Hacker News Reader

Comment by rwalle | Hacker News Reader

> A decent STEM PhD student stipend in the US is about $40k.

I don't know where that number comes from. In most universities you'd be looking at $20k-lower 30k, sometimes less. In fact, in public schools, salaries for teaching assistants/research assistants are public data and people can look them up.

View on HN

It depends on how you want to compute the stipend. Many stipends are officially $50K or more but that's because they include the tuition (which is kind of silly as most PhD students aren't really students in the traditional sense beyond the first year or two, but still officially have to pay tuition). But yes, students are unlikely to see more than lower $30K as actual pay as the tuition is generally taken out automatically.

To expand on this, IIRC postdocs cost professors about the same, but have double the salary, only because the school isn't taking the "tuition" cut. Of course, the incoming grant money to pay for the postdoc is still "taxed" at 50% by the university. So the lowly PhD student is probably only seeing 25% of what they're costing the government.

(for CS) You can find more numbers from Jeff Huang's Computer Science Open Data, which posts verified stipends: [0]

[0] https://jeffhuang.com/computer-science-open-data/#verified-c...

Yes - here in the UK a typical STEM PhD stipend is £17,668 [1] or $21,400

It's tax-free, and you don't have to pay any tuition fees - but it's nowhere near $40k.

[1] https://www.ukri.org/what-we-offer/developing-people-and-ski...

Britain really undervalues PhD students.

PhD students at the University of Copenhagen earn 36,000DKK/month, which after taxes works out to around £34,000 or $40,000 per year. They are considered normal employees with a pension, holiday etc.

German PhD salaries seem only slightly lower, but taxes and living costs are also lower, so it's probably similar or slightly better.

https://uniavisen.dk/en/salaries-at-the-university-of-copenh...

https://academicpositions.com/career-advice/phd-postdoc-and-...

That's true, I meant to write that it's on the upper end. I think my current stipend is about $36k for a neuroscience PhD in Seattle.

I've updated it to this: > A "good" STEM PhD student stipend in the US is about $35k. Note that many schools pay below this.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com