Several New School for Social Research (NSSR) PhD students were left in financial limbo after experiencing PhD stipend delays at the start of the academic year. 

NSSR awards five types of fellowships and funding to most PhD students. All fellowships offer a maximum of $25,000 to support students on the condition they work for the school. Stipends and tuition waivers are typical with most PhD programs in the US. 

However, for the fall 2025 year, some PhD students did not receive their stipends until the third week of school. Other students were not paid until this week. In the past, this payment was issued in the last week of August, the start of the school year. 

But PhD students were not paid until weeks into the school year.

“The delay was due to a file error in a newly upgraded banking platform,” Associate Director of Communications, Merrie Snead, said in an emailed statement. “The university is implementing controls to prevent a recurrence.”

The university did not respond to further questions about the controls.

Snead said the school was not notified about the problem and the issue did not come to their attention until Sept. 5.

But NSSR’s Assistant Director of Academic Student Affairs, Francesca Ferrono, told a student over email in mid-August that Financial Aid did not approve stipend packages which would cause a delay.

Students use the stipends to pay rent, groceries, and other living expenses. 

“My two flatmates are also on The New School stipend … we basically couldn’t pay our September rent on time,” third-year PhD student Jan Hendricks said. 

He uses the money to pay for housing, food, transportation, and to plan his courses as a teaching assistant. Other students told the New School Free Press they struggled to find permanent housing and had to couch surf to make ends meet.

Students reached out to administrators directly about the delay, but an email from Ferrono on Sept. 5 was the first time PhD students received a formal, program-wide communication about the delays. 

During the delay period, Academic Affairs advised PhD students to resort to the emergency fund. But after emergency fund staff received confirmation students’ stipends would be paid on the Sept. 5, their applications were cancelled. No one was paid until Sept. 8. 

“It was almost like the administration … sees it as allowance money … and don’t actually realize that some people are dependent on this for surviving in this city,” PhD applicant Dailt Zakaim said. She helped draft an email students sent to NSSR administration. 

Jack Condie, a PhD student in philosophy said the stipend delays reflect a general lack of communication from and within the university. 

“But it seems like the administration is set up by design to put a bunch of these people, who are well meaning and trying to fix problems, without the tools to fix those problems because it’s so decentralized. And all these offices don’t really talk to each other that way there’s never any accountability,” Condie said.

Many want a contingency plan from the university to ensure this does not happen again.

“The university charges us late fees when we don’t pay … Yet, we don’t see [late fees] going towards us when the university … messes up things like this,” Hendricks said.