<p>I have a vague idea of an ideal (and realistic) amount of financial aid one should expect?</p>
<p>For example:
1. no financial aid (I think this case may only apply to International students. Correct me if I am wrong)
2. tuition is covered. only TA/RA salary
3. tuition is covered plus $5-15k stipend + TA/RA salary (first year). Remaining years: unknown or TA/RA salary<br>
4. tuition is covered plus $15-30k stipend (first year). Remaining years: unknown or TA/RA salary
5. tuition is covered plus $15-30k stipend for 3-5 years</p>
<p>I realize that the amount would depend on many factors (school, department). While case 5 is typically offered to top applicants, I wonder if case 4 also means the same thing? Also, how much salary can we expect for the remaining years as TA/RA?</p>
<p>I guess a followup question would be: assuming that the research in both schools are equally intriguing to me, should I choose a rank-10 school (w/ case 4) or rank-20 (case 5)? Feel free to use a different scenario and share your personal case.</p>
<p>It depends on what program you are enrolled in. For life sciences programs (mol. bio, biochem, genetics, cell bio, etc.) students can expect full tuition and fees remission, health insurance, and a generous stipend if attending a 1st-2nd tier institution. This is because of funding received from the National Institutes of Health, which has a large budget (and hopefully larger with President Obama now in office).</p>
<p>For programs with less federal support (say, english or flim studies), one would almost certainly have to TA and expect a lessened stipend/salary.</p>
<p>I think getting some TA experience is a good thing, but overall, the best funding level to focus strictly on research/dissertation would be your #5.</p>
<p>choices 4 and 5 I have never heard of. The most prestigious institute-granted fellowship here is 5500 a year (though my department offers an 8k one as a result of new funding). RA’s typically get 20-22k a year and only pay about 500 per semester in fees, so that’s pretty easy to live on in total.</p>
<p>gthopeful: Like most things I’m sure it depends on the degree, program and department. Most biomedical PhD’s fall into #5 pretty easily. I pay no tuition and have a $26k stipend for the duration of the PhD (with likely raises). The teaching requirement varies some but is typically only 1-2 semesters over the 5-7 year PhD.</p>
<p>In the humanities, there is no additional “teaching salary.”<br>
There are stipends when students receive assistantships (teaching or research) or fellowships.</p>
<p>Right, like most have already cleared up, the stipend is it (well, they pay for an $1800 health insurance plan too) but yeah, no teaching salary. In some departments you teach one semester as a requirement of the dept, others it’s two. One dept I know of you may have to teach 3-4 years to keep getting the stipend depending on how well funded your PI is. I have heard of some places where you can get extra money if you take on additional teaching duties, but your PI would have to approve it and it would cut in on your research time, so very well may not be worth it.</p>
<p>I’m not sure what is typical for Computer Science programs. For UIUC CS PhD at least, they pay about 20K/year regardless if your a TA/RA/GA and guarantee funding for ~4 years.</p>
<p>so case 4 in the engineering & science field can be considered as insufficient financial aid? Having to teach as a TA every year will definitely cut a lot of research time. Is it appropriate to ask the dept. whether the funding for the remaining years would consist of TAship or a combination with stipend (and how much stipend exactly)?</p>
<p>Yeah this was my impression for everywhere as well. The OP seems to imply that he thinks people get upwards of 15-30k annually on top of the monthly (or whatever) payment you get for being a TA/RA/what have you. As far as I know, fellowships on top of assistantships are fairly modest - in the 5k range.</p>
<p>Gthopeful, not to overly agitate you, but that’s exactly what happens at many PhD programs in business school. To take one example, Harvard Business School’s fellowship stipend is about 33k, and guaranteed for 4 years. TA/RA pay sits above and beyond this fellowship, and that kind of work at Harvard can be rather lucrative. You also have the opportunity to become a Harvard house resident tutor, which basically gives you free housing + board (perhaps ~15k of value) in return for providing tutorial services to undergrads, and that is also on top of your fellowship. Outside scholarships such as NSF awards are also generally yours to keep with no or only minor reduction of your fellowship. </p>
<p>But all of that pales to by far the biggest money-maker of all: the myriad outside consulting opportunities, of which the top business schools are simply chock-full. I don’t think this is the right thread to discuss this topic in detail. Suffice it to say that the combination of consulting, TA/RA work, outside scholarships, and ancillary opportunities such as the resident tutoring jobs - all on top of your fellowship - means that some business school PhD students can make over 6 figures while still students. They of course also pay zero tuition.</p>
<p>That’s why I’ve always said that if your interests run within the social sciences (i.e. economics, psychology, sociology, etc.), it is almost always better - at least from a financial standpoint - to pursue those interests within the context of a business school. Consider the case of Tal Ben-Shahar. His dissertation had practically nothing to do with business at all, it was really a pure psychology paper; in fact, his committee chair was the esteemed psychologist Ellen Langer. But he completed his PhD within the business school (as part of the Organizational Behavior program), which meant that he had access to the extensive funding sources there rather than from the far more constrained sources of the psychology department. Interestingly, after graduating from the business school, he then placed into a position within the Harvard psychology department. So basically, he was a psychology grad student, but with business school levels of funding. </p>
<p>In my program, if we TA more than our one required course, we also get TA pay above and beyond the stipend. The pay is pretty awesome: about $5k per section. But as New_User mentions above, your PI has to approve it.</p>
<p>I would be careful about number 4 with the economy the way it is. Sources of funding in some areas have disappeared. I know of students with a first year fellowship that expected to be able to get subsequent funding and that have been told that no new research funds have been located. These are top students that could have had their PhDs wholly funded at a somewhat lesser school.</p>
