Literally (and perhaps paradoxically), a student who has already “graduated.” Which is to say, graduate students have already completed an undergraduate degree at a four-year college or university (or the equivalent), but desire to maintain ties to a pedagogical milieu. Some do so for the purpose of professional advancement in defined professional fields (e.g., business, law, medicine, architecture). Others seek supplementary accreditation in the form of potentially marketable “Master’s” degrees in the humanities, sciences, and social sciences. Still others pursue an M.F.A. degree, which permits several years of absorbing dedication to creative production in the arts (with very little prospect of gainful employment thereafter). A small number entertain ambitions for the terminal university degree, known as a doctorate or Ph.D. Of this last group, those studying the sciences and engineering tend to work mostly on a specific laboratory or field project overseen by a senior researcher in the chosen discipline; such students are nearly all subsidized by grants secured by these principal investigators. Students on the Ph.D. track in the HUMANITIES (who are funded, as a rule, by their universities directly, out of operating budgets) are generally abandoned to the alluring (if, also, frequently harrowing) solitude of reading and writing—at least for a time. It should be noted, however, that graduate students offer universities a tempting labor pool, in that graduate EDUCATION creates a local aggregation of lowpaid educators. Is such TEACHING experience a special privilege? A valuable apprenticeship in a chosen trade? Or merely a mode of exploitation? Opinions differ widely on this matter, an increasingly urgent concern in the wake of academic job market stagnation and identifiably “neoliberal” university reforms.