Why are PhD Programs Fully Funded?

[coolswimmer800]

Like many other universities, my department decided to not enroll new PhD students / stop continuing to fund them.

I am wondering why universities fund PhD students? What incentivizes universities to do so?

At least from my PhD program, all tuition was covered, stipends, health and dental insurance were offered for up to 5 years with no strings attached and no student union. This seems like a very high cost for the departments.

I can see how departments can potentially save a little by hiring PhD students as adjuncts, but I think fully funded PhD programs are mostly to increase the prestige / brand of the university? Am I missing something?

[marshwiggle]

Like many other universities, my department decided to not enroll new PhD students / stop continuing to fund them.

I am wondering why universities fund PhD students? What incentivizes universities to do so?

At least from my PhD program, all tuition was covered, stipends, health and dental insurance were offered for up to 5 years with no strings attached and no student union. This seems like a very high cost for the departments.

I can see how departments can potentially save a little by hiring PhD students as adjuncts, but I think fully funded PhD programs are mostly to increase the prestige / brand of the university? Am I missing something?

The question is kind of backwards. Unless it's a professional program, where a PhD basically guarantees a very high salary on completion, what sane person would invest the ridiculous cost to get one? (As always, for the very wealthy, it might have vanity value.)

[dismalist]

PhD programs make up part of the credibility of a research university. Students in such programs need to be the best. By funding students, the program gets to choose who it admits. If programs were unfunded, only those who could pay would apply, and those are not necessarily the best potential researchers.

[inframarginal_externality]

If you were to look at the criteria to be an R1 institution, PhD production across different domains are a big part of obtaining R1 status. So setting aside the benefits of PhD students in terms of teaching/TAing, subsidizing PhD students in many fields is crucial to obtaining/maintaining R1 status.

[Parasaurolophus]

Yup. Having a PhD program (1) is prestigious, (2) makes your faculty feel important, and (3) significantly decreases your faculty's marking load, enabling them to spend more time on research. It also helps to incentivize your faculty to do more research, disseminate more research, build research networks, etc. which, in turn, helps to build departmental and university prestige.

So: when you're talking about subjects without much of a direct employment pipeline, you'd have a pretty tough time attracting good PhD students if you didn't offer them some kind of financial carrot, just the giant financial stick of paying for tuition plus living expenses themselves.

You'd certainly get students--NSSR has loads of graduate students, for example!--but you probably wouldn't get the best of them. And if you're in an environment where other good programs are funding their students, well, you'd definitely not get the cream of the crop.


Seriously: imagine what would happen if faculty with cushy 2-2 or lower loads suddenly had to teach 4-4 or higher loads and do all of their own marking. Their research output would decline significantly. Paying graduate students is a way of subsidizing faculty research. The real question is whether the return on that investment is worth it. And for a lot of R1s, I rather suspect the answer is: "on the whole, yes".

[Puget]

In the sciences, doing a PhD is essentially a research job most of the time-- it's win-win, in that the students need to be trained and turn into productive scientists, but making them pay for the privilege would not be very fair-- it would be like a very long unpaid (worse, pay to play!) internship. PhD does not equal undergrad, or even masters, in this respect.

[dismalist]

... making them pay for the privilege would not be very fair ... .

World wasn't meant to be fair! :-)

Their training allows them to earn a higher income or have more fun after the PhD. One could just let candidates borrow now and get the higher income later. As we do with college. As this is not done, there must be a reason and it is for purposes of quality selection.

[apl68]

Seriously: imagine what would happen if faculty with cushy 2-2 or lower loads suddenly had to teach 4-4 or higher loads and do all of their own marking. Their research output would decline significantly. Paying graduate students is a way of subsidizing faculty research. The real question is whether the return on that investment is worth it. And for a lot of R1s, I rather suspect the answer is: "on the whole, yes".

I came away from grad school convinced that the main reason we PhD students were there was to serve as cheap labor.  Whether we graduated or had a career in our fields wasn't a concern.  I went in thinking that my four-year fellowship was a fantastic, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity--and left feeling that six years of my life had been strip mined for the school's benefit.

[mamselle]

Answers will vary by discipline, so are you humanities, sciences, other?

M.

[polly_mer]

Grad students do most of the research work in my fields.  The point of paying grad students is they are the cheapest way to get the work done and the grad students you want have other excellent options.  The trade-off for graduate school is the extra education and mentoring one is supposed to get over immediately high pay.

Programs that don't pay essentially the same as a job when taking into account the education/apprenticeship part won't have graduate students.

No graduate students and the research doesn't get done, which is a problem in the short-term for a PI and the long-term for society that relies on that research.

The grading stuff is done by paid undergrads in a good program.  Being a TA generally means taking one's turn at the recitations/labs, but it's not a primary reason for graduate students.  Adjuncts would actually be cheaper to hire in many cases and would do better.

[bio-nonymous]

Many labs in the life sciences operate as a Ponzi scheme in some ways. PhD students and postdocs are brought in to do the work as cheap as possible so that that more grant money can be brought in to fund more students and postdocs to do more research to get more money. There is about 1 tenure track position for every 7 or so postdocs (data from a few years ago, so it is likely worse now with hiring freezes and the pandemic looming). Some PhD students get jobs in industry, some languish as postdocs hoping for a shot at a tenure track job, others do something else with their lives after all that effort. The least that can be done for the PhD students is to pay them something for all that work--50-60 hours a week in a lab for 5 or so years in exchange for tuition, health insurance, and ~25K a year isn't that great...but, you are trained to be a scientist as a bonus.

[Caracal]

Seriously: imagine what would happen if faculty with cushy 2-2 or lower loads suddenly had to teach 4-4 or higher loads and do all of their own marking. Their research output would decline significantly. Paying graduate students is a way of subsidizing faculty research. The real question is whether the return on that investment is worth it. And for a lot of R1s, I rather suspect the answer is: "on the whole, yes".

I came away from grad school convinced that the main reason we PhD students were there was to serve as cheap labor.  Whether we graduated or had a career in our fields wasn't a concern.  I went in thinking that my four-year fellowship was a fantastic, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity--and left feeling that six years of my life had been strip mined for the school's benefit.

That is true for some schools in the humanities and not true for others. Where I went, for five guaranteed years of funding, the school got 4 semesters of TAing out of us. Not really a cheap source of labor.

[marshwiggle]

Programs that don't pay essentially the same as a job when taking into account the education/apprenticeship part won't have graduate students.

I certainly wouldn't have even considered graduate school if I'd had to pay out of pocket. I bought a new car my first term in graduate school since I had decent scholarship money.

[Caracal]

There's also just no real way the system would work without giving grad students stipends. I knew somebody who worked a full time professional job through grad school, but that's not something most people can do. If grad students all had to work 30 hours a week, they'd never finish.

[Durchlässigkeitsbeiwert]

I am wondering why universities fund PhD students?

At my [science?] sub-field they don't.
Funds are normally coming from the professor's grants, since grad students are the cheapest research workforce available.
Though, department does chip in occasionally (e.g they flew in prospective grad students several years ago).