Funding for Masters in Engineering degrees?

My daughter will be graduating this year with a bachelors degree in Biomedical Engineering (biomechanics concentration) and would like to pursue a Masters in Mechanical Engineering biomechanics focus. From what she has seen at her school, although the two departments have some overlap, they approach the subject matter from different perspectives. She feels that this would give her a stronger mechanics foundation and make her more appealing to employers. She is interested in developing components for prostheses and is completing her senior project on an upper extremity device that more closely mimics the movement and forces of the human hand. She is on target to graduate with high distinction, a 3.8ish GPA, is a member of Tau Beta Pi and the BME honor society. After talking to her advisor, she applied to several Masters programs that were recommended to align with her interests. So far, she has been accepted at all she has heard from and is waiting to hear from a few more. Her are my questions:

  1. Most of these programs said on their information page that some funding may be available. When receiving her notification of acceptance, most indicated that funding was reserved for PhD students and she was expected to pay the full price. She has received a small stipend to one program so far. Is there any way for her to seek other funding (grants, TA, etc) outside of what the university offers? Obviously there are loans, but she does not want to fund her entire masters program this way. (Disclaimer: I warned her about this before applying, but she insisted she was not interested in pursuing a PhD. i know that many schools use Masters programs as cash cows so I suggested that she contact schools before applying to discuss their funding policies).
  2. Would it be better for her to work for a few years, save some money and then go to grad school? With this there is always the risk that life gets in the way. it's often easier to go right away while still in the education mode. She realizes that this route may be necessary, however, and is looking at employment opportunities.
  3. Are there programs known for funding masters programs? If so, she may want to reapply to different schools next year.

Any insights are appreciated.

First, be careful using the phrase “master’s in engineering” or “master of engineering”, as they can have very specific, non-funded meanings.

Are the admissions notices from the school as a whole or the department? The availability and process behind MS funding is highly variable depending on each department so unless the department has shot down any chance of funding then I wouldn’t worry. Even then it’s not a set process, as individual professors have a lot of latitude in deciding who they fund and how much they fund them. It may be that the school or department simply don’t provide funding for MS students but individual professors do.

TAships are generally funded by the department and are likely the funding referred to by the admissions letters. The better bet would be RAships or external fellowships, which should all be within reach of MS students. It’s unlikely that most schools will tell an MS student they have funding ahead of time because they simply don’t know what professor will be their advisor and the schools (and most departments) don’t fund MS students as a matter of policy.

If she were to work for a few years the better approach would be to just get the employer to pay for the degree. It’s usually not a thesis-based degree in that case but that’s not a huge deal if the goal is industry anyway.

@boneh3ad - thanks for your reply. To clarify, all of the programs she applied to are for a Master’s degree in Mechanical Engineering. Any mistake in terminology is mine as she has driven the entire process but is now home for spring break talking to hubby and I about how she should proceed as she awaits decisions from her last few schools.

I believe that the acceptance letters have all come from the department of graduate admissions at the schools themselves. I know that at least some of the programs are thesis programs (Cornell for sure). If she contacts the department before accepting the admissions offer, will they be able to give her an idea of whether funding sources are available for MS students? This would likely be a critical factor in how she decides to move forward as hubby and I have funded undergrad amd she needs to work out grad school. Looking at the prospect of 100K+ in loans is not overly appealing to her.

Be wary of schools taking the “Spend a year here and then we talk about funding” route. We saw that a lot in architecture graduate programs.

Also, be very wary of schools offering some funding and stipend etc but with an asterisk that indicates any tuition credit as part of the funding is at the instate level… meaning if you’re out of state you are on the hook for the difference.

Definitely call the schools and ask.

My employer paid for my Industrial Engineering graduate degree. I went part-time at night while I worked full-time.

I don’t know much about the type of program your daughter is interested in, but you might check into employers that pay for graduate classes and schools that have part-time programs. Stanford and USC have online graduate programs in ME that are geared toward working professionals, and I’m sure plenty of other schools do, too.

