalent or lower than the lowest stipend within the largest dataset of United States of America (US) Biology stipends, and lower than the United Kingdom (UK) stipend. University endowment correlates with minimum stipend amount but intra- and inter-institutional differences suggest it is not solely institutional wealth associated with graduate pay. We observe Canada is behind comparable countries in minimum funding levels for the next generation of scientists.

 The author(s) received no specific funding for this work. Data Availability The machine readable file and all code associated with the project are available from GitHub at https://github.com/UVicMicropaleo/Canadian-Minimum-Graduate-Stipends. Introduction

Graduate students are an engine of scientific work for the academic system [1]. Despite this critical role in the Canadian research ecosystem, students report high levels of financial stress [2] exacerbated by increasing cost of living [3].

The following is a general description of the financial model of Canadian graduate studies in natural science: stipends provide financial assistance to students for living expenses (e.g., tuition, rent), as opposed to financial support for the costs associated with the research itself (e.g., reagents, equipment) [4]. Graduate students in Canada pay tuition and fees to their institution; waivers are rarely provided. When a stipend is provided, tuition and fees are paid by the student to their institution using their stipend, which itself was previously paid by the institution to the student. A master’s degree typically takes 2 years to complete and a PhD 4–6 years [5,6]. Both master’s and PhD students have a certain number of courses they must take, but these are often completed in the first few years allowing full time focus on research later in the degree.

Departments or equivalent academic units frequently set minimum stipend levels but individual principal investigators (PIs) can choose to exceed that amount. Stipends are typically funded from multiple sources: the institution (e.g., faculty of graduate studies provides the department funds based on number of students in their programs), a PI’s research grants (see below), student awards, and/or teaching assistantships. TAships are frequently a core part of funding packages, with the pay earned from this job (which can be on the order of $3-6k/term) often included in the value of the minimum stipend. Typically, TAships are for 10 hours a week [e.g., 7] and reduce the capacity of the student to conduct research.

The Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) Discovery Grant (DG) is a 5-year operating grant awarded to individual PIs and the foundation of most academic Canadian natural science graduate funding and research. Grant applications are judged evenly across three categories: a record of past research, highly qualified personnel (HQP; students, postdocs, and other mentees) produced by the researcher, and a proposed project [8]. Quality mentorship is therefore paramount in acquiring funding. Policy requires NSERC panels to not judge a researcher based on the number of HQP [8]; rather, applicants are judged on mentorship quality, post-mentorship careers, and so on. However, an incentive still remains to have more students, as publications and citations correlate positively with the number of HQP [9]. This pressure to train a large number of students with the relatively small operating grants may contribute to the suppression of stipend minimum support.

As a case study, we examined whether the guaranteed minimum stipends for graduate students in Physics and Ecological Sciences/Biology are a) enough to live on, b) comparable between programs and fields, c) related to the financial size of universities, and d) similar with those in two peer nations (US and UK).

 Positionality

Given the impact of career stage and nationality on perspectives about graduate programs, we summarize our positionality thusly:

Bailey is a British PhD student (Physics) at the University of Ottawa (Canada). He currently receives stipend support though a NSERC grant awarded to his supervisor. He is a department steward for his TA union and is on the Executive Council of Support Our Science, a grassroots organization advocating for increased pay for graduate students and postdoctoral fellows in Canada.

Fraass is an American tenure track Assistant Professor (Micropaleontology) at the University of Victoria (Canada). His graduate degrees and two postdoctoral positions were US based, followed by three years in England as a postdoc and fellow. He currently receives funding from NSERC and mentors graduate students.

Karunakumar is a Canadian early-career science policy professional. Her undergraduate and graduate education includes training in public policy and government relations. She is pursuing a career in science policy. Additionally, she serves as a volunteer for Evidence for Democracy (a fact-driven, non-partisan, not-for-profit organization advocating for the transparent use of evidence in government decision-making in Canada).

Wishart is a Canadian early-career academic publishing professional currently employed by Canadian Science Publishing. Her degrees (BSc, MSc, PhD) in biology were at Canadian universities, save for one year abroad (UK). She previously held institutional scholarships and received stipend support through operating grants (e.g., NSERC DG) awarded to her supervisors. In addition to leadership roles advocating for graduate students and performing research on graduate student experiences, she co-founded Support Our Science (a grassroots organization advocating for increased pay for graduate students and postdoctoral fellows in Canada) in 2022 and currently serves on its Board of Directors.

