Inside Higher Ed has an article about graduate students at the University of South Carolina. Seems they don’t make very much money for their work. By not very much, I mean it’s about the same as the average income… in Brazil.
Graduate students at South Carolina make an average annual stipend of $9,590, a sum that students say is insufficient to meet the rising costs of tuition (for those without waivers), living costs, and university-mandated health-care coverage.
Nine thousand dollars, and some have to pay their own tuition? Good grief, that’s pretty much just working for free. You can’t even live in a cardboard box on that salary. Maybe there’s more to the story.
University officials say they want to be competitive with regional peers, including Virginia Tech. But Virginia Tech’s current average stipend of $18,000 nearly doubles that paid by South Carolina. The discrepancy, however, could be in part attributable to higher stipends typically paid to graduate students in the heavily-represented science fields at Virginia Tech.
Ah, there’s a little bit more to the story. The difficulty of living as a graduate student varies heavily on what you’re studying. Take at the law school model, for instance: you don’t get paid at all, and tuition is very expensive and not waived. But the upside to that is that you’re not in school very long, you can live comfortably on loans, and once out you can probably get a high-paying job which can pay down your debt fairly quickly. So lack of pay is not in and of itself the problem.
Where things can get trickier is in some areas (like physics!) where you can be in school for a pretty long time and your job prospects are not necessarily very high right out of the gate. Six years for a physics Ph.D. is not at all atypical, and while professors usually make pretty good money, the job market is quite tight and a newly minted Ph.D. can easily spend even more years in a low-paying postdoc job without even the guarantee of a tenure-track position at the end. There’s always the national labs and industry, so a physics Ph.D. can usually bail out of the academic world and find a well-paying job elsewhere in need be. But a lot of physicists find that unappealing and so they’re willing to take the risk and low pay of the hunt for a tenured position.
In total though, the long duration of science (and physics especially) graduate education combined with the uncertainty of employment afterwards translates into salaries a lot better than the nine thousand dollars above. The graduate schools that I received offers from generally offered stipends a little north of $20,000 a year, with tuition waived. I think this is almost universal among physics schools. It’s probably fairly usual in other majors as well:
Several stipend levels at South Carolina certainly exceed the average cited by graduate students. In chemical engineering and biomedical science, for instance, the university pays graduate students $22,000 a year, more than twice the university average.
You won’t be rich, but at least you won’t be living under an overpass somewhere.
Are there any majors out there with the low $9k average salary above that don’t have quick graduations and good post-graduation jobs (like law)? I would not be surprised. I hope the University of South Carolina and other places can find the funds to make sure that doesn’t happen as much.
6 responses so far ↓
1 Jennifer Ouellette // Jul 9, 2008 at 10:51 am
Grad study in any of the humanities (English, comparative lit, history, philosophy) has absolutely none of the perks physics grad students have, with horrendous job prospects after finishing. That’s why I left after 1-1/2 years. :)
2 CCPhysicist // Jul 9, 2008 at 1:56 pm
I actually accumulated money in a savings account while a graduate student and drove a car I bought new. We also had full medical coverage, but did have to pay in-state tuition. [Except you don't want to know it was only about $3000/yr, at a school comparable to yours, after correcting for inflation.] Life as a post doc was much tighter, but I was also married by that time.
One thing you have to realize is that the lowest paid areas make up for it with teaching, but even then the pay is really low in some departments at South Carolina. Our physics program had a rule that TA and RA paid the same rate (and different research areas paid the same rate) so you could not “buy” a student.
3 Paul Murray // Jul 10, 2008 at 7:25 pm
A society that makes it impossible for a poor but talented person to get a full education impoverishes itself in doing so.
And like most foreigners, I find the lack of univeral health care in the US to be beyond belief. University-mandated health insurance, eh? I wonder what relationships exist between the university and the health-insurers that students are permitted to use.
As for the humanities: I’m no conspiracy theorist, but it’s not surprising that the powers-that-be aren’t paying people to read and understand animal farm, or 1984.
4 Tom // Jul 11, 2008 at 6:04 am
I got to grad school in the midst of a push to raise TA salaries from ~$6k up towards $9k, back in the early ’90s. I would have been eligible for state-supported rent assistance but for my GI bill support. In my final year as an RA I was making a whopping $13.1k. (Tuition remission but no health insurance, and we still paid normal student fees)
A colleague has told me that in his situation (better paid, but higher cost-of-living), the adage of what one could afford as a (male) grad student was “car, hobby or girlfriend: choose one”
5 Chris // Sep 15, 2008 at 2:23 pm
Try being a musicology grad student. I teach 100 students and get $318 every two weeks. Tuition is waived and our Grad Student Union negotiated free (very basic) healthcare, but we still pay regular fees (about $400/semester). I have no money for research and very few options for University-sponsored travel grants. I’m currently in my fourth year and have barely started dissertation research, so in another two years you might get to call me “doctor” as I teach part time at my local community college. Poor physics students….
6 Beryl Aguilera // Oct 1, 2008 at 9:55 am
Hi,
I understand, how you feel. However, I am on a campus with no healthcare for its undergraduate students and questionable affordiabilty for its graduates. Many students are poorer than every, and aid, and grants are not keeping up with increased education cost.
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