I don’t know much about the ins and outs of how funding flows in a graduate program, however I personally would not pursue graduate work at a university to be sufficiently funded to at least cover the costs, whether its as a TA, working in a lab, etc. My view of the situation is rather simplistic, but likely quite accurate - as a grad student you will be (or should be) doing work that is of real value to someone, that someone should provide money in exchange for that work.

I definitely would not get a loan for grad school or pay all that $$. My kids who are engineers will have their school paid for by their employer. One is doing online at GA Tech. It is competitive online. There are several good schools that offer online for working professionals.

Im not sure how the schools select who gets funding. I know someone who applied ME Masters and was invited to several of the schools along with other students (airfare and hotel paid for) to talk about funding, tour the lab etc. I thought that was reserved for Phds.

Funding is generally not available for MS programs. You might be able to acquire some assistantships which will cover tuition and perhaps a little more, but those come with a catch. Usually you don’t get them the first year, and even if you do they tend to be loaded with some form of perverse incentive that makes it impossible to graduate in one year. In general you will probably have to pay at least one year out of pocket no matter how it works out.

Conventional wisdom tends to say that you should work for a few years then have an employer pay for it. It probably can end up being free to obtain if you do this. But I’d caution against this choice for a number of reasons, some of which you mentioned:

  1. There is no guarantee that your employer will actually pay for it. Even when they do, it's always with strings attached.
  2. Like most "career advice" this tidbit comes from the mindset of the business schools and is focused on when and how you get your MBA. With an MBA, it really is just a two-year program, where the academics aren't as intensive as they are for engineering, and very often catered towards being able to go to school by nights. Engineering will take longer, and 5 years of night classes is not uncommon.
  3. Engineering isn't always good for night classes. Guess how thrilled your employer is going to be if you start to leave at 12 PM twice a week, and either leave for the day or come back at around 3 PM, because you have a class? Say an important recurring meeting is scheduled during that time as well. People tend to be understanding of school commitments for about the first week or two before your other commitments start to annoy them.
  4. 5 years of commitment, including night classes, is something you could easily talk yourself out of doing, and you will find you will reach career roadblocks because of it.
  5. At the end of the day, even if everything works out great - that the company will pay for it, that you can get it done in 3-4 years, that you aren't really missed for the time you are gone - your career ends up being on "slow mode" for all the time that you are in school. A lot of your high-quality working power has to be diverted to schoolwork or else you fail, so your performance suffers. You aren't always there for critical decision-making events. You're taking up company money, and they have stipulations that basically ensure that you have to stay in that position or pay a fine. The costs aren't direct but they can very easily add up to be well over what it costs to just go to school up-front. Might even get you a better job, and it sure won't get you a worse one.

On the other hand:

  1. Debt is an issue. I would recommend putting all your effort into a Masters to be able to finish in one year. At this point, professional development is secondary to the degree itself because at the MS level, you’ve already reached a point where you should be able to pick up anything that you do not already know when you need to.
  2. You’re more expensive. In the long run, a Masters degree is more productive than a Bachelors degree, all else held equal. But you are more expensive at the start and you still have no experience. I think this is a stupid form of cheapness on the part of companies but it really does exist.
  3. As you specialize, less jobs start to be available. The trade-off is that you become more desirable for the jobs that are available to you. So pick a good specialty.

Overall, my general advice is that a Masters is a good idea if you know why you’re getting one. Money-wise, it only makes sense if you spend only a single year there. For engineering, part-time MS in the future is not really the way to go. Having that Masters gives you a much steeper growth curve in big companies, so if you have one and you’re actually skilled enough to work on advanced projects (she seems talented enough), then it’s best done quickly, while the motivation for more schooling is still there, and while there aren’t additional complexities that come with having a family and a job.

Perverse incentive? If you are doing a full-time MS that is thesis-based you are not graduating in one year almost ever unless you are in the same school as your BS and got started in your lab while an undergraduate. It’s just the nature of research, which is the source of most MS funding.

That is indeed the case.

In general, I think that if the PhD route is not really your cup of tea, then take the shorter in length of the MS programs even if it comes without a thesis. I’ve never seen any employer who ever cared about having a thesis for the MS unless they are either a very academic employer (e.g. national labs, which tend to favor PhDs anyways) or if you did something impressive for your research (but there are other ways to impress).

