Graduate Student Salaries: What You Should Know Going In
22 Aug
Keeping with the day’s theme, a look at graduate student salaries:
Source: PhD Comics (H/T Charles Ebikeme via Google+)
10 Responses to “Graduate Student Salaries: What You Should Know Going In”
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First you have to get a good job for about 9 months to qualify for the unemployment benefits.
However, after 5 years on food stamps you don’t get a PhD. After 5 years of learning how to think, do Science, find free pizza for lunch any day of the week, oh and get the highest degree you can get. And this number seems low to me. 10 years ago I was getting $23,000 per year as a grad student in a non-large city.
I was getting 15K annually, but that affords a comfortable lifestyle in Maine.
This probably includes PhD students in the liberal arts, who sadly get paid less than PhD students in science and engineering.
Am I right to assume that this doesn’t include cost of tuition, which is often paid with a TA or GRA spot? Still tight, but (if tuition is added to this number) maybe not so bad?
Hah, oh wow. After this series, I may little remaining enthusiasm to get my PhD. Anything that redeems the likely poor compensation? How about job satisfaction studies?
What does “Average Maximum” mean??
You don’t go to grad school to get a salary, you receive a stipend so you can afford to go to grad school. If you don’t value going to grad school then you shouldn’t go.
I went to grad school over 30 years ago. I had a NSF fellowship, and got $6000 a year. I was newly married, and my wife was substitute teaching. She made about the same as I did. I remember reading an article in Newsweek that said that we were below poverty (or maybe just above, I forget, it was a long time ago). The article went on to talk about lawyers making $100K who had a hard time making ends meet. I laughed. We were very happy. I loved school. I loved being married. Ithaca was a fun place to live. Sure, we were poor, but students are supposed to be poor. We weren’t any more poor than anybody else. There was lots of free entertainment; playing games with the other grad students, going to local parks, reading CS literature. (Well, I enjoyed that, but my wife didn’t.) Life was good. Some of the professors said that grad school was the best time of their life, and i could believe it. Looking back 30 years, I know it was one of the best times for me, though I have had lots of great times since.
So, I recommend grad school, but I know it is not for everybody. If you are tired of school, do something else. I had gone to a small liberal arts school where I had taken all their CS courses my freshman year (both of them). I was itching to take CS courses.
Even if you want to go to grad school, sometimes it is good to take a break. My main advice to people who say they want to work for a couple of years before going to grad school is to remember the size of the stipends. Don’t get used to a big salary! Don’t get a car loan, get a huge apartment, or spend all your salary. If you are used to being poor and live simply then you can be very happy on a grad student stipend. If you get used to being rich then it is much harder to be poor again.
I lived on a graduate stipend in an expensive city for six years and considered myself *very* lucky because I left graduate school with no debt, unlike my many friends who went to architecture school, art school, and law school (few of whom have high paying jobs after graduation). The job market may be very challenging right now for academics on the tenure track and my savings account may be pitiful, but at least I don’t have massive student loans to pay off in the meantime. I think it would behove a professor accepting incoming students to have this frank conversation about finances during graduate school and also the prospects for jobs after graduation – some professors are great about making their students aware of other “non-traditional” career options but others are not. Another important factor to discuss with students is the lack of control over location – most of the time, we don’t get a lot of choice regarding where we move and often we have to move a lot -multiple post docs, temporary positions, etc. This is a challenge I was not aware of when I entered grad school.
Courses during a PhD? Aren’t you supposed to do research / experiments?