 Data sources

Publicly available information regarding stipends and waivers for the 38 universities in Canada offering graduate studies in Physics and/or Ecological Sciences/Biology (or the most similar department) was collected between February 16 to August 16, 2024. This study is limited to these two NSERC-funded programs to simplify the lengthy and difficult data collection process (see Accessibility), and because data are only valid for a single year. Tuition, mandatory fees, and minimum stipend amounts for each degree program were collected (see Supplementary Material for full details). When not discoverable on department websites or in associated files (e.g., graduate student handbooks), information was requested from program contacts via email.

 Accessibility

Determining accurate annual stipends was difficult, despite two of four authors possessing PhDs. It was rare for tuition and fees to be displayed in logical and easily interpretable ways. For example, most institutions split fees into different categories (e.g., bus pass, graduate association fees), but they commonly use different units of time to display each: some fees appeared per term, some per year, some per credit, while others had different values during fall, winter, and summer or for part-time vs. full-time students, and so on. This complexity made it extremely easy to make simple errors due to the number of parameters and unclear language/presentation. Many institutions include certain fees (e.g., healthcare) on their fee lists, others do not. Furthermore, several institutions put dollar amounts behind several menus and/or ‘opt-out/opt-in’ paperwork, or even private intranet pages.

Whatever the factors contributing to low discoverability and transparency in tuition and stipend data may be, the impact is obfuscated financial information prior to being enrolled in a program. One solution for these issues would be to have a “Finances” page clearly indicated on department websites, with a table laying out common funding scenarios, minimum stipends, durations, costs, and how much of the stipend is left after fees and tuition. A department that models this well is the University of British Columbia Physics Department website (https://web.archive.org/web/20240501083537/ https://phas.ubc.ca/graduate-program-financial-support).

 Stipend amounts

We collected tuition, fee, and stipend data from public-facing program and/or university websites for both domestic and international MSc and PhD students. We focus our main analysis on domestic students due to the complexity and uncertainty around much of the international student data that was available. We include international data in the Supplementary Online Material for reference, but acknowledge the lower confidence in the provided values.

Data analysis was performed in R (v. 4.4.0 [10]). All code and data are publicly archived on GitHub (https://github.com/UVicMicropaleo/Canadian-Minimum-Graduate-Stipends). We defined Gross Minimum Stipend (GMS) as the minimum annual stipend, Net Minimum Stipend (NMS) as the minimum annual stipend after both tuition and fees are repaid to the institution, and MBM Shortfall as NMS minus the inflation-adjusted Market Basket Measure poverty threshold (MBM), for a single individual with no dependents assessed by Statistics Canada [11]. The dataset contains 140 programs from 38 institutions. We found 91 programs providing a guaranteed minimum stipend, while 21 programs provide no minimum stipend. We could not identify minimums and received no response to email requests from 24 programs. Only considering departments which guarantee support, the mean domestic GMS in Canada is Can$23,933, and mean NMS is Can$16,528 (Fig 1). An average program with a minimum stipend charges Can$7,585 in tuition and fees to domestic graduate students, with a mean ~33% (range: 18% - 61%) of the GMS repaid to their institution.

10.1371/journal.pone.0313972.g001Annual financial support in Canadian and US dollars to graduate students (MSc and PhD in physics and biology).

Red lines correspond to recently increased federal NSERC scholarships. Gross Minimum Stipend (GMS) is the guaranteed minimum funding for an MSc or PhD student provided by the institution. Net Minimum Stipend (NMS) is the GMS minus tuition and fees for an institution. MBM Shortfall is the NMS minus the Market Basket Measure (MBM), a poverty threshold, for an institution’s location. US Biology stipends are from [12] and should be considered a rough approximation of the US stipends, without accounting for fees or taxes (see text).

