Money Talk: Getting a PhD and $$$

I don't know if more people are getting PhD's, it's hard to find recent data on enrollment numbers, but it feels like I'm inundated with content about getting a PhD in ways that weren't the norm five years ago.

While I appreciate people being transparent about the process of applying to PhD programs and elements of the hidden curriculum, I find myself continuously perplexed around the lack of transparency around money and getting a PhD. I find myself most perplexed because it seems the conversations around money and getting a PhD are painted with a broad brush. When in actuality, money while getting a PhD, and soon after defending, is greatly impacted by a multitude of factors. I guess I'm saying that the conversation around academia and money needs more nuance. So let's talk about it.

To put it plainly, the misallocation of federal funds and halting federal funding to research has created cascading effects for recent PhD grads and those navigating the research and higher ed job market. Economic anxiety is high right now - between rising cost of gas and groceries, rising cost of rent and home prices, all while Black women continue to be unemployed, underemployed or laid off. It feels like the fuse is burning on both ends. And for people in academia, like myself, who study equity, racism, and white supremacy, the money getting funneled to support our research seemingly disappeared overnight, which seems to be directly impacting the employment opportunities for recent and soon to be grads.

I can't imagine what it's like to live on a grad student stipend right now, but that doesn't mean I can't relate to living on a grad student stipend. Since graduating from undergrad, I have made an average of $40,000 a year. This figure may sound alarming or cautiously optimistic, depending on where you live. Which is why location is one of the most important things to consider when applying to, and accepting offers to PhD programs. In my first program, making close to $35,000 a year was fine. I was living in the Central Valley of California. Now when I moved from the Central Valley of California, to Long Island, New York, that $40,000 before taxes and student fees was an absolute jump scare. I also moved from a program who provided summer funding to a program that didn’t. This brings me to the first thing to consider with money and applying to PhD programs, how far will your stipend stretch. So when you hear people online talk about all the things they're able to do with their graduate stipend, it's important to consider that one, location determines what's a "doable" grad student stipend, and two, it is known that graduate stipends are typically contingent on the type of school (private versus public) and the type of program (STEM vs non-STEM).

Now, if you grew up low income or working class, any type of yearly salary is nice, it's nothing to snicker about, but there is a disconnect when you realize how much labor goes into whatever agreement allows for you to have tuition reimbursement. And that is the nature of the neoliberal capitalist beast. This is what happens when private equity and hedge fund individuals get into higher ed, because you go from being paid for working towards knowledge production and things connected to research, but then it soon becomes how can your labor be extracted to support the larger purpose of the university? TA labor is some of the most underpaid labor on a college campus, but oftentimes they are responsible for what drives undergraduate experiences: grades. I've been a TA since 2016, and I have never seen a cohort of students so obsessed with grades as this current cohort of college students. So the fact that most TAs are responsible for grading, you would think the university would support them with more concrete resources.

I can assure you most college students have no idea that most lecturers are getting paid $2,000 per credit. Which means they are getting paid $6,000 (before taxes) to teach one 13-week course. I share this because if you're considering a PhD, you need to keep your eyes on the end goal, which isn't a done dissertation, it's landing a job. These fundamental issues were never clearly laid out for me when I started my PhD journey in 2017, so I'm sharing them to help another first gen college grad who's looking into a PhD make the most informed decision.

So yes, you might get a PhD without having to pay tuition, but what you don't pay in tuition you certainly pay for in research funds and trying to support yourself while making little money for six years. It's a financial commitment either way.

How pay and resources disparities may impact your research

As sociologists, we are trained to identify inequality, yet as a discipline, sociologists continue to use evaluation metrics in hiring that reproduce disparities. The biggest predictors for landing a faculty position is if your parent had a PhD and your publication record, two outcomes that favor people who aren't poor and don't come from historically marginalized backgrounds. How ironic. Now, the data about the first point is hard to capture, but the publication record is generally accepted as an important factor across all faculty hiring, so let's flesh this out.

In order to publish, you need resources: access to data and research experience. You also need time to conduct research and analyze data. If all grad students were given a livable wage, all grad students would have equal opportunity to publish, but clearly, that isn't our current reality. For lots of PhD candidates and recent PhD grads, they are met with a number of constrained choices. If no one is paying them to sit with their data and publish, they have to go out and make money in other ways, which limits the time and resources they have to dedicate to writing and publishing. So there are clear structural arguments to be made about why publication records are an outcome of who is better resourced, not who is a better candidate with a stronger research trajectory.

Navigating unemployment post-grad while still participating in scholarly "work" (writing, publishing, presenting at conferences) has made the disparities in access to resources more abundantly clear. I'm a year post-defense and have had to pay out of pocket for every software, conference registration fee, and any subscription related to writing or data storage. Nothing in academia is "free," and telling first-gen college students that a PhD is a viable option because the tuition is free is only telling one side of the story.

If it’s on your heart to pursue a PhD, by all means explore the options, but it’s important to consider how the commitment will shape your livelihood. Most of us don’t have parents or partners who can pay our rent during the summer, and a lot of us leave our communities for these universities, which means living at home isn’t an option. So before you make the commitment, ask yourself if the money makes sense.