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Before PhD Admissions Season Starts, Discover What a Standard Offer Is in Your Field

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At this point in the year, you should be (nearly) done preparing your PhD program applications and looking forward to receiving at least one offer of admission. Congratulations on your progress!

If you haven’t already, this is the right time to fully investigate what a standard offer of admission looks like in your field and particularly at the caliber of universities you have applied to. That way, when your offer letters arrive, you can tell which ones are up to the standard and which aren’t. You can also begin to form an idea of what the time management and financial sides of your life will be like during your PhD.

standard admission offer

My PhD is in a STEM field (biomedical engineering), and my understanding when I was applying to programs was that I would be fully funded for at least 5 years. This is common in well-funded STEM programs, but more hit-or-miss in other disciplines and at programs struggling for sufficient funding. However, when I was applying I didn’t understand that the source of my funding mattered quite a lot to how I would actually spend my time in graduate school. I wasn’t very discerning regarding that aspect of my funding offers, so this article encourages you to do a better job than I did preparing to understand your offer letters and investigate the funding norms of the programs you’re admitted to, especially for upper-year graduate students.

What Does It Mean to Be Fully Funded?

Have you ever heard, “You shouldn’t pay to get a PhD” or “An acceptance without funding is a rejection”? These statements are valid for many fields (e.g., STEM), but not necessarily all. If you are in one of the fields where it is common to (partially) self-fund or need an outside job, you need to know that to have realistic expectations of your offer letters. If you are in a field that is supposed to fully fund students, you know that offers with partial or zero funding are not ones worth accepting (even if that’s the only type you get!).

What it means to be funded can also vary by field and institution.

The fullest definition of funding is to have your tuition and fees paid on your behalf and receive a livable stipend for all 12 months of the year guaranteed for the entire duration of your PhD. (I didn’t receive any offers that were that generous!)

It’s quite rare to receive an open-ended guarantee of funding as the programs want you to progress toward graduation at a reasonable pace. It’s important to find out if the typical course for a PhD student in the programs you’ve applied to is to be funded until graduation (after a reasonable period of time, even if it’s more than 5 years) or if funding becomes difficult to secure later on in the PhD (e.g., there are 10 funded positions but 15 students competing for them).

While ideally you would accept only an offer of full funding, in some fields that isn’t a norm, and you might not get a PhD in that field if you held out for that. But the other side of the coin is that in fields where full funding is typical, you shouldn’t attend a program that can’t or won’t offer it to you. Either the program is under-funded or you aren’t their priority.

Further reading: Unfunded Ph.D.s: To Go or Not to Go

Do Graduate Students Take on Outside Work or Debt?

A corollary to the above discussion about the degree of funding offered is how students pay for their lives (and tuition and fees) if they don’t receive full funding.

Is it common for graduate students in your field to have outside jobs, either year-round or during unfunded semesters? (Some fields pay stipends only during the academic year, leaving graduate students to their own devices over the summer.)

Do graduate students sometimes take out student loans, and if they do is it to pay their tuition and fees or to pay for living expenses?

You may find variations in these norms across the programs you are accepted to, even within the same field; this is a more difficult subject to investigate, but a very important one. Even if a program tells you that you will receive a year-round stipend all through graduate school, the students will be able to tell you if that stipend is livable or if they are turning to outside work or debt to supplement it.

What Do You Have to Do to Receive Funding?

There are two sources of money for stipends: fellowships and assistantships. When you are granted a fellowship that pays your stipend (or you might be on a training grant), you have officially “no work expectation;” you are free to pursue your classes and/or dissertation with all of your time. An assistantship that pays your stipend, on the other hand, comes with a work expectation between you and your department/university. An assistantship to receive a full stipend is generally 20 hours/week, but some assistantships offer fractional pay for fractions of that time.

There are a few variations of assistantships that are important to distinguish among. A teaching assistantship requires you to teach or assist a faculty member in teaching a course. Research assistantships require you to do research under the supervision of a faculty member; this research could become part of your own dissertation (more common) or be separate from it (less common). Sometimes assistantships are for other types of service around the university, such as an administrative role; these might be labeled graduate assistantships or similar.