We compared stipend values to both governmental (MBM threshold [8], Fig 1) and private (a national report of rents for September 2023 by Rentals.ca [13] both with and without adding $12k/yr for food and incidentals) metrics (Supplemental Information). Only two programs (University of Toronto Physics PhD and MSc) appear to have domestic net minimum stipends which reached MBM thresholds, though these were estimated as fees were hidden behind an intranet page. The average department would need to raise their guaranteed minimum stipend by ~Can$9,584 for domestic students and ~Can$16,953 for international students to reach the MBM threshold.

NMS best demonstrates the disparity between Canadian, US [14–16], and UK stipends for PhD students (Fig 1) as tuition waivers are normally included for US or UK graduate studies. Notably, US data [12] (n = 215) is considerable, but not exhaustive, while the UK funding agency sets a single national stipend level. It is difficult to reasonably compare various indices of poverty in an unbiased way across national borders. Poverty metrics generated by different governments vary due to numerous factors (e.g., national and regional differences, political impacts of declaring a ‘line of poverty’). Further, the non-TA portion of Canadian and UK stipends are untaxed while US stipends are taxed. US stipend data from [12] do not include ancillary fees, though it is extremely unlikely that fees or taxes are enough to erase the Can$23,759/yr difference between the means of the two countries (eg. the federal tax on a US$37k stipend for a single person would be around US$2,500). This difference is essentially the same as the mean GMS, suggesting in order to compete with the US or UK, observed Canadian stipends would need to double, compared to only increasing by ~1.5 times to meet the cost of living.

To identify if net stipend is driven by available institutional funding, we compared NMS against each university’s endowment (n = 26 universities with n = 80 programs; Fig 2). We fit a generalized linear mixed model (package lme4 v.1.1.26, [17]) with university endowment (log10 transformed due to skewness of raw data), program (MSc or PhD), and field (Biology or Physics) as fixed effects, and university nested within province as a random effect because postsecondary funding falls within provincial jurisdiction. Endowment accounts for significant variation in NMS (S2 Table), suggesting a larger endowment generally results in higher stipends. We see similar effects when considering total expenses rather than endowment, suggesting that this is an effect predominantly of financial size of the institution (S3 Table) rather than specific use of endowments (although these parameters are highly correlated with larger institutions generally having larger endowments). Yet, substantial residual variation remains, even with accounting for variation across program and field within provinces (e.g., Ontario and Quebec demonstrate inter-institutional variation). Variation in stipends may result from a number of processes; e.g., different levels of support allocated to departments from the institution, restrictions on university endowment funds, different departmental budget priorities, or perhaps lagged responses to the increased expenses faced by students.

10.1371/journal.pone.0313972.g002Net minimum stipends in Canadian dollars to MSc and PhD graduate students in biology (green squares) and physics (purple circles) in relation to their institution’s endowment in millions of Canadian dollars.

All analysis here is based on minimum stipend levels. Many graduate students do receive stipends higher than these levels, e.g. via top-ups from PI grants, additional TA hours, or external scholarships such as NSERC doctoral awards. However, the distribution of actual stipend values awarded is not publicly available and would require departments to report all stipend values, rather than simply department policies around guaranteed minimums (when they exist). Nevertheless, like minimum wage, minimum stipends are important to consider because they represent a lower bound that at least some graduate students experience. The purpose of setting a minimum is to ensure that all students receive financial support to enable them to focus on their studies without needing to seek employment elsewhere. If this is no longer being satisfied then the minimum level is not meeting the defined goals. Our mean/median minimum stipend levels are very similar to results from a recent survey [2], suggesting many students are, or are close to, receiving their departments minimum stipend.

There have been significant advances for Canadian graduate student finances recently. Federally sponsored scholarships received a large increase in 2024 [18], giving all PhD student recipients positive net stipends after accounting for tuition and MBM thresholds. However, for the vast majority of graduate students in Canada who are financially supported through other means, minimum departmental stipends are still essential to ensure financial viability of graduate program enrolment. For example, in 2021–22 only ~15% of domestic PhD students held a federal award. Further the proportion is likely to be lower for master’s students and near zero for international students who are ineligible for the majority of awards. Whilst these proportions will increase as more scholarships are awarded following Budget 2024, it will still remain the minority of students.