Once you already have a degree and you’re pursuing a Masters, the opportunity cost is a very large sum of money. Time becomes too valuable to waste an extra year on tacking on a thesis to the degree.

I’ve seen a few. There are definitely research-oriented positions in industry that would prefer that you have a thesis, though the majority of positions probably don’t care whether you have a thesis or not. There’s also the fact that, if you are treating a thesis the way you should be, you can pick up a lot of very solid skills that can land you a job that would otherwise be out of your league, e.g. CFD or flight-test engineering (three guesses as to my background).

Thanks for the informed and helpful responses to this post. i will be following it as we guide our daughter who has graduate school aspirations following undergrad engineering.

My D’s MS ChE is funded at Rose-Hulman. They offer up to 100% tuition grants (based on GPA) and $3000/ quarter graduate assistantships. Their website has full details.
Unfortunately for the OP, however, they do not appear to offer a biomechanics concentration for the MS ME degree. The three ME concentrations they do offer, as well as their MS BME, are also outlined on the web.

It’s not that unfortunate. It’s not like Rose Hulman is the only school with funded MS degrees. Nearly 100% of the MS students in my graduate school department were funded. It’s just difficult at times to determine which departments have a better track record in that regard sometimes.

Those are the kinds of fields that, in the long run, you’d probably want a PhD for. Not so much because you can’t do it without one, but because that’s the accepted “research” degree nowadays.

On a different note: I think that 2 years of funded MS Thesis is actually more expensive than 1 year of unfunded MS Non-thesis. There is no guarantee of a 2 year finish (I’ve seen 2.5-4 years for MS thesis because the results didn’t come so easily), and the opportunity cost is huge once you’ve already graduated, more than the direct cost of paying $20k (but not $50k-80k) for the degree.

That’s not true at all. You certainly do not need a PhD in those fields and I have plenty of former coworkers to prove it. And there’s nothing “nowadays” about it. The PhD has always been the accepted research degree. Really, the entire point of a PhD is learning how to research; learning how to learn. Sure you become a subject matter expert along the way, but the reason the PhD is and has always been the research degree is because if you come from a reputable program/advisor, you have already proven that you can basically take yourself and a research project from the point where almost nothing is known through to completion where something valuable is known. That’s a valuable ability for academic, government, and industrial research departments.

However, particularly in industrial R&D, groups typically only need so many PhDs to direct their research, and if you happen to be one of them, you don’t always want or need more PhDs to come in to help your group complete its work. More often you need candidates that are at least familiar with the research process and have proven that they have the skills you need and can learn new ones, especially in a research context. Enter thesis-based master’s degrees.

This is assuming that you view education (or at least MS degrees) solely on a monetary basis, which is not always wise. If your goal is to get an MS just to bump you up the pay scale, then yes, getting a thesis-based degree is a waste. That’s not the only potential benefit of the MS, though. As I mentioned before, a thesis-based degree offers a whole bunch of potential new skills, both practical and theoretical, to the students that they aren’t going to get with a coursework-only degree, plus it exposes them to the research process. This can absolutely give them a leg up for certain jobs. In some situations, those degrees absolutely carry more weight than the non-thesis varieties. In many situations they seem to be on equal footing.

In other words, the student really just needs to sit down and think about what they actually want out of their degree. If it is basically just a rubber stamp on the way to advancement, then by all means, take the one-year, company-funded degree and move on with your life. It would be silly to waste extra time with a thesis in this case from both a monetary and temporal standpoint. However, if your goal is to expand your own capabilities such that you can open up new classes of jobs for yourself, then a thesis-based degree may be the correct path, even though there is an opportunity cost involved.

This isn’t a black and white issue and talking about master’s degrees solely on a monetary basis does a disservice to them and to students.