In terms of having the maximum time to pursue your PhD, fellowships and research assistantships for your dissertation are superior to teaching assistantships, graduate assistantships, and research assistantships not for your dissertation. The former set allows you to devote all your time to degree progress, while the latter set carves probably 20 hours/week out of your time for non-dissertation-related work. (That’s not to say that the latter set of work might not benefit you in other ways, but whether it does or not depends on your career goals.)

It is imperative to know what kind(s) of work requirement is typical for your field to evaluate your offer letters and have realistic expectations about how you will use your time in graduate school. It’s not uncommon for graduate students to receive funding from different types of sources throughout their PhDs, so don’t assume that because you were offered a fellowship in your first year that it will necessarily continue. In particular, how are students funded once they are finished with classes and ready to sink into their dissertation research (e.g., have achieved candidacy)?

What Is the Time to Degree?

A question for the programs that have accepted you is: What is the average time to graduation? (Bonus: What is the standard deviation?) Make sure that the answers you get from the programs are in line with recent averages in your field.

While a shorter average time to graduation is attractive, make sure it’s because students are actually graduating on time and not just being kicked out for failure to progress if they take too long.

If the average is longer, ask how students support themselves after the fifth or sixth year: Are they still funded or are they on their own?

Where to Find Answers

The best places to find answers to these questions are:

  • Current or recent students in your field (e.g., alumni from your college, (friends of) friends)
  • Professors in your field who you already know (e.g., your research/academic advisors at your college)
  • Administrative assistants at programs you’ve been accepted to
  • Potential advisors who are courting you (talk about this outside your interview time)
  • The PhD Stipends database (pay particular attention to the Living Wage Ratio)

Having a baseline of knowledge of what funding packages are standard in your field will help you immensely to read and understand the offer letters you receive.

If you are a current graduate student, please report your field and what a standard offer of admission is in this anonymous 6-question survey!

Eliminate Debt Before You Start Graduate School

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Here’s the thing about debt: When you have a low income, you think that you have to use debt to purchase the things that you/need want. Buy now and spread your payments out over time! But here’s the thing about having a low income: you can’t afford to tie up your limited income with debt payments. If you are about to enter graduate school, which for most people is an unambiguous period of low income, you should do everything in your power to avoid taking on debt and eliminate the problematic debt you already have.

eliminate debt grad school

The Trouble with Debt Payments during Graduate School

The stipend you receive in graduate school isn’t intended to be remunerative. I like to say that the universities expect us to research for free, so they pay us just enough to keep us from taking outside jobs. (That is, for the graduate students who even receive a living wage – many don’t.)

If you’re lucky, your stipend is commensurate with or slightly above the living wage for your county. That is, you hopefully will be able to pay rent, eat (in), and get around town, and perhaps you can afford another modest expenditure like visiting your family, saving a little, entertainment, or some shopping. Have you ever heard the old joke about college: “Sleep, study, socialize: Pick two.”? Well, apply that to your finances in graduate school. “Basic living expenses, a splurge here and there, and saving/debt repayment: Pick 1-2.”

I’m being slightly hyperbolic; there is obviously a range of financial situations in graduate school, but you will almost certainly be in one of these (assuming you aren’t being supported by someone else):

  • Your stipend isn’t enough to cover basic living expenses, let alone debt payments – you’re going further into debt or spending some time working an outside job.
  • Your stipend can give you an okay lifestyle as long as you don’t have debt payments.
  • You could afford debt payments on your stipend if pressed, but there are a lot of other things you’d rather do with it (e.g., lifestyle upgrades, saving).

Knock Out Your Debt Before You Matriculate

If you are planning to start graduate school next year or soon, take the next few months to eliminate your debt or at least reduce it as much as you can.

If you can’t eliminate all of your debt in that time frame, you have to triage! Sort your various debts by priority level and work on them from highest priority to lowest priority. (This method is a hybrid of the snowball and avalanche methods of debt repayment.) The objective is to minimize the debt payments you need to make during graduate school, which means eliminating certain kinds of debts entirely if possible.

With this method, you will pay the minimum balance on all of your debts and throw as much money as you can scratch up toward the top priority debt. Once you have eliminated that debt completely, you move to the next top priority debt and throw everything you can at it. Concentrating your efforts like this gives you the best chance of paying off a single debt completely, therefore eliminating its minimum monthly payment and lowering the total amount of money you are required to pay monthly toward your debt once you start graduate school.