 Conclusions

The complexity and opaque nature of the Canadian graduate funding system is likely to be unclear to potential graduate students evaluating program options. This is exacerbated by a lack of transparency around stipends and tuition at institutional and departmental levels, making comparison between departments difficult, along with other potential consequences (for example possibly posing a further barrier to recruiting underrepresented students [19]). It also, given the dissimilarity with other similar nations, makes it incredibly challenging for international students to make informed decisions due to the overly-complex nature of Canadian tuition and fee structures. While individual departments are unable to transform this system, they can improve their own transparency to allow for more informed choices by future graduate students.

Canadian and foreign students receiving the observed minimum stipend levels are poised to incur substantial debt to undertake graduate education, unless otherwise wealthy. This presents a series of problems; for example: equity, incurred health costs of poverty on the next generation of scientists, and the breadth of scientific inquiry [20]. Students would benefit from significant changes at whatever level is possible [21]. Governments [22]) have the ability to tweak aspects or alter the entire national system at once. However, within the current Canadian system, institutions, departments, or individual PIs can adjust minimum stipend levels. There is ample anecdotal evidence that this is already occurring at least at the departmental level, as several departments had increased stipends while we were performing quality control checks on our data. That minimum stipends are still low, however, suggests that individual departments probably cannot do this on their own, and may require assistance from institutions and/or government.

It is clear that Canada is behind competing countries when it comes to funding the next generation of scientists. Canadians who desire higher STEM education have three options: hope for significantly higher guaranteed support from a supervisor, department, or awards; incur substantial debts; or emigrate.

Graduate students, both in Canada and around the world, help drive academic advances in science [1]. Providing adequate financial support to these researchers enables this work to be done most effectively and boosts the ability of the entire scientific community to make progress. Not providing adequate support is damaging [23]. How best to provide this support is a global challenge, with countries offering a range of different systems and amounts. Regardless of the financial model offered, there is a potential for participation in science and innovation to be reduced when junior scientists are expected to live below the poverty line.

 Supporting information Supplemental information file includes a short description of additional information gathered during data collection and rubrics for scoring data transparency.

(DOCX)

 Mean scores (± standard deviation) for discoverability and transparency of tuition and stipend data.

Tuition transparency was assessed as ease of parsing, while stipend transparency was assessed as completeness of presented data. Scores were assigned based on the rubrics presented in Supplementary Online Material. Higher values correspond to greater discoverability and transparency, while lower values correspond to lower levels of both.

(DOCX)

 Supported domestic minimum stipends compared to Rentals.ca values. Boxes at left are Net Minimum Stipends minus a local assessment of rents from Rentals.ca [<xref ref-type="bibr" rid="pone.0313972.ref013">13</xref>], while boxes at left subtract an additional $12k to account for food and other costs.

(DOCX)

 Supported domestic minimum stipends divided by province. Gross Minimum Stipend (GMS) is the guaranteed funding for a student provided by the institution. Net Minimum Stipend (NMS) is the GMS minus tuition and fees for an institution. MBM Shortfall is the NMS minus the Market Basket Measure (MBM) for an institution’s location.

(DOCX)

 Annual financial support in Canadian and US dollars to international graduate students (MSc and PhD in physics and biology). Gross Minimum Stipend (GMS) is the guaranteed minimum funding for an MSc or PhD student provided by the institution. Net Minimum Stipend (NMS) is the GMS minus tuition and fees for an institution. MBM Shortfall is the NMS minus the Market Basket Measure (MBM), a poverty threshold, for an institution’s location. US Biology stipends are from [<xref ref-type="bibr" rid="pone.0313972.ref012">12</xref>] and should be considered a rough approximation of the US stipends, without accounting for fees or taxes (see text).

(DOCX)

 Summary of generalized linear mixed model fit for Net Minimum Stipend (NMS) as a function of university endowment using package lme4 v.

1.1.26[17]. SEM = Standard error of the mean; SD = Standard deviation. Asterisk * denotes significance at α = 0.01.

(DOCX)

 Summary of generalized linear mixed model fit for Net Minimum Stipend (NMS) as a function of university expenses using package lme4 v.

1.1.26 [17]. SEM = Standard error of the mean; SD = Standard deviation. Asterisk * denotes significance at α = 0.01.

(DOCX)

M. Gaynor is thanked for their help with the US data. M. Gaynor, S. Laframboise, and K. Kharas are thanked for a preliminary review. Two reviewers (Lisa Walsh and an anonymous reviewer) are thanked for their careful consideration and comments.

