Hi;
I notice top schools offer financial assistance for PhD. The bad news is, this makes admission for PhD at top school extremely competitive.
Do you know if my chances will be improved if I say in my SOP that I don’t need financial assistance?
Thanks!
No.
And any reputable program is going to pay your tuition and give you a stipend, that is just how it works. You don’t want to go to program that doesn’t.
If you are worried about admissions, then focus on becoming a stronger candidate. Relevant research experience and work experience helps a lot.
You can self-fund an MA degree and some intuitions may accept you based on that, but that’s because self-paying for a graduate degree is (excluding professional degrees) by and large not good for you and only good for the university (they make money off you).
A PhD degree is about doing research and becoming a scholar (regardless of how you eventually use what you learn), so a school needs to be committed enough to your learning to pay for it and support you financially. They pay for basically everyone who attends because that’s the way the system works.
Thank you everyone.
Any PhD that doesn’t offer you a stipend isn’t worth attending.
Acceptance is based on pure academic merit.
What you said guys makes sense … But I notice some universities like Columbia university says in their FAQ that it might help if you don’t need funding for PhD.
Also, I saw some post on internet someone received an offer for PhD at Ohio state university without funding.
There is a bit of nuance to this question, although I 100% agree with all of the posters here in saying that you shouldn’t attend a fully funded PhD program.
That can be true, but 9 times out of 10 this refers to people who are being externally funded for a PhD by an outside agency. An example would be a student who wins an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship or a Hertz Fellowship, or is being funded by Gates Millennium, or their home country or a nonprofit foundation or their employer is funding their PhD. This usually does not refer to students who are planning on paying for their PhD out of their pocket through loans and personal resources.
Yes, offers for doctoral degree study without funding are actually not all that uncommon. Many lower-tier programs cannot afford to find some or any of their students, so they don’t offer funding. And even some top-tier programs will admit a few students a year without funding. My program was a top 10 program in my field and we did admit 1-2 students in some years without funding. The professors in my own department advised those students NOT to take the offers.
Programs that don’t offer funding to any or most of their students are usually lower-ranked programs, where the education is of questionable quality. It’s also an indication of the resources in the department. If the department can’t even do something as basic as fund your attendance, they may not be able to do things like cover seed research funding for students and professors or pay for conference travel. You will be competing in the academic market with PhD graduates who DID have those things at their campuses, which puts you at a disadvantage from day one. Don’t do that to yourself.
The same thing applies to programs at which you are not funded, but becomes an even more difficult problem because those comparisons happen inside your own department! Students who are admitted without funding in departments that fund almost all students* are virtually always the weakest students in the cohort - and everyone will know that from the outset. Professors, students, administrators. It puts you at a disadvantage against your peers in competing for resources and research support later on. Professors may not want to advise you because your funding is tenuous - what if you run out of money and drop out in year 2 or 3? Or they may realize that you’ll eventually have to take a job and work, which will diminish the time you can spend in the lab. Or they may simply have at least somewhat justified biases against students who are admitted with no funding, because funding always goes to the best students first. And if you do have to work or otherwise hustle to make money to support yourself, you’re already disadvantaging yourself against your colleagues and peers at your own department and others who are going to be spending that time publishing, presenting and networking. It also introduces a whole new level of stress that you really don’t need.
*I’m not talking about situations in which students come in externally funded. I’m talking about students who are offered no funding and are paying from personal resources. If you truly don’t need funding because you have external funding from a company, a government, an agency, a foundation, etc…that’s completely different and can totally work in your favor.
Thank you!
Also, I made a pretty significant typo in the first sentence - I meant to say “I 100% agree with all of the posters here in saying that you should ONLY attend a fully funded PhD program.”