Stipend

[irishgirl]

What is the average stipend offered to PhD students in top sosh schools?

[Karlito]

Make sure you take into account the location and cost of living there. 20,000$ in Bloomington is probably very different compared to 20,000$ at NYU (extreme example but you get the idea). This being said, top schools stipends are in the 20-25k range most of the time (a few Ivies being above that)

Edited June 19, 2012 by Karlito

[ThisSlumgullionIsSoVapid]

As low as ~$14,000 and as high as $30,000. The most common will fall between 16 and 22 if I recall. There was a survey we did this last application season that asked what our stipend was; I think if you look back in some old threads you can probably find it not too buried from new threads.

[irishgirl]

Thanks!

[splitends]

Can I ask why you're asking?

I think thisslum's numbers are accurate based on my experience, but I would add that there are so many little variations in policies from school to school, and that a lot more of it is negotiable than I originally realized. Some schools have little goodies stashed away for their students-- travel funds, book buying allowances, computer allowance your first year, relocation costs, etc. And different schools will have very different obligations attached to the money they offer. Some will require you TA or RA to get the money, some won't require anything, some will offer you extra money on top of your stipend if you teach or advise theses. And TAing in some settings will be very different from TAing in others; RAing for some professors different than RAing for others. Also, different schools might advertise the same stipend dollar amount, but some will guarantee it for X years while others get fuzzy on the numbers after the first year or two. Anyway, I think my point is that it's harder to make direct comparisons between funding practices than you might think (even beyond the issue of different costs of living in different areas), so I wouldn't worry too much about it until you have the numbers and other details in front of you so you can sort them all out.

Of course, if you're just asking because you heard it's abysmal and you want to double check, then, yeah-- I will reiterate the general knowledge that you're not going to get rich. 14K-30K was the range I saw (though if you're an NYU student with an NSF or similar grant who teaches, it can be more like 60K....but that's a weird outlier.)

[NotMyParty]

Some schools have little goodies stashed away for their students-- travel funds, book buying allowances, computer allowance your first year, relocation costs, etc.

To this list I would add type and quality of health insurance. In speaking to several friends representing a range of schools, I've seen health insurance packages run the complete gamut. If you're young and healthy, health insurance may not be something you've had to give much thought to in the past, but sufficed to say that healthcare is important and all grad student plans are certainly not created equal. There doesn't seem to be a huge correlation between wealth or quality of school/program and quality of health insurance, either. A friend of mine at the #1 ranked school in her discipline (coincidentally, a wealthy Ivy) says her school's graduate student health plan is colloqually known as "the death plan." Prescription medications (including contraception) are not fully covered, and neither is healthcare received out-of-state. The sticker price of this plan is $1200 (though the premium itself is covered in the PhD benefits package). If you want to add a spouse or child, however, the additional premium shoots up 3-4K for each. Contraception is $30-60 a month, not to mention other prescriptions (hey, this stuff adds up quickly on any stipend). At another top public school, stipends are at the low end of the spectrum but all graduate students receive the same insurance offered to state employees (valued at around $4500). Prescriptions (including birth control) are covered at a $5 co-pay and spouse and children can be added for an affordable fee. Many graduate students I talked to at this school cited the stellar health coverage as a deciding factor in their choice of school.

Splitends - as someone who is looking to apply to Sociology departments this fall, I would be really interested to hear about these 'fringe benefits' you mention. Specifically, I'm wondering if these extra funds (computer, travel, moving) are discussed openly, or if they're something you have to 'ask' about - i.e. negotiate? You say that much is "a lot more of it is negotiable than I originally realized" - could you give me some examples from your experience? Feel free to PM me if that makes more sense for you. I'd appreciate it!

[sciencegirl]

Can add some experience into the dialogue.. I may have mentioned this in the past but negotiating is a bit of tricky one to maneuver and I got a lot of advice on this. In the end, my decision came down to two top-10 programs, where after adding up the total packages, one program was giving roughly $10,000 more than the other ($30,000+ vs. $20,000+). This put me in a weird bind to see if I could/should/would negotiate the the other program since it was maybe a better fit for my interests.. and was also actually ranked below the other (where the $30,000+ offer was from more or less a top-5.)

