by Steven Tagle
The Myth of the Fully Funded PhD: Mitigating the Financial Realities of Graduate Degrees
When you decide to go to grad school, you are making a financial decision that will dramatically affect your earning capacity for the duration of the program and throughout your life. While the school’s reputation, available mentorship opportunities, and research resources are important factors to consider when deciding which university to attend, students often forget to carefully assess the financial realities associated with each opportunity.
Attending Graduate School Is a Financial Decision
Unlike students in business, law, or medical school, most PhD students do not plan to pursue high-paying careers, and they depend on “fully funded” doctoral programs to offset the cost of long-term research degrees. Although many graduate students receive admissions offers that are called “fully funded,” these funding packages often require them to teach multiple years in exchange for tuition waivers and teaching stipends. Once students start to work for the university and balance their many responsibilities, they quickly realize they’re trading their time for money. In other words, full funding isn’t the same as a scholarship or a full ride.
Common Misconceptions About Fully Funded Programs
Depending on the university and its location, the value of one’s teaching stipend in relation to workload and cost of living can vary greatly. In many cases, especially in big U.S. cities, stipends are not enough to cover students’ rent and basic necessities. As a result, most graduate students go into debt to complete their degree.
Since tenure-track jobs have become increasingly rare while adjunct teaching positions are growing, today’s doctoral students must also satisfy a growing list of requirements to be considered for stable, well-paying teaching positions upon graduation. The added responsibilities associated with producing early publications, progressing through the degree program, regularly attending conferences, performing department service, and pursuing ongoing professionalization or certification opportunities all require significant time commitments.
However, since doctoral students must work for the university in order to waive their tuition and fees, they cannot devote all their time to academic and professional progress. To avoid burnout and set aside more time for research, I suggest that prospective and current graduate students continuously apply for extramural funding, research fellowships, and community-based scholarships throughout their studies.
How Academia Deemphasizes Financial Concerns
The phrase “No one earns a PhD to make money” is frequently heard in academia. It seems to suggest that caring about one’s financial well-being is selfish and anti-intellectual. Especially in the humanities and social sciences, cultural importance is placed on the fact that academia is not about money and that academic careers are shaped by intellectual merit, not a student’s financial capacity to stay in school.
Historically, however, the option to waive tuition in return for a few years of university teaching was an affordable way for grad students to pursue intellectual projects in the not-for-profit environment of the public university. One generation ago, doctoral students transitioned into tenure-track jobs with much more ease than those currently on the market. They also entered public institutions carrying far less student debt, and upon employment, they received guaranteed state pensions and salaries commensurate with the cost of living.
In today’s public university, the labor commitments of teaching assistants have grown significantly, but pay has not caught up with the steep rise in the cost of living in most university hubs. For example, as a result of union pressure, grad students at UCLA now receive between $40,000 and $65,000 in annual pay as a teaching or staff stipend, up from roughly $20,000 a few years earlier. With Los Angeles rents running upward of $2,000 per month and rising, one can’t afford to live in the city without going into debt, applying for extramural grants, or taking on work outside of the university.
Although most graduate programs do not emphasize the financial aspects of navigating life as a student researcher and university employee, I found that the pursuit of additional funding was neither a greedy nor an anti-intellectual use of my time in graduate school. Rather, it equipped me for a successful career by empowering me to network outside my department, share my research with non-academic audiences, and develop essential grant-writing skills.
Strategies for Funding Your Graduate Degree
In addition to my own efforts to build funding applications into my graduate studies, I have worked with many graduate students to generate strategies for incorporating annual cycles of grant writing into their studies. Here are some of the most important takeaways from that work:
1. When applying to programs, take note of how transparent they are about graduate student funding.
Does the program describe how many and what kinds of department and grad school fellowships are available? Does it describe what teaching positions are available and what is considered a normal teaching load per term or per year? Is health insurance covered? Is training included for first-time teachers? Do you have to apply for teaching positions separately, or will you automatically be considered for a position if accepted? If you can’t find this information clearly stated on a program’s website, it’s worthwhile to reach out to the program administrator or contact alumni. If a program is not willing to be up front about funding, it may not be a good fit for you.
