You don’t need a Ph.D. to realize offering students a better quality of life will help attract better students. Having the best and brightest come to MSU benefits the undergraduates whose teaching assistants, or TAs, will be the smartest and most capable instructors available; the graduate students whose peers will add synergistic value to classroom and research discussions; the professors, whose laboratories and research programs will be staffed with increasingly insightful and intelligent minds; and the university, whose reputation will be boosted by the quality and quantity of research published by its students and alumni who carry MSU’s brand with them forever.

My personal experience at MSU has been very positive, aside from the $500 fee I pay every semester to the engineering college — $125 of which goes to paying my fellow graduate students who work as TAs, by the way.

My fellow students, my professors, my department and the university as a whole have created a supportive and constructive environment where I feel I can grow into a successful professional researcher. However, the more I’ve spoken with students from other departments, the more I’ve learned this is not the case for everyone.

For example, if I had a wife or kids who needed insurance — as many graduate students do — it would cost me more than $2,900 per year to insure them here. Seven of the other 10 public Big Ten schools would require them to pay far less, often with better benefits.

I’m also lucky to be in a department where I only have to take nine credit hours each semester to graduate in a reasonable time — that’s as much as my tuition waiver will cover. Nine of the other 10 public schools in the Big Ten cover 12 or more credit hours per semester; I’m sure it makes a big difference for prospective students who realize at MSU they’d have to pick between adding a year and a half to their degree or paying out of pocket for the extra courses.

To add insult to injury, U-M is at the top in almost every category of graduate student benefits. This means that not only is MSU losing prospective students to other schools in the Big Ten, but also many of them end up becoming our “big brothers” in Ann Arbor.

Not all hope is lost: This is a bargaining year for the Graduate Employees Union, or GEU, which means MSU has the opportunity to provide a compensation package for graduate students that will make the university competitive with other schools.

The problem is MSU’s Office of Planning and Budgets has explicitly told GEU representatives they are aiming to be sixth out of 12 in the Big Ten. If men’s basketball head coach Tom Izzo or football head coach Mark Dantonio told their players, high school recruits or fan base that MSU is aiming for sixth place every year, I don’t think they’d have jobs for very long.

MSU’s current contract offer includes 0 percent, 1 percent and 1.5 percent stipend raises through the next three years, a 0 percent contribution toward dental coverage, keeping the tuition waiver at nine credits and removing graduate students’ right to buy parking passes.

For comparison, the new contracts at U-M and Iowa give 2.5/3/3 percent and 2/2.5 percent stipend raises, respectively. It is naïve to think all of these factors don’t play a role in where prospective graduate students decide to enroll.

Hopefully, senior quarterback Kirk Cousins and the rest of the football team can give us something to brag about again this fall, because with the administration’s explicit goal of mediocrity for graduate student compensation, our benefits package probably won’t.

Stephen R. Boona, graduate student