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 10.1371/journal.pone.0313972.r002 Decision Letter 0 Swift-Gallant Ashlyn Academic Editor 2025 Ashlyn Swift-Gallant This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Submission Version 0

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PONE-D-24-49904Canadian science graduate stipends lie below the poverty linePLOS ONE

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Reviewer #1: Partly

Reviewer #2: Yes

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Reviewer #2: Yes

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Reviewer #2: Yes

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Reviewer #1: PONE D-24-49-49904

It is difficult to discern the difference between advocacy and research in this paper. I do not know what PLOS ONE’s editorial position is regarding the difference. If advocacy is within the journal’s mandate, with revision the paper perhaps warrants publication. As research it does not.

The most constructive way to explain this is to say that, like other papers of this kind it would toward the end of section on “limitations.” There are several.

1 Sponsored research is funded so differently in the U.S. and U.K. that the validity of evidence from those jurisdictions and comparisons to them are questionable. Perhaps less so for Australia. This makes me think about the findings of studies about policy diffusion and policy dissonance. There is a lot of unacknowledged dissonance here.

2 I appreciate the difficulty of getting data from only two departments, only minimum stipend values, and only NSERC, but as a matter of fact the simplification that the study admits fails to support most of the study’s conclusions. It makes the research a case study. Case studies, by definition, have little capability for generalization.

3 At the beginning the paper makes this assertion: Graduate students are a primary engine of scientific work for the academic system. And at the end we find this assertion as if it is a finding of the study: Graduate students, both in Canada and around the world, are the engine on which academic science runs.These are remarkable claims that, in my view, are more advocacy than research. As I read the Larivière paper it does not support the primacy that the paper gives to graduate student research in the first instance and the study itself provides no evidence in the second instance.

4 The paper’s first conclusion is about the “hidden curriculum” of an admissions process that results in under-representation in the academy. That may or may not be true, but it is an entirely different research question from where the paper begins, and it is hard to see how the study’s research methodology (which the paper presents very well) leads to that conclusion.

5 The discussion of proportionality is something like the “hidden curriculum” conclusion. The evidentiary basis of the conclusion is not clear, but more to the point it begs a question of an alternative that the paper does not admit: that the problem may be as much or more the number of stipends than the size of the stipends.

6 The study is correct to recognize the differences in stipend tax status between the U.S. and Canada (and maybe the UK, for which the study evidently did not collect comparable information. FYI Like Canada, stipends are not taxed in the UK.) This means that for comparative purposes the net minimum stipend in Canada is higher than the minimum stipend per se. This does not mean that Canadian stipends are inadequate and possibly still below the poverty line. It means that the comparative disparity may not be as great as presumed.

7 At several points the study refers to “substantial student debt” carried by graduate students. There are two potentially serious oversights here. First, approximately half of undergraduates in Canada graduate without debt. This varies from province to province. Second, the second oversight is the Canadian Education Tax Credit, which is available to graduates with or without debt.

8 Figure 2 is not conclusive. To be so would require a separation of restricted and unrestricted funds. Restricted means that a donor made a gift for a purpose specified – hence restricted – by the donor. Universities must comply with restrictions as long as they are not illegal. Of course, universities can refuse to accept restrictions. So, it is only the unrestricted portion of an endowment that can be directed to stipends. The study perhaps should come to different conclusion: that research-intensive universities in their fund-raising should place a higher priority on stipends.

Reviewer #2: This article highlights an important issue facing graduate students and the academy in Canada. For readers less familiar with the graduate systems in Canada and the US, the manuscript would benefit from additional details. I've provided some questions in the PDF to help you fill in some of the missing information.

Some attention to grammar and consistency within a sentence would further improve the manuscript.

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Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: Yes:  Lisa Walsh

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Submitted filename: PONE D-24-49 review.docx

Submitted filename: PONE-D-24-49904_reviewer.pdf

 10.1371/journal.pone.0313972.r003 Author response to Decision Letter 1 Submission Version 1

11 Feb 2025

A text with formatting distinguishing between reviewer comments and our responses has been added to the files on this manuscript.

