How do academia and graduate advisors deal with the fact that the cost of living is dramatically higher but graduate wages is stagnant? My supervisor got his PhD in the 1970s while having two kids and a house. He spent 25k on the house. Everyone from that era, even the 80s or 90s, said that their degree was dirt cheap and they were very easily transiting from academia to work life post graduation.

Fast forward to the present day, my graduate wage is 25k/yr (most of which is spent on tuition) and the housing prices in my city are 70k-100k for tiny small apartment. Almost all the housing prices are rising due to speculation and price for even basic daily necessities such as food or even a hair cut is rising.

I am going to a conference but I can't go because the plane ticket alone cost $1000 dollar. Uploading a paper cost $100, an additional one cost $300. Registration $300. All the conference prices are rising and many students are frustrated but the conference organizer insist on places such as fancy resorts or islands. It feels like a hustle.

How do academia rationalize the reality that the cost of living has risen dramatically, yet graduate wages are stagnant, making the graduate degree nowadays a very costly and risky journey. How do academic advisors support students in these times when their students are all living around the poverty line, the same bright students who could easily make 100k-200k working as a programmer? 

I sometimes wonder if the only reason I am admitted is that I am from a third world country and people assumed we are satisfied with less and unequal pay. Not unequal with respect to other graduate students, but unequal with respect to people who has citizenship with the same skill.
This might prove controversial but I'm going to reverse the question: why do PhD students accept being underpaid? As long as academic institutions find candidates willing to be underpaid, they have no reason to raise the wages. If the PhD students themselves don't defend their claim to a better compensation, who will?

In some countries PhD students are staff with a proper employment contract (I'm aware of at least Germany and France, probably others as well). The advantages of this system from the PhD student perspective are:


Access to health, pension and unemployment benefits in accordance with the country regulations
The PhD counts as a professional experience
The salary is usually indexed on some public employment salary scale
Symbolically improved social status, e.g. when being vetted for an apartment or a mortgage.


Obviously this option is more costly for the academic institutions, which means that they had to reduce the number of PhD students hired in order to increase the salary.

In France, the transition from student stipend to work contract happened at the beginning of the 2000s. The movement originated from the PhD students themselves and was driven by the Confédération des Étudiants Chercheurs (students researchers federation, later appropriately renamed as the Confédération des Jeunes Chercheurs, junior researchers federation). The central claim was that even if PhD students are researchers in training, they actually carry out productive research work, as illustrated by the fact that 50% of scientific publications have a PhD student as first author. Therefore legal cases were brought that their work qualifies as regular employment, and that the student stipend system was simply illegal according to labor laws. Institutions and funding bodies reluctantly complied over the next decade or so, for fear of legal challenges and/or bad publicity.