I do not know how graduate students work, do they pay tuition or does Harvard pay them for their work ? Also is it for only certain majors. For example do STEM/Law/Business majors get better pay if Harvard pays them ?
In anycase, if Harvard pays these students, then yes they should get a livable wage or at least free housing.
Anyway it is like this all across academia except for the "exceptional" students who are recruited. They tend to get everything paid for.
UCLA, UCSC, all of them pay poverty wages. Grad students have started unionizing though to get better conditions. In reality grad school in the US is basically an immigration pipeline. We should import the best and brightest. The New York times says 80% of US grad students are foreign [1]. This is the reverse of 80% of all US college students being US citizens.
That's absolutely crazy to think about. Why aren't more US citizens going to grad school?
Either they are not qualified, which means we are not educating our college students to a sufficient standard, the poverty wages are so detrimental that only foreigners will put up with it. Something is clearly broken.
1. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/03/education/edlife/american...
The third possibility is of course that top 1% of the college students outside of US are better than 10th percentile of college students inside.
On average, rankings of the world's top universities are about 60% US universities and 30% UK universities (just from a quick survey of ~5 ranking systems). Given this, it makes sense that graduate programs would attract a larger share of immigrants than undergraduate programs, as the reputation of the university is far more important for grad students than undergrad.
Frankly, I struggle to see why a large share of immigrants is a problem: It's a good way for the US to absorb huge amounts of global talent. If even half of the students stay in the US for their academic careers, it's a major win for the US. I can't really imagine a non-racist reason to oppose this.