Sure, you don’t need a PhD to actually work in the field. Depending on how advanced the field is and on supply and demand, you could get by with a Masters or even a Bachelors. And yet, if you work in a research shop, it’s still better to get the PhD. Academia and R&D centers that are intended to mimic the academic environment (national labs and a significant number of private R&D labs) are very pedigree-focused, and they will very visibly favor those who actually have PhDs for the good positions. Even the way you put it seems to imply that:

I have seen many labs that treat people with thesis MS as “research people who will be satisfied to do low level work for their entire career” as opposed to PhDs who want advancement. You can get jobs, sure, but most people would be better off going for the degree that allows them to advance in research, or to avoid R&D and go for a more applied route.

This entire “learning how to learn” shtick is taken way too far and is a bit of an empty statement. Every educator says that about just about everything but it just isn’t true. You don’t get a Bachelors to learn how to learn, you get one to understand basic human academic knowledge at a somewhat advanced level and to develop basic competency in a specialty to show that you can work competently and learn how to do jobs related to that specialty. You don’t get a Masters to learn how to learn, you get one to acquire advanced knowledge in your field, and to prove that you can learn advanced material in the specialty and to apply that knowledge to difficult problems within the field. You don’t get a PhD to learn how to learn, you get it to apply advanced knowledge and your research ability to solve an important research problem within that specialty, and to prove that you both know that sub-specialty well and that you could solve similar problems. It’s not about “learning how to learn” but about proving that you know a lot and have the necessary level of competence, and that you can learn the rest when you need to.

To paint people who don’t pursue a Thesis MS as pursuing education on a “purely monetary basis” is disingenuous and unfair. Moving on with your life isn’t always just about money, but about a whole lot of things that can be considered “opportunity cost.” Establishing yourself in one city instead of living in college. Marriage and children. Starting to pay off debts so that life can move on. Transitioning from a school environment to a work environment. A stable outlook of what the next few years are going to look like. A one-year program, as opposed to a 2+ year program (and they do go on longer if something just happens to get in the way of an early finish), gives stability and a better idea of the future. Money is part of it but not the only part. I’ve also noticed that many of these things tend to be more time-sensitive for women than for men, and given that the OP’s child is female, these are particularly important considerations.

There are always trade-offs and of course it is valuable to gain knowledge in the research process. All else held equal (and things are very far from equal), it’s better to have done research than not to have done research. However, a few caveats:

  1. University is not the only place to learn how to do research. It’s a standard part of a lot of jobs to learn skills that are very similar to what research in a university is. And you do learn a fair bit about research even from coursework - often classes do teach skills similar to what labs teach you, only over a much shorter and less effective time scale.
  2. If you do undergraduate research, the added value of doing more research in an MS program is diminished. Skills in “research” tend to be pretty universal over research topics.

In short, I don’t disagree that research experience is valuable, but a thesis is far from the only way to get that experience, and often time is wasted on a longer program.

Thinking of coursework as “just a piece of paper” of no significance is a pretty big disservice to students as well. That coursework shows an ability to work competently at an advanced level in the field, where often very cutting-edge knowledge is needed. That is not very far from what a thesis or PhD provides in terms of useful abilities.

If I respond to your post piecewise I will end up babbling on, so I’ll try to address it all in a way in which it is obvious which parts I am addressing. Here goes nothing…

You absolutely do not need a PhD to work in research. There are a lot of cases where it helps, but it is not any kind of universal requirement, even if you work at a “research shop.” In academia, the brand of research that is practiced generally spans from basic to the earliest stages of applied research where the processes are essentially the same and a PhD is basically required.

National labs, on the other hand, are somewhat different. As someone who presently works at one, I have seen that this varies quite substantially depending on your division within the labs. In my division, it is very heavily research focused and almost everyone has a PhD. On the other hand, I have a good friend with only a MS working in high-performance computing who has told me that almost everyone there only has a MS and that getting a PhD is, by and large, completely unnecessary.

In industry, there are often more MS-holders than there are PhDs, as their research generally spans from applied up to the point just before production. Not as much of the work requires the skills a PhD brings to the table.

