Finishing up now. When I started $1400/month (for 20 hours, $700 if it were 10). No change for several years. Now $1800/month, I am not 100% if that’s a raise that everyone gets or supplementary from a grant. TA/RA paid the same but I guess there’s no reason why the latter can’t pay more. That’s pay for 10 months, so $18,000/year, I only got paid for one summer. But in the other summers I picked up teaching, which was ~$3500. The only tax I pay is federal. In summer I have to pay the 1.45% medicare. The 6.2% social security goes into a 457 plan which is like a 401k except way better. Stipend depends on your department.
Hours varied, getting heavier near deadline. Advisor sometimes would be on campus but not visible for days, so face time isn’t necessary.
Being attached to someone trying to make tenure can be scary. Even if they are a decent person, the stress is high, and they are not good then they take it out on you. I am fortunate not to have done this but I see it in others.
A long time ago (1958-1959).
I got $1800 a year plus tuition waiver. Enough to live on (barely, and only if you were single). I taught 8 hours a week (two identical courses with back to back lectures) no homework although I did have to mark a couple of hour tests and a final exam each term. This was in math and U. Penna.
Late 70s. Fellowship for $1,000 per quarter (about $330 per month). Rent in a pretty decent house in Palo Alto was $100/month (shared with 3 other people). I prayed that my car would not break down for some cause that I couldn’t fix myself. Things were tight, but lots of free (or very cheap) entertainment stuff on campus. No gym membership to pay for, but facilities better than any you’d find off campus. Mostly First World problems.
Teaching was ~10 h/week, both advertised and actual. Research was every waking hour, and then some. TAing was unfavorable because it took away from lab time.
~$25k/year, + tuition reimbursement, + a health plan, + annual raises
We have a friend who went to Dartmouth for a PhD in Chem. His advisor’s students tended to jump off bridges. The guy had tenure, so the behavior of yours might be considered a feature. Our friend eventually left for a few years and came back to finish.
My wife went there in Bio, long before you did, and thought the place screwed grad students. Parking passes were discounted for undergrads and faculty, but not for grad students for instance.
2011 - who even knows, $27k/year plus health insurance and “tuition”, in a PhD molecular biology program at a research university
Technically I’m a full-time research assistant, working for my advisor, but that’s what I came here to do anyhow. The money comes from my advisor’s research grant. In a sense, in this field the only difference between working as a grad student and as a technician is the expectation of career advancement. These days I’m working full-time on my thesis project. (I also had a token one semester TA requirement.)
For comparison, my wife had full-time support while she got a MS at another university. She got $24k/year for half-time TA and half-time RA work. The TA requirement was supposed to be less than 10 hours/week, but that was a joke. The TA job usually required 15+ hours per week, and that was after my wife’s advisor went to bat for her against a department that wanted her to teach a hell of a lot more.
-Late 1990s
-Both RA and TA
-Both appointments were 50%, meaning nominally you worked 20 hours per week and were paid 50% of some base instructor salary. My understanding as that all RAs and most TAs in the college had 50% appointments, so everyone was paid the same (save for a few poor TAs that had 33% appointments).
-The stipend paid about $15K gross per year - I forget exactly what, in part because the stipend had a cost-of-living adjustment, so it slowly ratcheted upwards from year to year. Tuition and health insurance were free.
-University of Michigan, PhD in engineering
UW-Madison, mechanical engineering, 1993-1999. I had a 50% appointment for graduate research assistant. My first year salary was $14,340 and went up every year after that. Although it was 50% officially, you were of course expected to work approximately full time. So basically I came to campus about eight hours a weekday. When I was taking classes, my class time came out of those eight hours (homework was done on evenings/weekends); during summers and after completing my classes, it was 8 hours a day in the lab until the final 6 months before dissertation, when I started putting in a lot more hours than that.
In addition to the 50% RAship, we got free health insurance. Another part of the deal was in-state tuition rates, which IIRC worked out to about $2000 per semester + $500 for the summer. Once classes were done and I achieved dissertator status, my tuition rates dropped way down. Overall I was quite comfortable, living very close to campus in a decent apartment, driving a POS car, and having enough money to buy a new toy once in a while (nice bicycle, stereo, RC glider, etc.), although I wasn’t saving squat toward retirement.
Scrolling to the bottom of this page, it looks like a 50% RA appointment at UW now gets you $21,224. I suspect that hasn’t quite kept up with inflation.
Is this with tuition reimbursement or without? It does sound a bit meager for computer science stipend – my department did (slightly) better than that 20 years ago. With, however, the caveat that the research assistantships were largely reserved for people on the PhD track. People doing terminal Master’s degrees were actually viewed more as a profit center as they were often working and being paid to get a degree, and professors didn’t want to spend precious grant money on someone who was going to be gone in one or two years.
There was some notion that you were supposed to spend about 20 hours/week on the research but it was generally more, much more if it tied in with your own thesis work.
Same as Voyager–TA at UIUC, Computer Science, 20 hours per week, except several years later, in 1982-83. Pretty sure my salary was $4800 per semester (for a 4-month semester) when I started and $5200 when I left.
I thought it was good money. Living expenses were low and I had enough let over for little extravagances, like, well . . . beer.
1990-1991
Just called a GA, did not distinguish between TAs and RAs. Had no teaching duties officially, but adviser would take off leaving me to conduct classes.
20 hours per week
$8 per hour
Rural setting, large research institution, MS in Finance. Switched to MBA when adviser left the school leaving me in the lurch.
No Assistantships for MBA students but they paid me a $5000 fellowship and waived tuition. Tuition was only $2800 a year back then, in-state.
2005-2008
Four semesters as a TA, rest as an RA. As a TA, it was two organic labs a week plus prep and grading time. Those wound up being about a 12-13 hour day when I had my own classes, plus my own research to do, plus the evening (something like 5:30 to 8:30) lab session. By the time I was on a RA and had finished basically all my coursework (not counting taking the odd class that was only taught every couple of years like Organometallics) it was expected to be at least 40 hours a week in the lab. I have no idea what the hours on paper were.
About $20-22k per year with no tuition waver, so I was paying the school about $1600 a semester. The health insurance available was basically worthless and I suspect would no longer be legal so I went uninsured for almost all that time.
MS in Chemistry at New Mexico State
Graduate assistant with a department of the UW-Extension
Nominally 20 hours a week, sometimes worked out to more, if I had to take trips to see our “clients”
Net pay was about $1000 a month, which worked out to be enough to cover my tuition (these were the '80s, tuition at a state school was a pittance, compared to today), my rent (I shared an apartment with one or two other guys), and food.
University of Wisconsin-Madison, MS in Market Research
-2001-2003
-Technically there was no required assistantship at all, although everyone was a potential TA in one of three classes. I lucked out and didn’t have to TA anything.
-See above
-~$5000 (Full tuition remission as well)
-Washington University (St. Louis)
-Music (Vocal Performance, Master’s program)