<p>sakky, while your info on HBS and Harvard opportunities is basically true, I’m afraid you make it sound a little bit too easy. I assume you are referring to the Business economics program, which is 33K plus fellowships and TA positions and what not. But you have to realize that most PhD programs are not that ‘lucrative’. Indeed, the BizEc people are treated a bit better than other PhD students, because their opportunity cost in order obtain a PhD is so high (they could be consultants, investment bankers,work for a hedge fund, etc) Clearly, this year and this economy is not the best example of that opportunity cost, but still, if one is able to get into the Business Economics program at HBS, they are also probably quite able to get a fairly lucrative job, even in this economy. I guess my point is that this specific PhD program is highly competitive, and that one has to be well-qualified to enter it. </p>
<p>Second point, you mention the Harvard housing system and the idea of a resident tutor. These houses receive circa 400 applicants for 3-5 resident tutor positions each year. Again, very qualified, personable people, with lots of life experiences. A few I interviewed were Rhodes Scholars, MdPhd students willing to serve as pre-med advisors (a lot of work actually!), people who had many years of experience working for non profit organizations, etc. Moreover, besides it being competitive, there are many people that would rather not live with undergrads during their graduate career, so this option is not for everyone. </p>
<p>However, I will have to agree with you that if the choice presents itself (choosing to do a PhD at the Ec. dept or at the business school), I’d probably choose, the B-school track</p>
<p>I am referring to all of the doctoral programs connected to the business school. Tal Ben-Shahar, the example I used before, is basically a psychologist. He’s a graduate of the Organizational Behavior PhD program. </p>
<p>My point is that, generally speaking, PhD programs at business schools tend to be more generous than are PhD programs not in business schools. The PhD program at the Yale School of Management, for example, guarantees 5 years of fellowship funding for all students, with TA/RA salary being added on top of that. I don’t think any other program at Yale can say the same (that is, while some Yale PhD students surely get fellowship money, I doubt that any of the other Yale programs can boast of providing guaranteed 5-year fellowships for all their students.) </p>
<p>Which leads to my other point, which is that if your interests span to anything that the business school has to offer, you may well be better off doing the program within a business school, and that span is far broader than merely economics. Again, Ben-Shahar is a psychologist. He has nothing to do with economics. One could argue that David Ager, another graduate of OB, is really a sociologist and in fact, right now is at the Harvard Department of Sociology. One could argue that Hannah Riley Bowles is really a sociologist, as her work was on the role of gender on negotiations within the social context. She graduated from the doctoral program in General Management.</p>
<p>What I am saying is that business school PhD programs tend to be far more flexible than many people seem to think they are. Economics is just one subset, and frankly, a declining subset as the research community has recently realized the increasing importance of the other social sciences such as sociology and psychology in explaining business performance. </p>
<p>The bottom line is that, given the choice of pursuing a PhD in pure sociology or pure psychology, or pursuing a Phd through a business school - whether it’s the OB program at HBS or the Stanford Graduate School of Business or the MORS program at Northwestern Kellogg or similar such program - I think it’s fairly clear that, from a financial standpoint, the business school option is clearly better. Note, you still have to ensure that your research interests align. But I think there is little dispute that B-school funding is clearly superior. </p>
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<p>First off, you’ve neglected the fact that there are 12 Houses, and there are 3-5 resident tutor positions per house. </p>
<p>Secondly, I agree that many applicants are indeed highly qualified - but frankly, you have to be highly qualified yourself to even get into a HBS doctoral program in the first place. Hence, I don’t think you should have anything to worry about on that front.</p>
<p>Thirdly - you said it yourself - lots of people (probably most) don’t want to live with a bunch of undergrads anyway. That vastly reduces the pool of competition, given that you are willing to do so. </p>
<p>But I think most importantly of all, a lot of people simply don’t even know that this option is even possible. I continue to encounter Harvard grad students - many quite advanced- who have never even heard of this option. Generally, the ones who know are the ones who themselves went to Harvard as undergrads, for they would have then naturally encountered the resident tutors as part of the House experience. But, frankly, if you didn’t go to Harvard for undergrad, you probably don’t know about this program, and it certainly isn’t widely advertised.</p>
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<p>Well, I don’t know about that. Since you want to talk about the bus-ec PhD program at HBS, I would argue that I don’t think they are any more “marketable” than are, say, the Harvard PhD students in the economics department. Believe me, plenty of them also end up going to Ibanks, hedge funds, and consulting firms. But the bus-ec’s get access to B-school funding. The PhD students in the econ department do not. </p>
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<p>Look, nobody is trying to say that getting into a Harvard doctoral program is easy. </p>
<p>What I am saying is that this strategy I have posited can be generalized to all business schools, few of which will be as selective as Harvard. There are a lot of business schools offering PhD programs out there.</p>
<p>for our son, case #4, was more than sufficient to complete a master’s thesis program in 16 months. It was up to son to use the funds wisely and within the alloted time frame. TA/RA duties were pretty light and assigned as needed by the PI. His major was Computer Science-HCI with ME undergrad. </p>
<p>He researched his prospective schools/PI, prior to application to see if “possible” funding was provided on acceptance. No application was sent if no FA provided.</p>