We greatly appreciate the reviews of our manuscript. We have done our best to address all of the reviewers' points within the manuscript itself. We have made minor changes to the text of the manuscript to clarify issues noted by the reviewers and have added a supplemental figure.

In particular, reviewer 1 suggested that we had been engaging in activism rather than research. We have done our best to be as clear as possible about the line between advocacy and academic research, and, if it deemed necessary by the editors, would be happy to discuss that further. We were keenly aware during all stages of this project that we should be aware of the line, and did our best to make it clear that we are not entirely impartial (e.g., positionality statements - and we would argue that no one in academia can be ‘impartial’ in this discussion). Further, we have done our utmost to only rest on the facts of the matter, rather than taking policy stances, for example. If we have strayed over the line, we would again welcome a discussion of where we can pull our toes back.

Thank you,

Andrew Fraass,

Reviewer 1

PONE D-24-49-49904

It is difficult to discern the difference between advocacy and research in this paper. I do not know what PLOS ONE’s editorial position is regarding the difference. If advocacy is within the journal’s mandate, with revision the paper perhaps warrants publication. As research it does not.

We have made a number of changes to avoid advocating for any specific policy outcomes and to remain firmly grounded in research and science.

In the abstract (Line 48-50, Line numbers correspond to the Track Changes version of the manuscript) we removed the sentence outlining potential consequences of of low minimum stipend levels - instead ending the the abstract with our results on Canada’s relative funding levels of graduate students.

In line 87, we qualify our statement that incentives to have more students contributes to the suppression of minimum stipends.

In line 245-246, we revised our comment following our discussion that stipends not large enough to enable students to focus on their studies “must be adjusted” to “not meeting the defined goals”, making it clear that our research finds that minimum stipends are failing to meet their intended purpose, rather than suggesting that our research prescribes a policy outcome.

In line 272, we removed language about departments ‘serving as agents for change’ and instead focus on an option that departments have to improve transparency.

In line 282-284, we removed policy suggestions such as standard stipend or tieing stipends to local cost of living and instead focus on the broad power of the government to modify the system.

In line 288-290, we qualify our assessment that the current level of minimum stipends is due to internal limitations in institutions and departments.

In line 295-296, we remove the suggestion that Canadian policy must change to attract and retain competitive talent. Whilst likely true, this is not a consequence of this research and so has been removed from this paper.

In line 303-309, we remove reference to ‘requiring’ anything and focus just on the potential consequences rather than action that would be needed to address these.

The most constructive way to explain this is to say that, like other papers of this kind it would toward the end of section on “limitations.” There are several.

Sponsored research is funded so differently in the U.S. and U.K. that the validity of evidence from those jurisdictions and comparisons to them are questionable. Perhaps less so for Australia. This makes me think about the findings of studies about policy diffusion and policy dissonance. There is a lot of unacknowledged dissonance here.

We acknowledge science is funded in significantly different ways in different jurisdictions and in no way are implying any challenge to that statement. However, we are trying to examine the difference in the size of funding received by graduate students, an outcome of science funding systems which arises regardless of the specific mechanisms used and is directly relevant to Canada’s international competitiveness and the welfare of graduate students performing research. Additional countries (and funding models) would have strengthened the comparison, but we were limited by capacity and chose the countries that the authors are most familiar with. In only one case (where we suggested the options of “enforcing a standard stipend level for all students”) did we propose that an aspect of another country’s funding system could be applicable in Canada (and which has now been removed) - otherwise the focus was on comparing outcomes in terms of stipend size for the different systems.

I appreciate the difficulty of getting data from only two departments, only minimum stipend values, and only NSERC, but as a matter of fact the simplification that the study admits fails to support most of the study’s conclusions. It makes the research a case study. Case studies, by definition, have little capability for generalization.

We acknowledge that as originally written the paper overstates the generalizability of the conclusions from a case study of these two departments. The following changes have been made:

Edited title to clarify the scope is the natural sciences.

Line 91: Clarified that this is a case study looking at physics and ecological sciences/biology. Correspondingly, we qualified claims made throughout the paper to remove an implication that they generalize to all other sciences.

