What is the typical annual amount of a graduate student stipend at your university/ in your field? No need to post the school if that’s confidential, I’m more interested in what’s typical in various fields. I’ll assume working a half-time teaching or research assistantship is required, unless you explain otherwise. Many thanks…
Check out the Chronicle of Higher Education. The link points to a survey from recent years.
The numbers vary too widely across fields and institutions for an ad hoc survey to be useful to you. (At the university I attended, stipends in the technical fields were 2 or 4 times higher than stipends in the humanities.)
At the school I was at, there was a Univerversity-wide minimum stipend in effect so it came down to how much funding (internal and external) a particular department was able to get.
In general, a GA (research, teaching, general assistant, whatever) working 20 hours a week gets $3000 a sememster ($2000 and $2500 were common when the minimum was lower) and a full tutition waiver (including out-of-state tuition). A GA working 10 hours a week gets $1500 a semester and a 1/2 tuition waiver.
Keep in mind a GA must be enrolled in 12 hours of courses (9 is considered full-time for Graduates), unless they’re doing their thesis/dissertation or an exception is made. (Student has only one class left to take, etc.) No benifits (health insurance, etc.) were given.
If outside funding is being used, the sky was the limit! (Well, techinically it was limited to what the department would pay a first year post-doc.) Highest I know of was $30,000/yr. (Computer Science.)
Hope that helps a bit: I noticed that while in the link from Finagle my Uni did respond, the response was pretty much useless.
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When I was in grad school in philosophy back in the mid-90s (Georgetown University), the stiped was between $1200 and $1400 per month (I can’t remember exactly) + full tuition waiver. I think that was pretty standard in philosophy. I’m sure it is more now.
I’ve got an assistantship right now.
My university does not use TAs at all; in fact, this is a selling point. Prospective graduate assistants are thrown into a pool and different departments can either request them or GAs can work in a completely different department. I am a communication studies major but I work for the Teacher Ed department. For this reason, responsibilities vary widely. If I were working for the comm studies department, I’d be a computer lab assistant making about two more dollars an hour. Instead, I make copies, file, and do miscellaneous grunt work for minimum wage for 14 hours a week and a tuition waiver (but not fees).
Robin
The graduate students in my department (CSE) get full tuition waivers and between $16-21K per academic year (ballpark figure). My wife is in the geology department, same deal, although I think it’s slightly less on average. I cannot say whether this applies to Arts & Letters, but I believe it’s fairly consistent across the engineering departments. Last year, all grad students were given a $2K raise if they weren’t already above some “magic number”; IIRC, this was because stipends were well below the national average.
I was offered a research assistantship at MIT (in atmospheric physics) with a stipend of about $18k, all fees paid separately. The fact that MIT’s own estimate of living costs was $21k made this less appealing than it might otherwise have been!
I instead decided to stay in the UK. All Research Council funded studentships (I think only EU citizens are eligible for these, but I’m not sure) in the UK make the same basic stipend (GBP 12k/year, all fees paid. Bonus: no taxes save VAT). This is just for doing your research - teaching work is paid on an hourly rate. People doing research with some commercial relevance sometimes get additional money from their sponsoring company - in the region of GBP 3k. Some other studentships are around which pay more or less than the Research Councils, but in general they set the level for graduate funding.
I’m a grad student in chemistry. Our department gives every student $19K per year. The first year students take classes and teach one class (about 20 hours of work a week). Subsequent years students either do research 40 (or more :smack: ) hours per week, in which case their advisor pays them, or they do research and teach a class, in which case the department pays them.
We’re paid $6,000 per course taught; usually second-year master’s students teach two sections of freshman comp a year, and PhD students teach two sections of comp and one of literature. Often first-year MA students don’t get funded, though, and since that’s when most people are taking lots of coursework and often paying out-of-state tuition, it’s a big hit to the budget up front.
Half-time assistantship in history (here, anyway) gets you full tuition waiver, somewhere around 14k stipend plus whatever bonus they give you, which gets as high as about 4k.