Regarding the monetary examples, I am aware of the dangers of painting in broad strokes, but every example you have given so far has been in the context of money. I responded in kind. And yes, I have absolutely come across plenty of students have viewed the advanced degree as just a rubber stamp on their way up the corporate ladder. Do I think all of them do this? No, and it isn’t even the majority, but it does happen relatively frequently. There is absolutely an opportunity cost associated with everything, and it is not always monetary. Sometimes it is, but sometimes it is psychological or involves other factors, and assessing those costs on an individual basis does not always result in a thesis-based degree being useless or somehow a bad decision.

Your position seems to rest on the assumption that there are no opportunities available to someone with a thesis-based MS that wouldn’t be better served by either a PhD or a non-thesis MS, and that simply isn’t the case. For some (myself included), they go do an internship and see that those with just a BS are doing jobs that are just absolutely boring to them and that in order to get the jobs they want, they need additional sets of skills not typically available to an undergraduate. My example has been CFD so I will keep using it. You could either just take a job with your BS and start learning CFD while performing your other, boring job duties, or you could decide to go to graduate school and learn the skills you seek there. I don’t think there is a universally correct answer. For me, I would have rather gone back to school instead of crushing my spirits with a job that is soul-crushing to me. Other people may come to a different conclusion. My entire point here has simply been that there is no universally correct answer and that thesis-based degrees can be useful.

Also, I think your points about uncertainty and stability are quite important, but 1 additional year for a thesis-based MS is not likely to meaningfully affect these issues. They are much more prominent among PhD students (I know, I’ve lived that debacle). The caveat to my position here is that I am aware that sometimes thesis-based MS degrees do take longer, and for that reason I advocate that students have a serious discussion with potential MS advisors about the expectations for graduation and the expected time to completion. I think many instances of 4 year MS degrees come down, at least a little bit, to irresponsibility on the part of the advisor and that this should be an important data point in deciding where to pursue the MS. After all, if you are going to spend 3+ years getting an MS, you might as well just stick around for the PhD.

Regarding undergraduate research as a path to these skills, it’s tough to paint with a broad brush here. The quality of undergraduate research (based on my time in graduate school and now at the national lab) seems to be very variable. Factors include the individual students, the projects assigned by PIs, and the graduate mentors the students end up with, but ultimately, a fair bit of that comes down to luck. It’s unusual (though not impossible) that undergraduate researchers reach anywhere near the level of competence that would seem to make them a shoo in for jobs requiring those specific, more advanced skills like CFD.

Finally, I very much take issue with your description of PhD programs and what constitutes learning. What necessary level of competence do you think is actually required for research? Research is learning. The entire concept behind research is adding to the whole of human knowledge, and in order to do that, you have to understand and have a set of learning skills that basically transcends fields. Yes, in the process of earning a PhD you are going to become an expert on some bit of subject matter, but that is really just a result of the above process, not the purpose of the endeavor. The point of a PhD is to prove that you can, if desired, apply this same concept to new areas and generate new knowledge (at least this is the case if your goal is to parlay the PhD into a research position of some kind).

Probably the best example of this is the people I work with here at the national lab. You see people with all manner of technical backgrounds applying their expertise to all manner of new problems, some of which are barely even related to their original field. I have a friend with a background in experimental fluid mechanics who is now also working on a quantum cryptography project. This isn’t because he is a quantum cryptography expert. It’s because he has proven that he is a competent researcher, and research is learning. A PhD is all about learning how to research, and therefore learning how to learn. This is every bit as important to your future career as the subject matter you study with this process.

This kind of misunderstanding also plays into the idea that coursework provides largely the same skills as the thesis or dissertation (or rather the process of the work leading up to writing them). Coursework demonstrates a familiarity with more advanced topics. This is not the same thing as the practical skills that should be gained over the course of working on a thesis. It is especially not the same as the demonstrated ability to lead an original research project from start to finish and contribute to the whole of scientific knowledge that is the point of the PhD. All of these degrees serve their purpose and are useful, but claiming that they all provide essentially the same set of useful abilities is at best disingenuous and at worst illustrates an incomplete grasp of the scope and purpose of each of these degrees.

