COVID grad school updates?

Early last month, I floated a tentative proposal for how grad programs might best serve their students during COVID, particularly given how bad the academic job-market is almost certainly going to be this fall. Are programs taking any such steps? For example, have announcements gone out to grad students letting them know they can stay in the program another year instead of defending their dissertation and going out on the market? Have students who are coming to the end of their promised funding (e.g. 5 years) been told they can get an extra year of funding? Are other steps being taken? Or is little being done? I'm very curious to hear what's going on, and if not much is being done, drawing attention to it.

Comments

[D. Cooper]

I'm a first-year student in a mid-ranked PhD program. There has been no extension of funding for any graduate students in my department. My department has several graduate students who act as liaisons with the faculty. These students distributed a survey to see how grad students were faring, but there has been essentially no action from the department or faculty otherwise. Even an encouraging email from the chair would have been better than nothing. Instead we got an email saying that a prospective hire wouldn't be coming, and that hiring prospects aren't good for the foreseeable future.

Extensions to funding would be great, but I would also like to see my department and others start to address the elephant in the room--we're training for a job that we will have no hope of getting. The job market was tight before; post-COVID, I expect that the market will be basically non-existent.

[Eli Portella]

I'm a fourth year PhD candidate at a substantial and well-respected PhD program in the Pacific Northwest. There has been no extension and no extra funding support for graduate students. Moreover, graduate students have repeatedly tried to petition both the department and the university for aid and have received little to no response. Marcus, have you heard from anyone (grads or faculty) in a program which is extending such opportunities? If so, we'd love to hear about them so that we can establish a precedent and feasibility based on other programs!