Bargaining for a stipend in Engineering PhD?

[DecisionMeister]

So, I've been accepted to UChicago's IME program and Washington University in St. Louis' engineering program without an interview. I was already sort of leaning toward WUSTL's PhD program for one of the professors there,  but the stipend for WUSTL is $28k while the stipend for UChicago is $37K, which is quite a big difference. 

Is it appropriate/is there a way to bargain with WUSTL, because if they raised their stipend I might be more willing to go there, but I really don't want to offend anyone.

[rising_star]

The difference in stipend is probably due in part to the big difference in cost of living between the St. Louis and Chicago. Have you actually checked to make sure the stipends are livable in each place or are you focused solely on the dollar amount?

[Eigen]

Also, is the length/source of the funding the same? Will Chicago be $37k for as long as you're in the program, or is it a set number of years of funding?

$37k seems in the range of an additional supplementary fellowship on top of the base stipend.

Bargaining is hard- a lot of times, there's nothing the department can do to increase stipends unless they have some extra funding laying around. For instance, my department mandates that all TAs and all RAs be paid the same, to avoid any resentment among students. This policy has it's pros and cons, but it means an incoming student would have a lot less leeway to bargain the stipend up. 

We do occasionally recruit people with small ($5-$10k) fellowships on top of the stipend, but that depends on there being some pool of funding available to the department to use for that purpose. 

I'd second Rising_Stars assertion to double check the cost of living, but also look at the benefits each school is giving you- fee reductions/charges, health insurance, etc.

[TakeruK]

I also got one offer that was near $37k (in a low cost of living area, upstate New York) but this was because the extra money came from a fellowship. In my field, there is a school that often offers a bonus 1-time only fellowship that is a stipend boost of $18k for the first year. If the Chicago offer is coming from a source like this, it would be really hard for another school to compete with it, unless they also have fellowship funds available. And to be honest, if they did have the money available, they would have likely already offered it to you. 

My department also has a policy that all students are paid the same, regardless of how much TA or RA they do. The only exception is if you have an outside fellowship that is more than the base stipend here, then you get to keep the extra. Or, if you have an outside fellowship that pays for something that is not covered by our regular benefits, then you can keep it too. For example, the health & dental plans here are subsidized at a rate of school paying 85% of the premiums and the student paying 15%. But if you have a fellowship that specifically allocates money towards health insurance, you can use that fellowship to pay for the 15%. So, a few students here make about $600 more than the others. 

I second the others suggestions to properly compare cost of living and the other benefits. For example, consider how much you would pay in rent and health insurance premiums and copays etc. Rent is probably the biggest factor affecting cost of living so you don't have to worry too much about difference in things like groceries (unless you have a family and are feeding a lot of people). Usually, the best way to ask for more money is to show that you really want to go there, but the expenses are too high and the stipend not enough.

But, if you want to just ask for more money from WUSTL just because you want more money, then of course it's your right to do so. However, this is likely to be pretty unsuccessful. As Eigen said, most schools are offering the most that they can. It might reflect poorly on you to simply bargain for more money just because you want it. But I also see the reasoning from the other side---sometimes schools do take advantage of the fact that students are hesitant to ask. So, it's up to you to decide if $28k is enough and whether asking for more is worth it. 

(For what it's worth, I went with a lower offer and because of a lot of personal reasons I won't get into, the stipend would have not been enough for the first year. Since I had an external fellowship from Canada, I asked for an increase and was told sorry, they pay everyone the same. But nothing bad happened, they understood the reason for my request and said they would like to help but they couldn't. Later that year, they were able to find additional money to help me out because of the external fellowship. So it's not always bad to ask! But in my case at least, there were both 1) a "good reason" to ask and 2) I was bringing in some external money [they said this was the big deciding factor that made it possible to justify the one-time stipend increase for me).

[DecisionMeister]

So, the $37K is for the whole PhD and both offers include health insurance. The cost of living compared to stipend gives me about the same amount of money in each place, except that UChicago has graduate student housing which makes the cost of living lower than living in the regular city and therefore makes the $37K a bit more money than the $28K. 

I just know that I would really appreciate even a few thousand dollars more per year (that could make a difference in my quality of life) but I don't want to appear to the professor(s) that I'm interested in as if money is the main motivation for me. 

If I did contact the department, who do you ask about something like this? Has anyone heard of a SUCCESSFUL bargaining situation for grad school (where the person asking got more money)? 

[Eigen]

The only successful negotiations I know have been in person. It's really hard to do over the phone/email.

I've also only really seen it when one school asks what they can do to recruit you (usually at a visit weekend) which is when there's a good opening to say "I really would love to come to School A, but I've gotten Offer X at School B, and the extra money would really help with x, y and z". 

Emailing cold to the department and negotiating doesn't usually end well. 

[rising_star]

2 hours ago, DecisionMeister said:

So, the $37K is for the whole PhD and both offers include health insurance. The cost of living compared to stipend gives me about the same amount of money in each place, except that UChicago has graduate student housing which makes the cost of living lower than living in the regular city and therefore makes the $37K a bit more money than the $28K. 

Does this include summer funding? That is, do both offers include full RA or fellowship status over the summer? If not, you'll want to find out what the summer opportunities are like and how much they pay.

[Eigen]

12 hours ago, rising_star said:

Does this include summer funding? That is, do both offers include full RA or fellowship status over the summer? If not, you'll want to find out what the summer opportunities are like and how much they pay.

I may be wrong, but I've never seen an engineering stipend that wasn't 12 months, so I'd assume the offers the OP is reporting are indeed over 12 months. 

[TakeruK]

In STEM, almost all offers are for 12 months. I did get one offer where the first number they quoted was for a 12 month stipend, but then the following paragraphs did make it clear that it's actually two separate offers: a 9-month fellowship with a certain value and a 3-month summer RA with another value, where the summer RA is something I would have to apply to after starting the program. But after visiting and talking to the faculty, it became clear that this is just a formality in the way the funding is structured (the fellowship comes from the department but the RA comes from the professor) and basically everyone who is accepted has a professor willing to hire them as an RA and basically everyone who wants an RA can get one. However, students do have the option of not taking an RAship that first summer and doing something different instead (e.g. internship, going home and studying for quals etc.). This was the only program in STEM that I've heard of doing something like this but my humanities friends tell me this is normal for most of them.

[Eigen]

1 hour ago, TakeruK said:

In STEM, almost all offers are for 12 months. I did get one offer where the first number they quoted was for a 12 month stipend, but then the following paragraphs did make it clear that it's actually two separate offers: a 9-month fellowship with a certain value and a 3-month summer RA with another value, where the summer RA is something I would have to apply to after starting the program. But after visiting and talking to the faculty, it became clear that this is just a formality in the way the funding is structured (the fellowship comes from the department but the RA comes from the professor) and basically everyone who is accepted has a professor willing to hire them as an RA and basically everyone who wants an RA can get one. However, students do have the option of not taking an RAship that first summer and doing something different instead (e.g. internship, going home and studying for quals etc.). This was the only program in STEM that I've heard of doing something like this but my humanities friends tell me this is normal for most of them.

To add on to this, it's very rare for there to be the *option* to do something other than work in your PIs lab over the summers. The summer is when you're expected to get the bulk of your work done without semester distractions. 

I've seen people occasionally work out the ability to do an internship, but it took monumental amounts of work to get permission to be gone over a summer.

[Argon]

For the record, the UChicago IME stipend is probably so high because the program is only a few years old and they are trying to attract strong students. Money can sometimes do that (as evidenced by you asking the question). Just food for thought.