We note, however, that roughly 33% of new NSERC doctoral scholarships and post doctoral fellowships in 2024 were awarded to individuals with the key words physics, biology, ecology, physique, biologie, or écologie in their reported department or discipline (with care taken to avoid double counting), suggesting that the case study of these two departments is probably applicable for around ⅓ of NSERC awards in and of themselves. https://www.nserc-crsng.gc.ca/NSERC-CRSNG/FundingDecisions-DecisionsFinancement/ScholarshipsAndFellowships-ConcoursDeBourses/index_eng.asp?year=2024

Further, we chose these two fields because of their historical reputations for being large (sample size) and well funded, but fairly ‘generic’ funding structures (ie., engineering can have relatively lucrative funding ties to industries). Humanities, it should be uncontroversial to say, is not funded at the level of STEM fields, and thus whatever the findings of this research might be, the conditions won’t be applicable there. Given the similarity between Physics and Biology, it seems that doing a similar survey of chemistry, math, or Earth sciences would not result in a drastically different result.

At the beginning the paper makes this assertion: Graduate students are a primary engine of scientific work for the academic system. And at the end we find this assertion as if it is a finding of the study: Graduate students, both in Canada and around the world, are the engine on which academic science runs.These are remarkable claims that, in my view, are more advocacy than research. As I read the Larivière paper it does not support the primacy that the paper gives to graduate student research in the first instance and the study itself provides no evidence in the second instance.

We have rephrased those statements in order to make it weaker. They now read “Graduate students are an engine of scientific work for the academic system.” (52-53) and “Graduate students, both in Canada and around the world, are an engine on which academic science runs.” (298-299) We do acknowledge that those might have been overstatements depending on a number of factors (fields, etc), and hope that pointing out that graduate students produce a substantial portion of research within the system is uncontroversial.

The paper’s first conclusion is about the “hidden curriculum” of an admissions process that results in under-representation in the academy. That may or may not be true, but it is an entirely different research question from where the paper begins, and it is hard to see how the study’s research methodology (which the paper presents very well) leads to that conclusion.

We acknowledge that introducing the concept of the ‘hidden curriculum’ in the conclusion was probably not the appropriate location. The aim of this paragraph was to highlight the challenge to potential new graduate students of understanding and finding information about graduate student stipends and tuition (with an example of the harm that this could potentially cause). We have reframed this paragraph by removing reference to the ‘hidden curriculum’ and making it clear that the focus is on the lack of transparency.

The discussion of proportionality is something like the “hidden curriculum” conclusion. The evidentiary basis of the conclusion is not clear, but more to the point it begs a question of an alternative that the paper does not admit: that the problem may be as much or more the number of stipends than the size of the stipends.

It is somewhat unclear what ‘discussion of proportionality’ this comment is in reference to. It is also unclear to us what the reviewer means by ‘the problem of the number of stipends’. Is this the scenario where, by reducing the number of graduate students, a department is able to raise its minimum stipend level without increases in external funding, or does it refer to the scenario in which the number of graduate students in departments which do not currently have any minimum stipend level being a greater problem? While we acknowledge that the latter is concerning, we base our conclusions only on data for those departments which have already accepted the principle of a minimum stipend. Further, it seems that suggesting that the number of graduate students be lowered in Canada in order to raise the minimum would be advocating for a specific policy? We did our best to point out the small size of the minimum stipends in Canada and not advocate for a specific solution, like lowering the number of graduate students or increasing the base NSERC funding to PIs. We agree however, that could be a factor, though in order to address that hypothesis we would need historical data.

The study is correct to recognize the differences in stipend tax status between the U.S. and Canada (and maybe the UK, for which the study evidently did not collect comparable information. FYI Like Canada, stipends are not taxed in the UK.) This means that for comparative purposes the net minimum stipend in Canada is higher than the minimum stipend per se. This does not mean that Canadian stipends are inadequate and possibly still below the poverty line. It means that the comparative disparity may not be as great as presumed.

In response to the other reviewer’s comments, we have included an example for the amount of federal tax a typical student may pay ($2500 on $37k stipend). We feel this sufficiently clarifies the magnitude of the disparity that is likely to be reduced by tax and strengthens our statement that it is “extremely unlikely that fees or taxes are enough to erase the Can$23,666/yr difference between the means of the two countries”. We have also included information that UK stipends are untaxed.

