At Harvard, Grad Student Parents Navigate a Patchwork of Programs To Keep Up With Costs

When second-year Harvard Biophysics Ph.D. student Juan Carlos Fernandez del Castillo ’20 began searching for child care for his toddler, he was shocked to discover that tuition at one Cambridge daycare cost $50,000 a year — almost his entire annual Ph.D. stipend.

“My income is less than the combination of rent and childcare,” he said.

Today, Fernandez del Castillo and his wife draw from their savings from previous jobs to pay their living expenses.

Fernandez del Castillo is not alone. Eight Harvard graduate students told The Crimson that they struggled with the costs of raising a family — whether because of scattered resources and eligibility requirements for Harvard programs, or rising living expenses in Cambridge.

The hourly cost of childcare services in Cambridge for toddlers and children can reach up to $50 an hour, with weekly costs hitting $1,200. MIT’s guidance for students with families estimates that tuition for full-time child care in the city ranges from $30,000 to $51,000 — making Cambridge one of the most expensive places to raise a child in America.

Harvard has increased graduate student compensation to try to keep pace with rising costs of living. Last year, Harvard’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences raised its minimum Ph.D. program stipend to $50,000 — more than a 10 percent increase for most students.

The minimum living wage for a single adult without children in Middlesex County is more than $66,000 — and dramatically higher for adults raising children, according to MIT’s living wage calculator.

Cristian A. Piazzetti, a second-year Ph.D. student in the Committee on the Study of Religion, said he appreciates the resources offered by Harvard.

“Other schools wouldn’t have what we have,” he said. “But at the same time, I can’t deny it’s challenging to get by.”

Spokespeople for Harvard and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences declined to comment for this article.

Minding the Gaps

For many graduate student parents, high costs create a difficult balancing act.

Two students raising children at GSAS said they wished the school matched the annual stipends given to student-parents at some peer schools.

In contrast to Harvard’s child care stipend, Yale provides an annual subsidy of up to $7,500 to eligible Ph.D. students with a child under the age of 18. Similarly, Princeton awards up to $6,500 per child per year, with a maximum annual award of $19,500. MIT provides graduate students with an annual need-blind grant of up to $8,500 as well as additional need-based funding up to $10,000.

But at Harvard’s GSAS, eligible Ph.D. students with children receive only a one-time $7,484 payment for each child.

Jordan Vanderpool, a second-year Ph.D. student in the Romance Languages and Literatures Department and one of five officers of the Harvard GSAS Student-Parents Group, said that even a smaller annual stipend would be better than a one-time payment. Insurance, he said, was “the main upfront cost of having a kid” — and parents need to pay it every year.

“Food and clothing grows incrementally along with the child’s growth,” he said.

Harvard GSAS offers special child and adult backup caretaking services through care.com, which subsidizes up to 10 days of backup care per graduate student.

But graduate students are on the hook for any additional child care costs. Students at GSAS and most other graduate schools are not generally eligible for financial aid for child care, and a page describing Harvard’s campus child care options warns that “space is extremely limited.” Monthly tuition at Harvard’s six campus child care centers ranges from $2,300 to more than $3,600.

Some GSAS students said that reimbursements provided by the Harvard Graduate Students Union helped them fill the gap. The negotiated contract between Harvard University and HGSU established an annual fund of $830,000 that eligible graduate students can draw from to subsidize parenting costs which include childcare and afterschool programs.

For Fernandez del Castillo, the child care fund has been essential.

“I’m very grateful that the union has fought for what they fought for, because I think that’s made it possible,” he said. “Certainly without those benefit funds, I don’t think I’d be in graduate school.”

Graduate students eligible for the HGSU benefits pay child care costs and health insurance premiums upfront, then file a reimbursement to the union before a given deadline. Often, due to limited HGSU funding, reimbursements — which are not tax-exempt — do not entirely cover the original payment.

“The reimbursements are incredibly helpful and make a huge dent, but you’re still on the hook for a lot of money,” Fernandez del Castillo said.

However, only employed graduate students are eligible for the HGSU’s Childcare Fund, meaning that recipients must be salaried research assistants, teaching fellows, or course assistants.

For students in the humanities and social sciences, teaching responsibilities often don’t begin until the third or fourth year of their graduate studies — meaning many are not eligible for Child Fund reimbursements until years after they arrive at Harvard.

“There’s a lot of benefits that I could be getting, but I’m not a student worker yet,” said Vanderpool, the Romance Languages and Literatures student.

A HGSU representative, Biophysics Ph.D. student Ryan B. McMillan, wrote in a statement that “HGSU is proud of the childcare benefits we’ve won for our student workers and have consistently heard from parents that these benefits are critical in caring for their children.”

“At the same time, these benefits fall woefully short of what’s necessary to care for a child in the Boston area,” McMillan added.

