Hello there! I am in grad school and I have an assistantship that basically pays nothing. It made me wonder - have these stipends kept up with inflation?
Please include the following info if you choose to respond:
Year(s) you received this stipend
What kind of assistantship it was
The hour requirement on paper (as opposed to the hours you actually worked, which were probably more)
How much per year you got with the stipend (excluding other forms of compensation, such as tuition reimbursement)
(Optional) What school was it?
(Optional) What was your academic program?
I think it would be really interesting to collect some informal data about this since these figures aren’t generally made public.
[ul]
[li]1991-1994[/li][li]I was a TA and research assistant[/li][li]Probably worked less than 10 hours a week[/li][li]Stipend was just over $550/month (also got tuition and a textbook allowance)[/li][li]University of Illinois at Chicago[/li][li]Engineering MS program[/li][/ul]
ETA - the $550 a month was take home, no idea what the gross was
As of 2011:
Teaching assistantship, but the professors all had a gentlemen’s agreement to pay their RAs the same amount
Nominally 16 hours, 8 in the lab, assumed the same amount outside the lab on prep, grading, office hours, etc.
Approximately 15k, though I don’t remember the exact amount. Plus tuition waiver, of course, and all required fees, including student health insurance.
Montana State University (note that Montana has a fairly low cost of living)
Physics (I’d heard we were the highest-paying department on campus)
It should also be noted that this was the post-comps figure. Students who had not yet passed their comps got a slightly lower number.
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[li]2007-2012[/li][li]Teaching Assistant for three semesters, Research Assistant for eight semesters plus summers[/li][li]20 hours a week, both positions[/li][li]TA paid $1500/month. RA paid $1600 ($1700 after comps). Both included a tuition waiver and health insurance. For two summers I had full-time support (40 hrs, $3200/month). That was really nice.[/li][li]Flagship state university, with research funded by a combination of state, federal, and non-profit orgs.[/li][li]MS in hydrologic science, PhD in hydrogeology[/li][/ul]
Between the 2000-01 and 2006-07 academic years, teaching stipends in my grad department (UNC-Chapel Hill, English) rose from $4,100 to $6,000 per section. Almost everyone taught three sections a year, so $12,300 to $18,000 in all.
I’m fairly sure the amount flatlined for several years after that because of the economic crisis, and I know it had been flat for several years prior to when I started teaching; I was just lucky enough to hit a good patch of relatively steady increases.
I was in grad school for 1998-2003. I started at $13,000 and ended at about $20,000 per year. No written hourly requirement that I was aware of, but we all worked way more than 40 hours per week and that was expected. We were lucky that our program required minimal teaching. We could meet the requirement simply by tutoring our peers. That meant more time in the lab.
Major public research institution. PhD in microbiology.
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[li]1973-1977[/li][li]TA and RA - depending on funding[/li][li]20 hours a week[/li][li]$400 a month tax free to start, with raises, which were tied to faculty raises[/li][li]U of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign[/li][li] Computer Science[/li][/ul]
I don’t remember what I got when I moved to another school, since I got married and my wife actually made money. And $400 a month was good money - my apartment (no roommates) was $125 a month, furnished, utilities included. I saved money.
As for hours worked - the first time I was a TA our whole research group were also, and we TAed the class our professor taught. Not onerous. As for the RA, what the hell else was I doing? It was such fun I never paid attention to actual hours.
Dartmouth 1995 - 1997. $13,500 a year plus a full tuition waiver and discounted health insurance. I remember it like it was yesterday. It amounted to $1040 a month in blood money.
I loved the school and hated my advisor with such a passion we are both lucky we didn’t end up on a minor national news story. It was the hardest and worst money I ever made and i would never do it again. Dartmouth was fairly generous with stipends at the time but we are still talking about poverty level wages for 90 - 100 hour work weeks so it was still less than minimum wage.
I will never forget my advisor telling me that I couldn’t see my then girlfriend (now ex-wife) on a Sunday afternoon because ‘I don’t pay you to have a social life’. That was a constant theme for everything. I told her straight up that she wasn’t personally paying for me to do anything. It fell on deaf ears because she was trying to make tenure (she succeeded eventually to the horror of anyone that has the unfortunate experience of being associated with her).
I was thrilled when I quit and moved into the professional world and actually got paid for my work plus some respect. My first professional job didn’t pay that much comparatively speaking but it was several times what I made in grad school and it was much easier. It has only gotten better from there.
Graduate stipend, but the people in my program were treated more like staff, not graduate students.
-20 hours, but sometimes it was 40 or 60 or more.
A bit over 30K before taxes, about 18-19K after taxes and tuition fees and health insurance. Yeayea, we got “waiver” but still had to paid all the student fees (transportation, technology, institution, sports, health) and part of our health insurance. So I still had to pay about $3K out of my own money to go there.