Low-Balance Debt: Higher Priority

The easiest debts to eliminate completely are those with low balances. If you have any debt balances under $1,000 or a few thousand dollars, those should become a high priority because they are possible to eliminate completely in just a few months.

High-Interest Rate Debt: Higher Priority

Also a high priority is high-interest rate debt because that is the debt that is growing the fastest and costing you the most money overall. For example, if you have two debts both with balances of approximately $1,000, you should prioritize the one at the higher interest rate.

Deferrable Student Loans: Lower Priority

Check with your lender to be sure, but student loans should have the option to be deferred while you are in graduate school. Since there would be no minimum payment due on these loans once you matriculate, they are a lower priority to pay off before you start graduate school.

However, that does not mean that you should ignore them completely prior to or during deferment. Unsubsidized student loans accrue interest even in deferment, and it is common for student loans to have a moderate to high interest rate.

If you eliminate your higher-priority debt and can start paying your student loans down before graduate school, definitely do so, starting with the highest interest rate loan.

Mortgage: Zero Priority

If you’re near the start of your home ownership journey, I’m betting there’s no chance you can pay off your mortgage in just a few months. (If that assumption is wrong, go for it!) Mortgage debt will therefore be in your life during graduate school, so prioritize paying off basically any other debt before you start making higher-than-the-minimum mortgage payments. However, if you do own a home, you need to check that you will still be able to afford the payment once you switch to living on your stipend. Selling your home, renting out your home, and renting out bedrooms in your home are all good options if you can’t afford it on your stipend.

Dump Collateralized Debt that You Can’t Afford

You may discover, as you look at your stipend offer letter and add up your minimum monthly debt payments (taking into consideration what you can eliminate before you start graduate school), that you either can’t afford all of your remaining payments or that maintaining all of them would financially paralyze you during graduate school (no fun, no saving).

Your best option in this case is to eliminate your collateralized debt, which is your debt that is against a specific asset that you own, such as your home or car. A very accessible scenario is if you bought a car and took out a car loan based on your previous higher salary, and now that car payment is far too high for your lower stipend. A simple fix is to sell your car, pay off your car loan, and buy a less expensive car (ideally without debt). You may “lose money” by doing this because you owned the car over a period of steep depreciation, but that consequence doesn’t change your inability to afford the payment on your stipend.

“But I Don’t Have a High Income Now to Pay Off My Debt!”

The advice in this article applies to practically anyone who is about to start graduate school and not currently in graduate school, even college students.

Certainly, if you have a higher-than-a-stipend salary right now, start cutting back your lifestyle to what it will be during graduate school and use the cash flow you generate to pay off your debt. You have to do it pretty soon anyway, so you might as well make your transition to graduate school less of a shock by acclimating yourself to the necessary frugality and eliminating as many minimum payments as you can.

However, even if you have a low-to-non-existent income right now, e.g., you are in college, you still have time on your side. Yes, you need to keep your grades up until graduation. Yes, you should enjoy your last few months with your college friends. But you still almost certainly have more free time now (and especially over the summer!) than you will once you start graduate school. That time can be used to generate a side income that you can immediately apply to debt repayment. Bonus points if you can establish a side income that you can continue during graduate school (time permitting), such as online freelance work or passive income.

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Don’t Forget to Save

One caveat: Don’t become so focused on debt repayment that you forget to save up some cash. It’s very helpful to have a small amount of savings available to you during your transition to graduate school, particularly if you have to move. There are a lot of expenses involved with moving and establishing a new residence and possibly fees to be paid to your university, plus most graduate students have to wait rather a long time (over a month) before their first paycheck arrives. It does you no good to work so hard to eliminate your problematic debt only to turn to a credit card because you have no savings for the transition.

Further reading: Bring Savings to Grad School

How intense you need to be in your debt repayment relates to how much high-priority debt you have and your ability to repay debt during graduate school. The more debt you have that is possible to eliminate entirely and the lower your stipend relative to the local cost of living, the more essential this process is to complete prior to matriculation.

Bring Savings to Grad School

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Even if you are earning a stipend during graduate school, it’s essential to have some savings already when you start graduate school. In all likelihood, you are going to wait several weeks before you receive your first paycheck or fellowship disbursement, and those particular weeks are going to be unusually expensive ones.

Why Does It Take So Long to Get Paid?

Processing payroll takes time, and you probably won’t even start setting it up until after you arrive on campus.

