>>>With grad school, you can pay your way through by working for professors on projects and also working for the university as a teaching assist.
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>>Well, sort of, if you're willing to live poor. Solomon has a teaching assistship--no tuition plus a stipend of $14,000 per academic year. He'll earn an extra $3,000 working summer session. This is in the Washington, DC area where $17,000 doesn't go very far.
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>College students are supposed to be poor, aren't they? I am not being flippant.

I dunno. I think your point is they should be uncomfortable enough to see the point of graduating and going to work. Certainly, I agree that paying students a luxury wage would be a disincentive to working. OTOH, you'll always have the basic inequities that some kids come from money and others don't.

I'm a big believer that students should _not_ have jobs during the school year. I think it interferes with both academics and the other things that education includes (sports, music, theater, student government, volunteering in the community, etc.). (I'm pretty sure the research agrees that working while in school has a negative effect on academic acheivement.)

I also think we need to recognize that grad students (at least, PhD students) are our next generation of scholars. They're the researchers who are going to ferret out the secrets of the universe and the human body, as well as educate future generations. For the most part, they're graduating into jobs that don't pay that well. (In fact, Solomon says that post-docs in his field are actually paid worse than grad students.) We need to make it affordable for the best and the brightest to train to be scholars.

Tamar