Comment by keithwinstein | Hacker News Reader

Comment by keithwinstein | Hacker News Reader

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To give one data point, at Stanford CS this year we're paying PhD students $64,110 a year plus fully funded health insurance and tuition, but that figure comes with some caveats:

- A chunk of your money will go towards a Stanford-subsidized dorm room or apartment

- Even beyond housing, the cost of living around here is not cheap

- You may not love Stanford's student health plan, in which case if you're over 26 (and can't be on a parent's plan), you're looking at paying for your own health insurance via the ACA market or otherwise

- To be making the full $64,110, you need to have advanced to candidacy (generally this is 3rd-year students and later) and stay for the summer with a "full-time" [90%] RAship. Many students do summer internships in the industry instead, in which case you're probably making way more money.

- Even with recent economic pressures, this is still much less than you can probably make in the industry, and for some subareas of CS, much much less.

I think the summary would be that if you're in a place where you have the luxury of mostly just needing to support yourself, and your health needs are well-met by a student health plan, you can afford to get a PhD here and focus 100% on it and enjoy a reasonable "student+" lifestyle for the 6ish years that will take. (Or a better lifestyle if you take summers to intern in the industry.) There's still a huge opportunity cost. The people for whom this doesn't work are often people with families to support (e.g. children and/or a partner without their own source of income) or other demands on their time or finances.

(I took two tries to get a PhD, but the second time was great!)

This might be the case for CS PhDs, but it certainly isn't for the vast majority of Stanford PhD students in other departments - many of whom are earning less than half the amount you cited. A large percentage of Stanford PhD students work at least one additional job, so the reality is that outside of a select few departments you cannot "focus on it 100%."

I'm much less familiar with the financial model in the humanities, but I don't think your information is correct. (What's your source?) Across the whole university, Stanford's minimum salary for graduate research assistants this year is $12,054 per quarter (four quarters per year), and $12,522 per quarter when serving as a teaching assistant. (https://gfs.stanford.edu/salary/salary23/salary_tables.pdf, and here's what the financial package looks like for a PhD student in, e.g., education: https://ed.stanford.edu/admissions/financing/doctoral)

I'm definitely not telling you to go get a PhD in English/history/education/theater for the money, but if you did, my understanding is that the salary you could expect here is around $48k-$49k a year (+ health plan). I don't think any PhD student is earning less than half the amount I cited.

When you say "A large percentage of Stanford PhD students work at least one additional job," if you mean TAing, then yes, that's true -- I think every PhD student has to TA at least a few times, and more depending on how well-funded their program or advisor are and whether they have their own fellowship. (Regular faculty also have to teach on top of our research responsibilities.) But if you mean some outside-Stanford job, I don't think this is common.

> To give one data point, at Stanford CS this year we're paying PhD students $64,110 a year plus fully funded health insurance and tuition

Tuition is fake so it shouldn’t be included as a benefit. If you can get into Stanford CS PhD you can get a job at a FAANG. They pay a lot better than $70K a year

Tuition is not fake. It's not like that's monopoly money or something. That's real money that is actually paid for real resources that are consumed by the student on the campus that need to be paid for (instructor time, instruction space, etc).

It is fake.. it's just a plot to siphon grant money.

It is fake after your first year usually. You arent taking any classes but you are signed up for a few credit hours of some fake grad student class with 300 people you don't know and a professor you never heard of teaching it in a classroom that says TBD for the entire semester, because the class doesn't exist and only serves to check a box for the administration that you are in fact a student and eligible for the student health insurance plan.

Tuition is not just used to fund classes, it supports all kinds of campus resources for the student. Tuition dollars are used to pay salaries, it couldn’t be any more real.

I mean usually those external resources are paid for by the student activity fee, a line item that grad students usually cover out of their own pocket. The other stuff I mean I guess you can get pedantic and say money is fungible, this gets used to keep the lights on at some building or whatever, but its important to know that these salaries are not making or breaking any department. A department might only have a few dozen grad students, these aren't significant amounts of money for a university. Keep in mind you have to pay this fake tuition for your student after the department takes half your research grant already. Some times its cheaper for a professor to hire a post doc than a grad student even with the salary differences given the tuition requirement.

$64k, unreal.. For me I made a dismal $18k stipend.

Mine was similar, closer to $13k but along with tuition reimbursement through my MA and then a slight bump to the stipend during the PHD.

64k a year is a lot better than I imagined. That makes me feel a little better about considering grad school in the near future!

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