If you are working for your university (receiving compensatory pay as an RA, TA, or GA), you will have to perform some work before you are paid. It is most typical for graduate students receiving compensatory pay to be paid monthly, so your first paycheck will arrive near the end of your first or second month after starting grad school. While you may be required by your program to be on campus for orientation, unless you are concurrently starting your RA or TA duties, you may not be paid for that time.

If you are receiving a fellowship stipend, you may be paid monthly or in lump sums. Either way, the disbursement from your funding source has to be processed by your university before it is sent to you, so you will also be paid after the start of the school year.

Unfortunately, while your pay won’t arrive until some weeks after you start grad school, your start incurring your expenses well before.

Further reading: Why I’m Voting Yes

What Will My Expenses Be Before I Am Paid?

Not only do you have to sustain yourself normally before you are paid (food, housing, transportation), you have additional start-up expenses associated with the beginning of graduate school.

1) Normal Expenses

If you’ve never tracked your spending before, you may be surprised by all the different expenses you have each month. Your basic needs are food, housing, transportation, clothing, and insurance. On top of those, you may have some discretionary expenses such as restaurants and bars, entertainment, and shopping.

2) Moving Expenses

Many if not most graduate students move to their university towns prior to starting graduate school. Your costs to move may be as low as only gas money or as high as flights and shipping, depending on the distance moved and the amount of possessions being moved.

3) Housing Start-Up Expenses

You should expect to pay your rent for each month up front (e.g., pay for September’s rent by the end of August), so at a minimum you will pay for some housing expenses before your first paycheck. On top of first month’s rent, you may be required to put down a security deposit and possibly pay last month’s rent as well; policies vary by location. Some rental companies in college towns offer discounts on these types of expenses.

After you get into your new home, you will need to furnish it to some degree (either you will pay to move furniture or you will buy furniture in your new town) and stock your fridge/pantry. You should also purchase renter’s insurance, possibly paying for the whole first year at once.

Further reading: My Beloved Air Mattress: An Anti-Debt Story

If you have chosen to buy a home prior to starting graduate school, of course you will have much higher housing start-up expenses.

4) Transportation Start-Up Expenses

If you will own and use a car during graduate school, you will have to register the car in your new location and update your insurance policy. Buying a car for graduate school will involve either paying for the car up front or taking out a loan, possibly with a down payment.

5) University Expenses

You are likely taking classes in your first year of graduate school, and your courses may require you to use certain textbooks. You might also be responsible for paying some fees or even partial tuition near the start of the school year.

What Are My Options for Paying My Expenses Before I Am Paid?

First, minimize your expenses to the greatest extent that you can by using frugal strategies. Some tips that are relevant to the start of the school year are:

  • accept as much free food as you can
  • borrow your textbooks from the library or older graduate students
  • delay buying non-essential furniture to spread out the cost and buy used
  • try living car-free if you are not certain that you will need a car

Second, by far the best way to pay for your expenses before you receive your first paycheck is to use savings. It would be ideal to have a least a couple if not several thousand dollars on hand for your transition to grad school.

If you don’t have the cash available, you’ll likely have to take out debt of some kind. Some graduate programs offer short-term loans to their students to help them through these kinds of transitions. Another option might be a personal bank loan. Accruing credit card debt should be a last resort; not only will you have to use your first paychecks to play catch-up, your debt will almost certainly generate a lot of interest charges in the meantime.

How Should I Build Up My Savings In Advance?

If you are already saving money for other purposes, divert some of it to a special transition-to-grad-school fund. If you do not currently have the excess cash flow to save money, you need to either increase your income or decrease your expenses to create some. Check out our side hustle series for ideas for increasing your income and our frugal practices for ideas for decreasing your expenses.

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Vote with Your Feet, Prospective Graduate Students

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When I was applying to and interviewing for grad school, I told myself that the only factor I would consider when selecting a school was the advisor with whom I would work. I wanted to do high-quality research in my sub-discipline of interest and wouldn’t let the reputation of the program, the city, or anything else get in the way of working with the best advisor (for me) possible.

Thankfully, my preferences with respect to the non-research factors crept into my decision-making subconsciously when I compared the programs I’d been accepted to. Ultimately, I decided that two potential advisors at different universities would be equally excellent for me to work with, and I allowed the cities the universities were in to break the tie. Namely, one city had better weather… and my then-boyfriend-now-husband was already enrolled in a PhD program there.

