why are econ stipends so low?

[uwecon85]

Why are econ grad stipends so low compared to engin, sciences, even some other soft sciences?

It seems like people in other fields are getting around 20-30ish on average while my stipend was like 10.5k

[486hunter]

A few points:

(1) 20-30k is high, even for the hard sciences. 10.5k is a nice stipend but it's probably on the low end for econ. So the difference is not as large as you suggest.

(2) Hard science departments are much more profitable for a university than social science departments. In addition, hard science graduates are, on average, a little bit more marketable in the non-academic sector compared to similarly credentials Econ graduates (there are exceptions, I know).

[uwecon85]

1) 20-30k high? for engin? LOL NO. My friend is getting nearly 30k as a CS grad. I got 10.5 teaching 4 sections of 24 [removed by mod] UGs who didn't give a [removed by mod] about econ. [removed by mod] per hour pay if you ask me (although i only worked maybe 7 hours per week on it).
2) Economics is mostly useless. I know this. However, those who enter a graduate program in econ are usually majors in math, cs, engin, stat, etc. They can be making a lot of money if they didn't go to grad school. Those who finish graduate school in econ make tons of money compared to those who finish in hard sciences (except physics guys who sell out for quant jobs). The average transfer pricing or consulting gig is like 100k+

[uwecon85]

The Chronicle: Stipends for Graduate Assistants, 2003-4

[uwecon85]

I guess econ depts use econ to make sure econ grads get w = mpl or whatever they teach at the ug level. actually no. cause the mpl of teaching 100 UG students (many in business) should be higher. it's probably some absurd game where for some subset of players taking a low wage is a signal of how badly they want to suffer for the phd.

[jeeves0923]

At top institutions, econ stipends far exceed the 10.5 number. I believe this year we had:
37 at Stanford
36 at Yale
26 at Princeton
28? at Harvard
23 at Berkeley
20 at NWU
20+ at Chicago

... This is pretty good.
Even given all of the schools with lower stipends, the process is still extremely competitive. Perhaps hard sciences and engineering people have a low supply and the institutions have a high demand for those students. Seems pretty straightforward to me...

[unitroot]

uwecon85,

I don't think that you can base your inference on econ stipends vs other specialties just based on your experiences at one university. Specially, if it'ss UW. It is a special case.

First, UW's econ department seems to be specially stingy. They offer something like 12K or sometimes less per year. This is not comparable to what students get paid at other schools. I have friends who are PhD students at big public universities in the midwest and southwest. They typically get paid between 15 and 18K per year. Most of them live in small college towns with reasonable living costs. In the light of this, UW's funding of its economics students is outrageously bad.

Next, UW is basically "almost" the top university in computer science. If you rank the top computer science departments in the united states, it would look like this:

Tier 1:

Berkeley, Stanford, MIT, CMU

Tier 2: University of Washington, UIUC, Cornell, Caltech

Tier 3: everything else

(this might be crude, but that's how my CS friends rank them based on their preferences).

Basically, UW's computer science department, unlike their economics department, competes with the top or almost-top CS departments for the best students. And therefore, their CS stipends tend to be good. UW is also a good place to study engineering overall. If UW had a top 10 economics department, then I bet it would have to offer much better stipends.

Next, the opportunity costs are different. The opportunity cost of attending graduate school for CS and engineering students is much higher. Most of the stuff that they spent 4-5 years studying in college is directly applicable in well defined areas in business, whereas 9 out of 10 economics students have not taken much courses that are directly applicable to most jobs out there. And so, the employment opportunities of economics undergraduates tend to be good, but nowhere as good as of those who did CS or engineering in school. Those UW CS graduate students (at least the US citizens) could probably get a well paid job at the top companies like Microsoft or Google or very promising startups, if they only bothered to take that route.

[C152dude]

deleted

[zwicker]

All of my offers were between $14500 and $23000. I can't complain.

[486hunter]

Originally Posted by uwecon85

1) 20-30k high? for engin? LOL NO. My friend is getting nearly 30k as a CS grad. I got 10.5 teaching 4 sections of 24 [removed by mod] UGs who didn't give a [removed by mod] about econ. [removed by mod] per hour pay if you ask me (although i only worked maybe 7 hours per week on it).
2) Economics is mostly useless. I know this. However, those who enter a graduate program in econ are usually majors in math, cs, engin, stat, etc. They can be making a lot of money if they didn't go to grad school. Those who finish graduate school in econ make tons of money compared to those who finish in hard sciences (except physics guys who sell out for quant jobs). The average transfer pricing or consulting gig is like 100k+

I know that a number of hard science grads get stipends in the 30k range. And I don't doubt that your friend is one of them. I'm just saying that this is not the norm across the entire spectrum. On average, I would guess that the difference bwteen econ and the hard sciences is likely < $5k.