What does a university gain from recruiting more grad. students?

[Chukwu Chucks]

I'm just curious, we know the cost for grad school is massive, a minimum of $25,000/yr for each student. What kind of benefits does a school gain from spending money to finance some graduate students (through TA/RA/fellowships)? To save more money from hiring additional teachers/professors? or just merely commercial/promotional step? or both?

What do u guys think?

For example, just imagine if there are 20 master students who're fully funded (for a $25,000 worth/year program), they have to spend at least $500,000 + $270,000 (for stipend) = $770,000/year!!!! which is a massive amount of money!

[Usmivka]

For many programs, schools have to spend much more than this because of administrative overhead, health insurance, and facilities upkeep. They are losing money on every student they take. The only way this works is because out of state/international undergrads subsidize the school, they get federal grants, or pay only professional schools put in way, way more money, and some of this gets distributed to other departments. Still cheaper than full time employee though, and the federal grants often have educational goals like "we want to encourage STEM graduation."

[TakeruK]

Many profs have assured me that it costs a LOT more than our stipends to pay for a graduate student. LIke Usmivka said, there is overhead as well -- I think the actual cost of an international graduate student is somewhere around 100,000 or more per year.

The school takes students because it is an investment in us -- one day, some of us will do great work and people will see that we graduated from School X. Or, we might even do good work while a student and we will be presenting at conferences and publishing under the School X banner, increasing that school's ranking and impact factor or whatever metric is used, etc.

In addition, even the best profs can only do so much work before they run out of time/energy! So, graduate students like us will be doing a lot of the grunt work. Sure, they could just keep hiring more profs, but we are a lot cheaper than profs! If, with overhead, our total cost is about the salary of a tenured prof, imagine how much it costs in total to have a prof on staff!!

And also, they subsidize the costs of their investment in grad students from other income sources such as undergrads or other programs.

[ANDS!]

They are investing in the future. As someone said, every action the student takes - it will reflect positively (assuming it is positive) back on them, and thus warrant the large grants and faculty interest they receive.

There are of course OTHER benefits, but I think its very cynical to think these "other benefits" (student labor) are what is really driving graduate committees.

And is TA'ing really that bad. I've done it and not been paid, and I would say I would rather have done it (even though yes I hated doing it) than not because it keeps you constantly engaged in the material in a different way than sitting around and debating or talking about it with your peers does.

[TakeruK]

I love TA-ing. Teaching is one of the reasons why I want to be in academia. I agree that it keeps me engaged with the material. I also enjoy the ability to talk to the undergrads and help them figure out things like finding summer research positions, scholarship applications, grad school applications, GRE study groups etc. I also do a bit of private tutoring (for courses I don't TA). I find that it's also very satisfying to be able to help someone answer a question or do something right as a TA after days on end of being frustrated with my code not working or other research problem.

But no matter how much I like it, it's still a job and I'm not going to do it without fair pay. I really don't think student labour in terms of TA-ing is what drives graduate committees -- I've seen a ton of departments where there is a shortage of TAs so all of them are overworked. Clearly, if they wanted to hire students to be TAs, they would have gotten more students and then just weed them out at orals or something (although I've heard of one or two places that do this).

However, I really do think graduate committees are looking for "research labour" when selecting students. In the sciences, it's usually the grad student that actually does the research work -- the more established profs will be the ones providing the guidance, expertise, funding, and all that in order to enable the grad students to do work, but like "Prof. Smith" of PhD comics, the prof doesn't actually do science/research anymore. Thus, the grad committees want to select students with strong research potential in order to run the labs and get science done (under the name of their school of course).

[Hillary Emick]

It costs my department between 27K and 42K per grad student annually. As other posters have mentioned, a lot of this does come out of research grants & other sources of external funding, and they do get a lot out of the funds they put in, both in terms of not having to pay a post-doc to do the same work and in terms of investing in the future of the discipline.

[Chukwu Chucks]

It costs my department between 27K and 42K per grad student annually. As other posters have mentioned, a lot of this does come out of research grants & other sources of external funding, and they do get a lot out of the funds they put in, both in terms of not having to pay a post-doc to do the same work and in terms of investing in the future of the discipline.

So....the school actually "investing" on the grad student....hoping for eventually producing a great alumni? gotta study harder then,.,,,.