Now that I have completed graduate school and corresponded with thousands of students at universities across the US, I realize just how fortunate I was that my decision-making process didn’t completely backfire on me. Yes, your research advisor and the quality of the research produced by your department is an important consideration, but not to the exclusion of other factors affecting your quality of life.

Your stipend and benefits offer will greatly affect your lifestyle during graduate school and possibly your net worth for the rest of your life. Consider the same student accepted to two programs, one of which would force her to live paycheck to paycheck while the other would allow her to save. This disparity in savings ability over even this short period of time can result in a difference of hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars in retirement due to the power of compound interest.

Further reading: Whether You Save During Graduate School Can Have a $1,000,000 Effect on Your Retirement

If you are a competitive applicant—meaning you’ve been accepted to two or more programs—you have the opportunity to take your financial offers into consideration. While you shouldn’t necessarily accept the largest stipend and benefits offer (after adjusting for cost of living), you should vote with your feet by vocally declining offers that too low to provide you with a reasonable lifestyle.

If you do decline any admissions offers for this reason (perhaps among others), you should let the departments know why. At the same time that you are competing with other applicants for admissions, the departments are competing with one another to attract the best individuals and overall class. Universities pay attention to how well they are doing in comparison with their peer institutions on various metrics, and many of them try to offer stipends and benefits that are in line with their chief competitors. (Some programs even offer unusually high stipends when they are trying to move up in rankings.) The departments pay attention to which programs they they lose students to and why. Giving them the extra information that the lower stipend (relative to the local cost of living) or lack of benefits played into your decision is a great act of service to both the departments and students if they choose to use this information to improve how they treat their current and future students.

Once you have accepted a program’s offer of admissions, you still have the opportunity to advocate for higher pay and better benefits, especially through assembling with other students. However, your strongest position for making your voice heard is often before you accept an offer or upon your rejection of it. Once you have started graduate school, the switching costs become so high that departments practically have you over a barrel. Graduate students rarely negotiate their offer letters, so one of the best actions they can take is to vote with their feet by declining unacceptable offers outright. It’s hard to overstate how much universities depend on graduate students and postdocs to bring in grant money, produce research that raises their prestige, and create their other major product (undergraduate education). This value should be reflected in the pay students receive, and if it’s not, the departments need to hear about it.

Further listening:

There are two practical steps prospective graduate students can take to strengthen their position when accepting or rejecting admissions offers:

1. Apply to a number of programs. I know it’s expensive and time-consuming to add schools to your application list, but that cost pales in comparison to how much going to a poor-paying or unsupportive program will hurt you over the years you are in it. Having multiple admissions offers will give you the best chance of attending a program that will support you as a whole person.

Further reading: The Full Cost of Applying to PhD Programs

2. Thoroughly research the stipend offer letter extended to you by each program you gain admission to as well as the benefits provided by the university and how the benefits have changed over time. While some of that research is available online, you will almost certainly need to talk with multiple current students to get the real scoop. Ask them if they can live comfortably on their stipends and how they define comfortable. Ask them if there are any common financial pain points that students gripe about. Ask them if out-of-pocket fees have increased in the past few years, whether the ACA has changed their health insurance benefits, and about any special considerations you have such as partner benefits, childcare subsidies, or support for students with chronic medical conditions. If the students share their perception of an “us vs. them” attitude on the part of the administration or an administration that is powerless protect students from federal and state funding changes, take that as a major red flag.

Further reading: Before PhD Admissions Season Starts, Discover What a Standard Offer Is in Your Field

When I was applying to grad school, I didn’t know about benefits, unions, how states cutting higher education funding affects grad students, or health insurance subsidies. I had no idea that a good advisor or good department could be housed in a university that has an adversarial relationship with its students. I consider myself very fortunate that I ended up at a university that provided a reasonable stipend and benefits and had a supportive administration just by following my research and weather preferences.

I don’t want you to get ‘unlucky’ in this process simply because of a lack of information or that you only received one admissions offer. I want you to accept an offer that allows you to live a reasonably comfortable lifestyle in graduate school for your own well-being, and I want you to signal to departments whose offers didn’t meet that standard where they are lacking for the benefit of their current and future students. If enough of us vote with our feet by rejecting low offers, the departments and universities will hear us and be forced to change.