Combined residency/PhD program (hence the five years). I finished with one degree and one specialty (plus passed the board certification).
I should say that the payscale in my group was wildly varied… Because sometimes students came from different sources and ways of paying them varied and the payment scale varied by type… I had a colleague on my exact same program who got about half of what I did, because he was being paid by grants. Another one, also paid by grants, got paid 10K less than me. Another colleague was in the “just residency” and made a couple of thousand dollars less than me. On the other hand, another student was also in the “just residency” program, but his residency was funded by another group, so he made almost twice my salary. And another student also in the same program as I was, managed to get herself funded as the head investigator and was paid somewhere between my salary and the highest paid guy’s salary. And I know of other students who were also in the same program as I was and that either made less or made more, depending if they were grant-funded and how generous their major professors were with them.
1994-7
TA paid 1000$/month. Later I got a scholarship from my local government paying the same, which carried the requirement to not be teaching, so I got moved to “RA, no pay”.
TA involved teaching one class (in my case, Orgo lab). No specific hours listed, as far as I remember. For RA, definitely no hours listed. Most of us worked 16h days; I was the odd woman out in that I’d take three hours off on Wednesday afternoon and take Saturday afternoon completely off (I’d go to the gaming club at 4 and from there to 8pm Mass). One year, the three Indians in the group invited everybody else to their home for a Christmas lunch of Indian homemade food; next day the boss was completely freaked out that none of us had answered the phone at the lab all day; we threatened him with calling his mother (he was nominally Catholic, she really was Catholic).
U of Miami, Chem PhD
The ACS does collect this data for Chemical, Chemical Engineering and related disciplines, there should be a report somewhere in the last year of Chemical and Engineering News.
I don’t have one now, but this is what is on my outstanding offer for assistantship that I’ll likely accept in a couple days:
2013-2014
Teaching assistantship
20 hours per week (not including the coursework required as a normal part of the degree)
The salary is set at $1700/month. But all benefits (medical, dental, eye) are included and fully subsidized by the department
PhD in Machine Learning/AI
1996-2003
Research assistant, no teaching requirements.
Full time, and then some - lots of hours in the lab.
Started at $18,000, ended at $28,000 (in a very expensive metropolitan area), plus they paid for tuition, health care, and fees.
PhD in Genetics, top tier research university
It’s going to vary wildly based on the program of study. Science and engineering graduate students get paid more, presumably because there are opportunities for them to go get a decent-paying real job after undergrad. Students in professional schools (law, pharmacy, medical) have to pay through the nose, presumably because those fields are highly desired and pay well after grad school. Humanities grad students probably get a tuition waiver and some peanuts for teaching. Another difference is that a grad students in science is basically working for his PI, doing research which brings in grant money, where a med student is just learning, not really contributing (at least until residency). I’m not sure what that dynamic is for Humanities students.
I’m in chemistry.
There are two ways to look at it. Yes, I’m making probably 60% of what I could be making if I’d gone straight into industry.
On the other hand, I’m getting paid a living wage to go to school and get a graduate degree, something markedly different from many types of graduate education.
I started last year
Teaching assistant now, when I go research assistant next year will be similar
Not sure about paper requirements, everyone expects it to basically be a full time job
$29000 a year, in Chicago (so metropolitan area, but much less expensive than a lot of places on the east or west coasts)
Program: chemistry PhD program
I applied to (and was accepted at) a number of different schools. This is probably on the more generous end of what I was offered, although others were similar. UW Madison was only $25000, but has a lot lower cost of living. California schools were similar to my offer, some slightly higher, but would have had much higher costs of living.
Montana State University, 1995-2001, Chemistry and Biochemistry Department
I started at $12,000/yr gross as an RA and ended at $16,000/yr gross as a TA.
Thus works out to maybe half of minimum wage, but my adviser was not the slave driver type, and I had completely flexible hours–my incentive was to graduate and move on with my life, and that was incentive enough to put in many hours per week, although I did love living in Montana most of the time.
Note that while a medical (and veterinary medicine) student would be paying a lot during their 4 year degree, they will be paid once they reach the “specialty” level (interns and residents). And this is what I meant in my part, as I was in such a combined program.
In fact, medical students would even be paid more than that, although nowhere as what they would get once they graduate, and the hours are likely to be worse, mainly for some specialties. Somewhere around $40-50K per year is not uncommon. Again, they are mostly doing clinical work, although for post-graduate degrees, they would also likely be paid more than a comparable science student who came directly from undergrad to science.
My veterinary colleagues who were doing clinical work just down the hallway from me were actually getting paid a couple thousand less than me (so less than $30K).
(he was nominally Catholic, she really was Catholic).