On national labs: I’ve worked with a few, and I have some friends who ultimately ended up working at some of them (personally I was not a fan but I see their appeal). You are correct - the ones I’m familiar with have something like 50% MS, 25% BS or lower, and 25% PhD as the makeup of their research staff. Some of them offer their members benefits that encourage them to take a leave of absence to get a higher degree. And yet, at the end of the day, they are all very strongly pedigree focused, in that the majority of the most politically successful employees earned PhDs. I’ve seen cases where the MS workers took around 20 years to receive any meaningful advancement, with the lack of pedigree being the cause of them having their career put on “slow mode.” I can’t speak for LANL because that happens to be one I am not particularly familiar with, but for the ones I am familiar with, that seems to be the general pattern. An MS gets you employment, a PhD gives you a chance to advance. I would personally recommend a PhD to anyone who would choose to go that route, even if an MS seems like it would suffice, because in the long run it would be more effective.

Everything boils down to money if you really think about it, of course. Research wouldn’t happen either if there were no money. However, I don’t think most people associate marriage or stability with a “purely monetary outlook” on education.

I don’t think an MS thesis is useless or that there’s always a better option, but the MS thesis does represent a sort of awkward middle ground - it’s just barely enough for traditional R&D, but the MS non-thesis is more than enough for most industrial positions, a lot of which could be R&D. In that light, I’d question the wisdom of 2+ years when 1 is enough, or of choosing not to finish the entire PhD. I know a few good reasons to pursue one - to add depth to a resume, to complete a trial run of the PhD, if it’s externally funded with a salary (some national labs do this), or if it doesn’t take 2 years because the Bachelors degree makes it faster to complete.

The fact that MS degrees may take longer as a result of bad advising is a real issue. It’s not always possible to predict this ahead of time, and it does depend on a fair number of factors including quality of advising, how effective the student is at researching the best advisors, the tendency of that field of study to introduce new unexpected challenges, politics, unrelated personal factors, etc. You can no more expect to finish an MS thesis in 2 years than you are to finish a PhD in 5 years - that is, it’s feasible if everything turns out well, but it could easily take longer.

UG research is indeed pretty variable. But if an undergraduate did develop solid research skills in a useful field but chooses not to go for the PhD, there is much less to be gained from an MS thesis.

You seem to be saying that a PhD is not only about learning a specific topic, but also about learning a wide range of broadly applicable skills that apply to not obviously related fields. That’s true, but that’s also very far from the characterization of a PhD as “learning how to learn.” Or perhaps the phrase “learning how to learn” is just so broad that it could mean anything, and it’s just a buzzword that should be dropped.

And the skills you actually learn do matter a lot. Quantum computing is really not all that far removed from fluid mechanics - all the PDEs, physics, computation, linear algebra, etc. are transferable skills that can be applied there. Same deal for the many PhDs who decide to work in quant finance. Going from CFD to something like pharmaceutical research or psychology research, which has very few transferable skills, would be a more interesting transition to consider. Besides, national labs are often unique in that they want lifetime employment, while a fair number of more profit-driven employers would prefer someone to actually have a thesis based on something that they could directly use because a few years of training is expensive.

I agree with what you say that a coursework-only degree does not provide. However, these practical skills are rather readily acquired by having “work experience.” I really haven’t found research-style work in an academic setting to be particularly different from work in an industrial setting. Work experience is as transferable to research as research experience is to work, and the skills are very similar. And in both environments, the coursework provides a base of theoretical knowledge to competently understand the work/research to be done, and the know-how to look for further knowledge. When it comes to pedigree-independent practical knowledge, the difference between non-thesis, thesis, and PhD, is neither trivial nor essential.

In response to @NeoDymium “3. Engineering isn’t always good for night classes. Guess how thrilled your employer is going to be if you start to leave at 12 PM twice a week, and either leave for the day or come back at around 3 PM, because you have a class? Say an important recurring meeting is scheduled during that time as well. People tend to be understanding of school commitments for about the first week or two before your other commitments start to annoy them.”

I can understand this for the most part but just to let some people know that there are places that want you to get your Masters and will work with you on it. Where my son works, an FFRDC, a federally funded research and development center, they let students leave to go to class if they have to because they want you to get an advanced degree. They are very supportive. Plus they pay for it though you do owe them time back.