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December 02, 2008, 11:47 AM ET
Graduate Students' Pay and Benefits Vary Widely, Survey Shows
When it comes to the financial packages that graduate students receive to pursue their degrees, the devil is in the details.
A Chronicle survey, conducted this summer and fall, of the pay and benefits of teaching and research assistants at more than 100 research institutions reveals a dizzying array of variables that students must compare.
Some institutions cover 100 percent of graduate students’ tuition, while others waive only a portion. It is possible to get health insurance paid in full — 42 percent of the institutions that responded to the survey do just that — but coverage for family members is harder to come by.
Then there’s location: Just how far will a $19,000 stipend go in Los Angeles, anyway? When it comes to paying rent, buying food, and otherwise making ends meet, stipends do matter.
“A large part of my decision was based on how I would be able to afford to live,” says Verity Mathis, a Ph.D. student in evolutionary biology at Louisiana State University at Baton Rouge. Her stipend for 12 months as a teaching assistant is a little more than $20,000. Ms. Mathis, 30, pays $500 a month in rent for a two-bedroom house. Louisiana State pays the bulk of her $500 annual health-insurance premium. Student fees, about $800 or so each semester, are among the expenses that she must cover. “I stretch my money out with student loans,” Ms. Mathis says.
The data collected by The Chronicle, though not comprehensive, provide a snapshot of what graduate students are earning in six fields this academic year. Comparisons among stipends are difficult because every institution has its own way of handling a financial package. Still, it is safe to say that while graduate students are hardly living the high life, some of them (science students) are less poor than others (English, history, and sociology students).
For instance, biology departments reported an average research-assistant stipend of $18,200 for an appointment that typically lasts a full 12 months. Students in English, however, got an average teaching-assistant stipend of $13,387 for an academic year.
Categories: Salary-and-benefits
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