I remember the day I was in my adviser’s office and he suggested I consider going to graduate school when I was done with college. I was thinking about going into the Navy at that time and was in my sophomore or junior year. I flat out told him, there was NO WAY I could afford graduate school if it was anything like college. He said, “You don’t pay for graduate school in physics, they pay you.” Whoa! I didn’t even think that was possible. A whole world opened up for me in that one moment.

I love using that line with my student. However, has any one else seen a subtle shift a way from this model over the last few years? More and more I will hear a student say, they have been accepted but there is no funding. COVID is accelerating the problem. I talked to a Master’s student last week at another University that had been accepted into multiple Ph.D. programs but wasn’t offered any funding. Its one thing if its some odd thing that one program is doing, but now it seems like it is growing. It is so unbelievable to someone who studied physics around 2000 that someone would have to pay for their Ph.D. in physics.

Universities provide funding by exchanging employment for educational fees. Some students work as graders, lab instructors, and research assists. The money comes from University operations and grants. Graduate students are paid a barely livable wage which is near the poverty line, but their tuition is nearly waved. While it makes sense that Universities that are struggling with lost revenue and are having to cut back, I am nervous what it will do for the physics community. Why would anyone pay for a Ph.D. too?

Here is my advice to all potential Ph.D. students in the natural sciences. If someone doesn’t fund your Ph.D., DON’T GO! It isn’t worth it. Go to another school that is willing to fund you. For most jobs they really don’t care where you went to school (finance and management consultants are an exception). If you don’t get in, take a year or two off to do something else rewarding (e.g., get a job, start a company, etc) then apply again. Don’t pay for a Ph.D. That’s just nuts!

While it is true that there are fields out there that make students pay for additional schooling such medical and dental schools. (These should be free too.) Students in those fields rack up serious debt, which they can pay back through a decent salary. According to this site family doctors make $241K year where as according to this site physics Ph.D. holders make $129K a year. The extra salary seems nice to be a family doctor, until you consider that a medical school student racks up a ton of debt where as the physics Ph.D. has a couple of reasonably nice years of funded graduate school.

Physics graduate school is grueling. Its going to be north of six years and it is FULL TIME (>60 hours a week). There are often insanely hard qualifying exam that take months to study for. And in the end there is not a clock like college which says, you have completed X numbers of courses, you are done. In graduate school, you keep going until you do it, whatever that is.

On the other hand if people are willing to pay for graduate school why not let them? My stomach just did a somersault as soon as I wrote that sentence. Don’t pay for graduate school (Ph.D. program) in physics! If you need a job, ask for help or start the SPS Career Toolkit.