<p>My adviser told me that I should not accept a PhD offer unless it is fully funded. What are the 'levels' of PhD funding for engineering students? i.e; could you be offered a half-tuition scholarship? </p>
<p>Also, I've heard that it is possible to be fully funded and receive stipends of possibly $30K or $40K per year. I'm curious to know what peoples' experiences are with receiving funding / stipends for Engineering PhD programs... what is common and what is considered a great deal. </p>
<p>“Fully-funded” generally means a full tuition waiver plus some monthly stipend for living expenses, and covers a wide variety of options. I have never heard of a “half-tuition” scholarship, but I have heard (rarely anywhere) of fixed-amount scholarships and (rarely in engineering) tuition waivers at state universities that only covered the in-state portion. </p>
<p>Generally, fellowships pay more than research assistantships (RA’s), and RA’s pay more than teaching assistantships (TA’s). I had TA offers with ~$15k annual stipends, RA offers with $20-24k stipends, and a fellowship offer with a $35k stipend, and I would consider them all within a reasonable distance of “common”. Any fellowship is generally considered a “great deal”, if only because there is no mandatory workload associated with it, but I would say that right now anything >$30k is great!</p>
<p>Speaking as one who ran the Graduate Admissions office for my university (Illinois Tech) for three years, a half-tuition scholarship is not fully funded by any means. They are basically telling you that if you come, you will pay your own living expenses and half of the tuition and maybe if things work out, you can see if there is additional funding later. This may be an acceptable thing to do for a Masters degree where the time to degree is only 2 years and so the cost to you is limited. However, for a Ph.D. if they do not offer you a full assistantship or fellowship, it means that they do not really want you. Find another school which does.</p>
<p>I accepted an offer into a PhD program without funding. The Wednesday before classes started at my University (Umich), I got a four year fellowship…full tuition and stipend. I wouldn’t quite agree with your advisor. When you are not immediately funded, it just means that there was somebody more qualified. </p>
<p>In my program, sometimes during the first semester or year, students paid partial tuition or only received a stipend and were responsible for their tuition. If the student was successful as a PhD student, they were always fully funded (full tuition and stipend) within a year or a semester.</p>
<p>On the other side of things, I’ve seen students come in fully funded and flunk out. Funding does not equate to how much the university wants you. In fact, in my experience initial funding and success and long term success in grad school were only loosely related. I even remember hearing a faculty complaining once about how all the fellowship students had troubles (not me of course…;)), while the students without initial funding seemed to be doing just fine.</p>
That is a HUGE gamble that most people lose. It is certainly true that funding can vary over time, and that you can gain funding later on (or lose it!!), but it is pretty rare for the kind of success you saw - more often, someone who enters without funding at most universities will struggle to find funding for a substantial chunk of their career, and may have to leave due to financial pressures. If I had to guess, I would say that the fellowship in question had some very specific requirements that only a couple of people could fulfill.</p>
<p>True enough. I had to be a us citizen and show financial need. If you are coming straight from undergrad and have not been employed, this shows financial need. If you are unemployed (because you were laid off/let go and had not quit), this also shows financial need. These requirements certainly limited the eligible students for this fellowship I received.</p>
<p>Again, you need to look at the culture of were you get into. Some Universiy’s culture sticks into to the students the first semester financially. Michigan were I’m at did this for a while, but then there were concerns and my dept officially changed the policy. I think now they only accept PhD students if they can fund the student. For a while, it was pretty common for students to fund themselves for a semester in the engineering PhD programs. I know countless examples. I think it was a bad way to go for a top ten engineering program. Don’t get me wrong, University of Michigan is great. They have the reputation for being stingy though. They’re working on improving it though.</p>
<p>The point is you need to know the dept your accepting into to understand the risk. Talk to PhD students in depth before making a decision. It is not necessarily a HUGE gamble.</p>
<p>jack63, your examples may be anecdotally true but not statistically. Statistically, students with less funding take longer to finish their degrees and are more likely to drop out than their classmates with funding.</p>
<p>And yes, generally speaking funding DOES speak to how much a department wants you (btw, “how much the university wants you” is not the same thing as “long-term success.” We’re talking about initial investments). That’s the way academia works - good and well-connected students/scholars get funding, and the more funding you get the easier it is to get funding later. If a department only funds half of their students, who do you think they are going to give the funding to? They’re not going to do it randomly; they’re going to give it to the half they believe is more likely to succeed. And that may become a self-fulfilling prophecy.</p>
<p>On the other hand, I do agree that a student needs to have all the information before making a decision. I am in the camp of “never pay for a PhD”, which usually means “don’t accept an offer without full funding.” But you have to know your department. In some places, many students are not funded in the first year but can easily find funding in years 2+. If the vast majority (and for me, that would have to be at least 75%+) of PhD students who don’t have first-year funding get steady funding after their second year, then I would consider that program.</p>
<p>However, this should not be an issue in engineering, which is generally a well-funded field. Student stipends commonly range between $25,000 and $35,000 in addition to tuition, required fees, and health insurance. So while an unfunded first year may be more the norm in the humanities and some social sciences, I would be skeptical of a program that couldn’t find all their first-year engineering students.</p>