Will the economy affect your decision?

[csApplicant]

Will the economy affect your decision as to which school you will decide to go to? I'm asking this in CS and not other forums because I wanted to get other CS people's views.

For instance, the state of California is a big mess right now. Will this affect funding at state schools in CA? Even Berkeley? Not to mention the state of Michigan, whose economy is hurting quite a bit due to the automotive industry doing poorly. Major state schools relied on the automative industry.

How about Stanford? Their business school had layoffs because they rely so much on donors, who aren't contributing like they used to. Will this affect all of Stanford? It surely must.

How about schools where advisors fund you (versus the school itself)? Given the option of full-funding by a school or full-funding by a professor's grants, would you make a decision solely based upon this? I don't think our government would let our top universities fall into bankruptcy, so well-known schools are probably safe as far as all around funding and security... But those whose professor's fund them through grants - well, that could be a different story entirely. One could find himself without funding mid-way through his studies.

I think this is one of the harder years to apply to graduate school because since budgets are tight, and thus, so are acceptances. But what I want to know is - will you base your decision upon monetary security?

How seriously will you consider this?

[belowthree]

It depends on what budgetary streams you're talking about. Universities are a complex organism that derive money from a diverse number of sources. Cutbacks in state funding for the UC system at least generally are going to cause changes in the number of students these institutions enroll at the undergraduate levels more than most. It will also have an effect on student fees and tuition costs which will likely go up.

However, it's unclear to me that this will have a terrible impact on graduate students. Especially those who are getting paid out of a grant. Grants are already written with the expectation that tuition goes up and most departmental funding actually comes out of grant overhead, which means that the funding streams likely to most directly effect graduate students relies on an institution's research funding.

For those institutions who derive most of their money from federal funding, the picture actually looks reasonably sunny as the new administration has been quite vehement to pack funding for science into most of its major initiatives. The recent stimulus bill has more funding for science and a lot of that is going to go directly back into universities over the next two or three years. Science funding looks to be going up and not down.

Which isn't to say everything is rosy, there certainly are going to be places that lose grants from industry and that's going to cause more contention for federal dollars... but if you look at an institution's federal funding rates you should do alright.

Conveniently, I computed this the other day while procrastinating about applications. It's not formatted very well because the forum doesn't seem to allow me to use tables... but this data was pulled from the combined CS+EE NSF numbers. These are the top 32 institutions that get federal money tracked by the NSF, as well as how much money that really ends up being. This data is for CS and EE both combined. If it says 99999 that's because I included it even though I can't exactly place it in my ranking. There may be other schools which exist that show up in those places too, but for the first 32 I can guarantee that those are the top 32 funded schools from the data I had.

 

Dollars in thousands:

1	JHU          203294

2	GaTech     161860

3	CMU         138491

4	UIUC         121494

5	USC          118112

6	UCSD		114651

7	Penn State  94628

8	UT Austin  79497

9	MIT           78201

10	Berk          74978

11	U MD CP    57462

12	Stanford    53860

13	OH State   49904

14	Vtech        49851

15	Cornell      42463

16	Purdue      42433

17	UCSB	        41752

18	U Mich Sys 41133

19	WashU   40972

20	UCLA	        37418

21	AZ State   34358

22	Amherst    28979

23	UCI           26922

24	Uwisc-M    25247

25	U MN	        24405

26	Washington       22874

27	Princeton  22682

28	Brown       22298

29	U Hi Man   21252

30	Drexel       20492

31	Clemson    20136

32	NC State   20031

9999	Vanderbilt 19924

9999	U AZ         19786

9999	U UT         18167

9999	U Chicago  18144

9999	Univ Fl      16808

9999	UIC           16778

9999	Or H&S     16702

9999	UCD          16167

9999	Northeastern  15976

9999	Caltech     15566

9999	Duke        15497

9999	SUNY        15058

9999	RPI           14446

9999	IN U          12397

9999	NC Chapel-H   11764

9999	Dart          10764

9999	UCSC	         6917

Edit: Numbers corrected, sorry about the white spacing, this forum software is really stupid when it comes to tabs.

[Falmouth]

The problem is that advisors need new money for new students and in many instances to fund students which they already have who were given one year fellowships. New grant money has been very tight with the change in administrations and with the stimulus package just passed, programs are waiting to see if they will recieve more. Because of this, many programs are accepting fewer students or are taking longer to notify.