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Updated Funding Packages


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  • 3 weeks later...
On 11/28/2018 at 2:10 AM, GlacierPoint said:

Looks like the spreadsheet was wiped out - it only lists 15 English PhD programs and it's missing the other tabs. 

Thanks for catching that. Based on the history, it seems that someone deleted the information on Thanksgiving. (Perhaps, somebody had a little too much turkey!)

I've restored it to a backed up version but it seems like some of the values are off. I'll take a deeper look later on this week!

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  • 4 weeks later...

I realize that the people doing it are unlikely to read this, but please use the spreadsheet Warelin shared wisely. The idea is to add information you have when you have it. Instead, data is being deleted and the sheet is made unreadable by aesthetic changes. Some of us are actually referring to this document regularly, so please be careful as anything you touch might result in a permanent change and there's no reason for anyone to have to oversee the document.

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  • 1 month later...

If you do contribute changes, please make sure to update the year of the offer as well. This will allow other applicants to see how recent the offer was made. 
I've highlighted schools in green that are missing stipend information. These schools include: Oregon, Boston University, Missouri, Kentucky and Stanford. If you have funding information on those schools, please contribute it 
If you notice a number is wrong, please feel free to correct it. Please do not erase  entries from the list.

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5 hours ago, northwestnative said:

Am I having some sort of moment, or have all the UC schools vanished from the sheet?

 

5 hours ago, sugilite said:

Can't see them either! @Warelin, could you take a look? 

Fixed. It seems like someone did some resorting and unclicked California in the settings. I've undone those settings and schools in California are now listed again!

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@Warelin Second question - how is the wage index calculated? I'm looking at numbers on the MIT website, but I can't tell if it's supposed to be the 1 individual before taxes? Have the numbers been updated on MIT's website since the spreadsheet was created, perhaps? 

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34 minutes ago, sugilite said:

@Warelin Second question - how is the wage index calculated? I'm looking at numbers on the MIT website, but I can't tell if it's supposed to be the 1 individual before taxes? Have the numbers been updated on MIT's website since the spreadsheet was created, perhaps? 

For spreadsheet purposes, the spreadsheet only accounts for one individual.  A score of 1 equates to MIT's living wage * 40 hours * 52 weeks (or 2080 hours). This is usually the same as MIT's listed "Required annual income before taxes". However, there have been times that the number is slightly different. It is possible that cities that have seen inflation in living (Nashville, Boston, Austin) or cover really huge areas (Philadelphia, NYC, Houston) might present a less accurate number depending on how recently MIT updates their data. It is possible that MIT has updated some numbers, but not all of them. It is possible that some of the numbers might need updating within the spreadsheet as well. :)

The Living Wage Index is based on the school's stipend divided by MIT's hourly living wage multiplied by 2080 hours.

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6 minutes ago, Warelin said:

For spreadsheet purposes, the spreadsheet only accounts for one individual.  A score of 1 equates to MIT's living wage * 40 hours * 52 weeks. This is usually the same as MIT's listed "Required annual income before taxes". However, there have been times that the number is slightly different. It is possible that cities that have seen inflation in living (Nashville, Boston, Austin) or cover really huge areas (Philadelphia, NYC, Houston) might present a less accurate number depending on how recently MIT updates their data. It is possible that MIT has updated some numbers, but not all of them. It is possible that some of the numbers might need updating within the spreadsheet as well. :)

The Living Wage Index is based on the school's stipend divided by MIT's hourly living wage multiplied by 2080 hours.

So, just checking before I update--for UCLA, the wage index =1 column, could be updated to 29,864? Based on this data: http://livingwage.mit.edu/counties/06037

Am I looking in the right place? So sorry for all the questions and thank you for being patient with me!

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On 2/25/2019 at 11:10 PM, sugilite said:

So, just checking before I update--for UCLA, the wage index =1 column, could be updated to 29,864? Based on this data: http://livingwage.mit.edu/counties/06037

Am I looking in the right place? So sorry for all the questions and thank you for being patient with me!

So, I just have one question in this regard:

Is Los Angeles County or is Los Angeles - Long Beach - Anaheim metro a smaller area? (In these cases, I always tried to go with a smaller area or one that had closer costs to their area? 

Otherwise, either the $29,864 or the living wage multiplied by 2080 hours would be acceptable and updates would be appreciated!

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On 2/25/2019 at 11:19 PM, Warelin said:

Is Los Angeles County or is Los Angeles - Long Beach - Anaheim metro a smaller area? (In these cases, I always tried to go with a smaller area or one that had closer costs to their area?

I'd assume that they're just slightly different configurations of geographic area. LA-Long Beach-Anaheim is about the same size as LA county, but LA county includes places like Palmdale and Lancaster which are economically very different to live in than, say, Long Beach. 

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  • 4 weeks later...

Current grad student at Mississippi-- just updated the Mississippi funding. Earlier, the spreadsheet indicated stipend as $15,000...the base stipend (excluding fellowships, etc.) is $11,500. The spreadsheet also originally indicated the first year is service-free, which it isn't. I updated it to a 1-1 teaching load, which is consistent across all 5 years of funding. Hope this helps!

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On 4/10/2019 at 7:37 PM, FoucaultThis said:

Current grad student at Mississippi-- just updated the Mississippi funding. Earlier, the spreadsheet indicated stipend as $15,000...the base stipend (excluding fellowships, etc.) is $11,500. The spreadsheet also originally indicated the first year is service-free, which it isn't. I updated it to a 1-1 teaching load, which is consistent across all 5 years of funding. Hope this helps!

Thanks for fixing it for Mississippi! I've noticed that Google Sheets does sometimes rearrange where data is inserted if it's resorted. I'm not sure if there's a way to prevent that from happening.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Added U of Alabama for Rhet/Comp.

Thanks so much, @Warelin for maintaining.  My partner and I used this spreadsheet a lot when we were making our preliminary decisions!

 

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  • 4 months later...

This might be a naive question but does anyone know if graduate TA/RA stipends differ significantly among departments? On the Google Excel Sheet provided (thank you so much @Warelin it has been a lifesaver), it states that the stipend for PhD English at UNC Chapel Hill is $16,000 but I was speaking to my friend at UNC who is a doctoral student in Chemistry and they said their stipend was much higher than that. If all graduate students are part of the graduate college, shouldn't our stipends be the same? I know the humanities have a much lower budget than STEM fields, but damn. I understand that there might be differences in stipends between being a Research Assistant, Teaching Assistant, Teacher of Record etc. so that might play a role. I don't mean to undermine any department, academic field, or teaching responsibility - I am mainly curious in how the logistics work. 

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Funding packages can be very different within one school, most likely because of the amount of financial resources a department has, how much additional expenditure it has (a chemistry lab needs more materials than English), and the size of the cohort. The best idea of how much they pay for English - if it isn't on the website - is by checking here rather than relying on other department's (while logic would say that other humanities departments receive similar funding, my program pays significantly more than some other literary programs at the same university, so it's really hard to say).

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I think one of the things that also impacts funding are grants. The sciences are more likely to receive grants for their works so departments are able to give more funding. I imagine a part of funding is also determined by what the "major players" of the field are doing. I'd wonder what would happen if people started listing schools that were either the "highest stipend amount" or "best cost of living". I wonder if that shift would result in some colleges redetermine what certain colleges are doing and who they're paying attention to. It wasn't too long ago that a number of (now) top colleges weren't funding all their students.

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