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Comment by Alex_Butters | Hacker News Reader

Even being a poor grad student at an Ivy feels like this. The undergrads are wealthy and the grad students cherish every dollar of their ~$30k salary while still sometimes do side work to get by since city's have rents set for the higher income undergrads.

There was some resentment we had for our students to say the least.

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I'm a poor grad student at an ivy, and I have to say that I find just under 30k a year far more than enough for myself. The whole starving grad student just doesn't hold up in rich private institutes. I live in a cheap house with four others, but my peers have apartments in some of the nicest buildings around. I cook my own food most of the time, but many grad students eat out twice a day, even if only at a food truck.

Now I won't pretend that 30k is much to raise a family with, or much if you have to help out your parents or siblings. But I'm saving a sizeable chunk of my income and I'm not even supplementing it with tutoring the rich undergrads, which can net you two hundred plus a week for a few hours of work.

I thought the stipends were more like $12k/yr and it was not allowed to seek outside work (though everyone did and had to, to get by).

My offers for stem PhD programs at ivy-type private research institutions were about 30k, one was more like 35k. At university of California schools, the stipend was more like 19k (and a higher cost of living). My current stipend is the standard here and not due to unusual scholarships or grant money. We're supposed to ask permission for outside work, but the department will actively help you find people to tutor.

Ah. My sister was in the humanities at an Ivy, so that could be the difference.

Humanities grad students have a _much_ worse deal than STEM ones, typically.

From what I've seen, for STEM, the assumption is that your tuition is covered, you get a stipend that you can actually live on, your medical insurance is covered. For humanities, the working assumption is that none of that is true, and if some of it happens to be true, you're in luck.

Oh, and the humanities degrees often take longer too.

Yeah :(

I worked for a physics professor at an ivy league school, not as a grad student, but as a software engineer on his team. I was working on a project with a database that contained all the personnel information -- everyone was getting between $30 and $35k.

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