Currently, Harvard offers financial support to parents in the form of the Parental Accommodation and Financial Support program, which offers support for graduate students with children or following a birth or adoption.

PAFS connects Ph.D. students with a coordinator if they “express interest in participating at least four months in advance of the anticipated birth or adoption event,” according to the program’s website. The program also works with students to find academic accommodations of up to 12 weeks following the birth or adoption of a child.

For some students, however, the accommodations don’t entail a complete leave of absence. Vanderpool said that requirements often remain difficult to fulfill for graduate students with teaching responsibilities.

“We’re supposed to have 12 weeks of accommodations, which they officially say on the website,” he said. “But really it amounts to nothing if you really look into it. It basically means your professor should be flexible with these for 12 weeks.”

‘A Very, Very Tight Budget’

The cost of parenting in Cambridge is also pushed up by high rent. Fernandez del Castillo said one of his big challenges was finding housing his family could afford, on top of daycare costs.

“Living in Cambridge is tough because daycare is super, super expensive and rent is pretty high,” he said.

According to the City of Cambridge’s Community Development Department, median monthly rent prices in Cambridge are about $3,000 for a two bedroom apartment. That’s nearly twice the national average — which sat at about $1,700 last year, according to a Washington Post analysis of CoStar Group data.

Piazetti, the Ph.D. student in Religion, has been living in Springfield, Massachusetts, since the beginning of his doctoral program, almost 88 miles away from Cambridge.

Piazetti needs to commute to Cambridge twice a week for his studies, a commute that he said adds two hours in each direction. But he said “housing is so much more affordable here that it’s worth it.”

“I don’t know if I would recommend — but here we have more space for the kids, so it also compensates the downsides of having to drive to campus,” he added.

Piazetti said that, for his family of four, living so far from campus was a financial necessity.

“With two kids, it’s virtually impossible to live in the Cambridge area,” he said. “There is no apartment with two bedrooms like the price of the stipend.”

But even while living far from campus to minimize living costs, Piazetti said that money is tight. Currently, he works an extra job as a librarian assistant, which pays $18 an hour to help with additional household expenses.

“We live on a very, very tight budget. It’s quite challenging,” he said.

Support Networks

Beyond the financial challenges of raising a family, graduate parents must also find a way to navigate the timelines of research, reading, and writing as a student.

For Piazetti, who is supposed to take his exams in the next year, working part time to take care of his family means less time for his studies.

“If I were in a better position, I would just let go of this job for now and go full on on the exams. But I can’t,” he said.

Piazetti said having support from his wife and occasional visits from family made a huge difference in his workload.

“My wife does the bigger, larger job. Of course, I try to be as present as possible and also participate in the education and raising my kids,” he said. “They are at this stage where they need so much attention.”

Similarly, Fernandez del Castillo said that the presence of family allows him and his wife to spend less on childcare.

“We’re lucky we have some family in town, so we’re able to only pay for three days of daycare a week, and then we kind of balance it with our family in between my wife and me,” he said.

Amanda Wilde, who is in her second year of an online Biology master’s program at the Harvard Extension School, is a single mother with a three-year-old, whom she’s raising in Baja California, Mexico, as she pays off student loans.

“Your experience of being a student-parent is so dependent on your support system and your financial situation,” she said.

Wilde currently sends her daughter to daycare for four hours, five days a week. But even with the daycare program, Wilde struggles to fully engage with her studies simultaneously with caring for her three year-old daughter.

“There’s a different emotional element to phoning in your studies, which is something that you are paying for — that you are passionate about,” she said.

Vanderpool said that for most graduate students, their studies take priority. But being present as a parent sometimes means cutting studies off short, he said.

“Most graduate students that I know at GSAS, they study every day, they work every day, and they work probably into the evening,” he said.

Some students at GSAS and Harvard’s other graduate schools have joined forces to build a stronger support network.

Sarah F. Hatch, a second-year Ph.D. student at Graduate School of Education, is one of the five officers of the GSAS Student-Parents Group. The group holds a welcome brunch for families and organizes toy and clothing exchanges.

The Student-Parents Group has advocated for the implementation of the care.com program, as well as access to lactation rooms on campus — but it’s also about helping students find resources that already exist.

Hatch said much of how she learned about Harvard’s parenting resources was via word of mouth.

“For me, it’s been like, ‘One person told me about this. I should look into that. And then someone in my department talked about this. So then I Googled that,’” Hatch said.

“We’re trying to streamline and unify those resources across Harvard, because Harvard is well-resourced, but it’s not necessarily streamlined and organized,” she added.

—Staff writer Iris Hur can be reached at iris.hur@thecrimson.com.

—Staff writer Claire Jiang can be reached at claire.jiang@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X at @_clairejiang_.