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Comment by lazyjeff | Hacker News Reader

I recently collected the first-year PhD stipends in computer science across 39 university departments, to have a real sense of the numbers. Basically to have a fair comparison, because a lot of reported stipends aren't clear whether they are 9-month or 12-month stipends, and stipends can different depending on the year/candidacy of the student.

Data: https://jeffhuang.com/computer-science-open-data/#verified-c...

The main conclusions I arrived at from this exercise is that 1) CS stipends vary quite a bit but have slowly been increasing, but NSF funding needs to catch up for them to go higher, 2) the 12-month stipend makes a big difference from the 9-month stipend, and I think universities should guarantee the 12-month stipend (which only half do), rather than making summer stipend dependent on availability of advisor funding or student jobs (like TAing).

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It can be argued that the credential to land a PhD in CS in any of these university would have most of the time guaranteed a much much higher paying job in the industry, and potentially less stressful one at that.

Jeff, thanks so much for putting that stipend information together; I'm sure your list has started discussions amongst students and amongst faculty at many institutions. The variance in stipends was eye-opening to me, and clearly they all need to go up.

The posted numbers for my home institution, the University of Maryland, are a bit off; current offers are $25k for 9-month and up to $36k for 12-month, if funded on an RA over the summer. That RA summer funding is not guaranteed. Again, clearly, this needs to go up.

Thanks for checking about the numbers. I did just double check the Maryland numbers, and what's in my table seems correct:

The 25K you're referring to is for 9.5-months so is normalized to 9 months to compare against the other 9-month numbers. It's already notated with the [1] footnote in the table.

The 36k is not guaranteed in the offers given to students: the UMaryland CS offer letters states "Students who are TAs or RAs over the summer earn an additional $5,600 up to $11,000", which I can only interpret to mean that 11K is not guaranteed. So what's reported in that table is my interpretation of the minimum stipend if the student does get one, but what you say makes sense, that an RA provides the higher number in that range -- I just don't have a way to represent that.

Oh, you're right! Good catch, I agree that the numbers are accurately reflected as you had originally written them. Thanks again for compiling all this information, really helpful service to the broad community.

Thank you for the kind words!

> universities should guarantee the 12-month stipend

I'm not sure how this would work in practice.

If you hand out 12-month contracts, you'll lose a ton of students, because they often want the summer for themselves (in many cases, they are from another country and want to travel home, or they have a spouse working somewhere else in the country).

If you give the students the option on an annual basis, a school like Columbia might have the money to cover unanticipated expenses, but mine does not.

> rather than making summer stipend dependent on availability of advisor funding or student jobs (like TAing)

The money has to come from somewhere.

> I'm not sure how this would work in practice.

It's already working in practice for almost half the universities: summer stipends are guaranteed, but if students choose to intern elsewhere, you don't get the summer stipend. Nothing changes if their advisor is already funding them. I'm just saying the other half of universities should be doing this as well, that it should be universal.

Yes it does cost a bit, but if you think about what's happening now for universities with no summer guarantee, it's that PhD students without summer internships are getting no pay in the summer. And even the ones that do find summer pay, it's still a stressful situation for them during the academic year, so a complete distraction.

Honestly, I can't think of a better use of university money than to be paying PhD students who would otherwise be working for free in the summer (if their advisor can't fund them).

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