At several points the study refers to “substantial student debt” carried by graduate students. There are two potentially serious oversights here. First, approximately half of undergraduates in Canada graduate without debt. This varies from province to province. Second, the second oversight is the Canadian Education Tax Credit, which is available to graduates with or without debt.

In all three cases we mentioned debt, it was always in the context of debt incurred, not carried. The purpose of these statements was to highlight the immediate imbalance of stipend income and necessary living expenses and in no way a comment on the costs of carrying debt into the future.

While the tuition tax credit can be sizable, in reality for most graduate students it is not meaningful whilst they are graduate students. Since the bulk of stipends are tax free, graduate students typically pay minimal tax during their course of study. This means that the non-refundable tuition tax credit is unable to boost their net income and will be carried forward to apply once they are earning more taxable income (and presumably no longer a graduate student).

We as authors feel that adding a discussion of either of these points would be confusing rather than clarifying to the main points of the article, and so have chosen not to include new discussion points in the manuscript. However, should an editor want it to be included, we can.

Figure 2 is not conclusive. To be so would require a separation of restricted and unrestricted funds. Restricted means that a donor made a gift for a purpose specified – hence restricted – by the donor. Universities must comply with restrictions as long as they are not illegal. Of course, universities can refuse to accept restrictions. So, it is only the unrestricted portion of an endowment that can be directed to stipends. The study perhaps should come to different conclusion: that research-intensive universities in their fund-raising should place a higher priority on stipends.

The effect that we see is more to do with institution size, and as a proxy perhaps for the number and types of supports it represents (e.g., larger libraries, access to technology and specialized equipment, opportunities to collaborate, etc.) rather than the financially available component of endowment specifically (although institution size and endowment are highly correlated). Therefore, we did not find discussions about the restricted nature of endowments to be directly relevant. This was not clear in our original manuscript, and so we have added a line (Line 225-228) to clarify that a similar effect is seen when considering total expenses and included an additional figure in the supporting material to this effect. We have also added (Line 232) an explicit mention that restrictions on university endowment funds may be a source of the variation.

Reviewer 2

Can you provide the average and/or median years students in the two disciplines evaluated take to graduate with a Master’s /PhD? Are they taking classes each year, or do late-stage PhD students exclusively focus on dissertation research?

For all Master’s students the average time to graduate is around 2.1 years and for PhD students 5.4 years; however, Statistics Canada has not released this information with a breakdown by field of study and may not be informative for the focal programs in our study. The number of classes required varies by programme and university, but typically are completed in the first few years of the degree allowing exclusive focus on research (and possibly TAing) for the latter part of the degree.

Is the stipend greater for TAships? Are they expected to do less research if teaching?

Typically the value of the stipend is set without explicit consideration of TAships, though they are often a requirement to receive the amount of stipend offered. In some cases it’s up to the supervisor to determine if TAing is required (e.g., whether they can pay an equivalent amount to the TA salary from their research grants). It is possible that some students (particularly if they hold an external scholarship) are able to TA and receive a larger total income, though these additional TA positions are not going to be guaranteed.

TAships in Canada are typically for 10 hours a week (although there is variation around this). Holding a TAship will reduce the capacity of a student to conduct research than if they were funded in an alternative manner.

It is notable that this is extremely different from a TA in the United States, in that doing a Canadian TAship is effectively sometimes a small additional payment on top of the stipend, and does not provide a tuition waiver or anything other than an additional amount of money. It’s a fairly different position with a smaller time commitment but also substantially fewer benefits in Canada. We have tried to make this

Submitted filename: Response to Reviewers.docx

 10.1371/journal.pone.0313972.r004 Decision Letter 1 Swift-Gallant Ashlyn Academic Editor 2025 Ashlyn Swift-Gallant This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Submission Version 1

11 Mar 2025

Canadian natural science graduate stipends lie below the poverty line

PONE-D-24-49904R1

Dear Dr. Fraass,

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Additional Editor Comments (optional):

One minor editorial request: Please provide sources in the introduction for the length of time it takes to complete a master’s and phd degree, as well as the typical TAships hours/week.

Reviewers' comments:

 10.1371/journal.pone.0313972.r005 Acceptance letter Swift-Gallant Ashlyn Academic Editor 2025 Ashlyn Swift-Gallant This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

PONE-D-24-49904R1

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