In the end, it was made clear to me to not even begin negotiating unless I was 99% certain that if School B matched or came close to the offer from School A, then I would definitely go to School B... and honestly, I am not sure if the funding would have swayed me too much, so I made my decision without negotiating.

I would add then - you should apply broadly to any program you might consider going to, if for any reason, that it may give you some leverage against another program... but at the same time, don't expect too many magical things... as many private programs seem to offer almost the same package to their incoming students.

Goodies? Let's see here... I'm currently deciding when and how I will spend my computer fund.. and I can't wait for my "books and moving expenses" check to arrive in about a month... I mean, it's not a private plane or anything, but there are some cool perks thrown around here and there.

[jacib]

Has the 09-10 stipends for Berkeley, Brown, Chicago, Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, MIT, Penn, Princeton, Stanford, Yale.

Private schools in general tend to offer a little more but be in more expensive areas. On that link above is also a chart of adjustments for every place with a graduate school I could think of using a "cost of living" calculator. The 2009-10 stipend numbers above are already a bit out of date, though. Summers historically have been funded separately, but like three-four years ago Yale started guaranteeing five summers worth of funding, so they can (and do) say "25k a year for five years!" instead of "21k a year for five years, plus four summers at 4k". See how much better the first one sounds? At least two other elite private schools have followed suit already and I expect that to become the new normal at top private schools over the next 10-15 years. Public schools generally don't have the same monetary as private schools, though. Example: the school I go to offered to fly me out for visiting day. Up to $300 is what they were offering for Americans, but since I was living abroad, they offered me the international student compensation of $500. I said that wouldn't cover it, plus I might not be able to get time off work so I might not go. The chair immediately said, "Well, it'd be a shame if you couldn't come just for financial reasons. If you can get the time off work, book your ticket, we'll cover the whole thing." I'm not sure at a public university there'd be the same money just lying around. At my school, there are institutes, centers, working groups, seminars, etc that have money (one of them is currently funding my working abroad as we speak) that I didn't know existed when I applied.

Fringe benefits are like that, in my experience, catch as catch can. I don't know the details of every school's packages, but I can guess what school sciencegirl is talking about because I've only heard of one program which offers such expansive and established fringes like she described (someone in my cohort also got in there and I believe used those fringes to negotiate a "computer fund" for their first year at my school). You'll worry about that after you get in though; the current graduate school students will explain how money works on visiting days. Spoiler alert: I haven't heard any one at a top-20 sociology complain that they were thinking of taking loans out because money was tight, even at Columbia and NYU. Whatever they're offering, it is enough to live on, but conversely probably not enough to let you save much (unless you get bomb outside funding like the NSF or are really dedicated to saving). The biggest thing to keep in mind is that at many private schools, as a TA you are a glorified grader (minimal time spent) whereas at public schools teaching (often intro classes) takes up a lot more of your time (especially after year five). From everything I've heard, things like that are why Berkeley, Madison, Michigan have longer years-to-degree than Harvard, Chicago, Princeton, despite all being peer institutions.

Oh,NYU's is an outlier because they fund TAing completely differently--they're paid like adjuncts. I think it's a weird legacy of NYU's years of union-busting graduate students' attempts to organize.

[splitends]

Actually, the NYU weirdness I was referring to was the fact that they let you keep your stipend on top of NSF or other large outside grant funding. So you could conceivably be getting ~25K a year from the school, then another ~30K from NSF annually, plus the teaching money (which I also heard has to do with union busting). But the NSF thing is a little crazy-- I've never heard of another school doing that.

[sociologyinthepast]

Has anyone heard of a school offering substantially less (like, 10k or less?) I'm asking because I'm looking at UMass Amherst (seems like a great fit) but one page on their site suggests that their average stipend for a 9 month academic year is only $10,700. Any other schools do this?

[amlobo]

I've seen smaller stipends at some of the schools I'm looking at, and I've seen some that don't offer a stipend at all. Once you get outside the top 15 or so, the stipends can vary greatly from school to school.