2. Apply for extramural funding when you apply to grad programs.
Most applicants are so anxious about whether they will be accepted to their desired PhD program that they don’t think about funding until after they’ve been accepted. But there are a number of organizations – such as the Ford Foundation, the Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans, the Stanford Knight-Hennessy Scholars Program, the National Science Foundation, and the Fannie and John Hertz Foundation – that offer funding for prospective graduate students. Like grad school applications, these also run on an annual cycle that requires students to apply one year before they plan to enroll in school. So, if you’re planning to spend this fall applying to grad school, it is well worth it to add a number of fellowship applications to your list as well. In my case, receiving a prestigious Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship helped me get into one of my top-choice schools and secure a tuition waiver. Even if you aren’t successful with your first round of applications, you will be prepared to add scholarship applications to your grad school routine. This is an activity you should engage in throughout your degree, and you have to start somewhere!
3. Upon acceptance, read your admission letter as if it were an employment contract.
Below are some questions your letter of admission should answer. If it doesn’t, try to find out the answers before you make your decision.
- How many years of teaching assistantship does the university commit to providing? How many students are you responsible for teaching, assessing, and holding office hours with each term?
- Are there stipulations related to your progress through the degree that might limit your access to university funding or campus work opportunities?
- Does your status as a university student or staff come with health benefits?
- Does your university have a union for teaching assistants? If so, what employee rights do you have through your union membership? Take note of pay issues related to maternity leave, medical leave, absence in the case of the death of a family member, and access to childcare.
- Is there an employee handbook for student staff and teaching assistants?
- What is the pay scale associated with the teaching positions the university has offered you?
4. Research the cost of living in your school’s area in relation to anticipated pay.
Before you decide where to go to school, research your housing options. How much does university housing cost? How much is the average monthly rent in the area? Can you share an apartment or house with other incoming students? Some universities post annual budgets on their websites that include the cost of housing, but you have to analyze these carefully to understand how these budgets translate to your degree. For instance, the estimated cost of attendance for graduate students may only list the annual budget for the academic year, which consists of eight months. So, you’d have to add four months of summer expenses in order to get a true sense of the living costs associated with each calendar year. When preparing for grad school, try to build up some savings, create a budget, and live within your means, taking advantage of student discounts and other departmental perks.
5. Map out the phases of your degree program that correspond to different types of funding.
Once you’ve chosen a university, map out the various phases of the program, the skill sets that you wish to build, and the accomplishments that you will achieve as you progress through the degree. Different types of funding are available for every step, and if you are intentional about identifying related funding, you can apply for specific opportunities throughout. Here are some examples of different achievements or degree phases associated with specific funding opportunities:
- Two to three years of coursework
- Conference travel
- Master’s exam period
- Master’s thesis writing year
- Language study
- Building a technical or quantitative analytical methodology
- Preliminary fieldwork or archival research
- Prospectus development
- Qualifying exam period
- Preliminary dissertation research
- Primary fieldwork or archival research
- Dissertation writing year
6. Build an annual routine of writing funding proposals throughout your studies.
It’s important to be on the lookout for funding opportunities throughout the year. You can find these through your department mailing list, by speaking with older cohorts, by attending campus information sessions, or by conducting online searches. You might also be able to find university funding by developing relationships with professors and administrators. Keep in mind that most research-related funding opportunities do not pay out until a full academic year after the application submission period. This means that you should plan your goals an entire year in advance and apply for funding in the year before you complete the projects and goals that you propose in your application materials. If you can continuously conceptualize your degree in the long term, you will be able to anticipate the types of funding that will support your progress.
7. Plan ahead for paid summer opportunities.
Whether you work for the university or not, it will likely be up to you to cover the cost of your summers during graduate school. Rather than wait until summer starts to figure out how you’re going to pay the bills, start making plans during the preceding fall. You may find paid opportunities to teach or conduct research, fieldwork, or language study during your summer. But you also have the option to take on paid internships in a number of research fields in the public and private sectors. You may also consider taking on freelance or remote work during the academic year to supplement your income.
A Stanford graduate and the recipient of prestigious fellowships from the Fulbright Program and the Institute of Current World Affairs, as well as a Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans, Steven Tagle has taught and mentored students for 20 years. As a published writer, journalist, and former speechwriter for the U.S. ambassador to Greece, he knows how to draw out applicants’ unique stories and craft compelling personal statements that help their applications stand out from the pack. Want Steven to help you get accepted? Click here to get in touch.
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