Applying to colleges sounds like a total nightmare for these kids.
Sucks. In some ways its easier than when I applied because it’s all online and there’s the Common App, but it’s just so much more competitive. What was once a backup school is now 50/50 or worse.
It was only ~15 years ago that I applied to one single school. I can’t fathom anyone doing that now because they’d end up screwed. Things have changed really, really quickly, another reason why older generations that are removed from this are so out of touch with college, student loans, etc.
I find myself not particularly sympathetic to “disadvantaged” kids today who are being lapped by other kids who can somehow ace everything because resources.
I was solidly middle class and my SAT prep was buying a Kaplan book with sample tests and taking some and then buying a book from ETS with actual old tests, which was much better than the Kaplan book. Total outlay under $50.
As for college admissions–kids today have the damn internet. I did some research but didn’t know much about college applications and was fine. Today there are probably 100 test prep and college and application info websites. I would probably read tons of them and have TMI but some genuine expertise.
If you do not have the skill/interest/motivation to track down and process such information, then maybe an elite college isn’t for you.
What is “success” in this context? Earning a degree?
GPA, grad school, professional school, and I think other metrics. I believe it’s discussed in the study cited in the article.
Johns Hopkins PhD students will receive minimum annual stipends of $47,000.
I really, really don’t understand the economics of a PhD program, particularly one (like mine) that doesn’t actually have the students doing much teaching.
That works out to about what I got adjusted for inflation, although I don’t know what is typical these days.
I believe I got somewhere in the $20-$24k range starting in 1999, which comes out closer to $45k. But considering this was for a business school degree (which generally offers higher stipends than university average), the JHU number is really surprising to me.
I feel like if I were a single dude without much purpose, just serially getting PhDs seems like a pretty decent life.
Think you’re pretty seriously underestimating the breadth of disadvantages that many people have. It’s not usually just about money.
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As a phd student in the 90s I didn’t get a stipend but I did have an assistantship that paid around 1500/month plus housing (15hrs/week of “work”).
I got $14k a year for 3 years, $19k for the last 3 (they bumped it for everyone that year because nobody was accepting offers lol) about a decade ago
Aren’t you like on the inside, though? Surely you have the info at your disposal to get to the bottom of this.
Things that don’t surprise me for $1000
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Right, I should have said that it’s hard to make the argument for maintaining a PhD program. I can see how it makes sense in other disciplines:
- You might have a humanities PhD student that earns his/her keep by teaching a lot of classes and doing a lot of grading.
- You might have a science PhD student that performs necessary tasks in a lab, and who would have to be replaced by a paid scientist in the alternative world without a PhD program.
But our program (and I think this is common across business programs) doesn’t require much teaching - only a single course over the entire PhD program. And even though students are assigned as research assistants, the net benefit from that to the faculty member they’re assigned to is minimal, and might even be negative. It’s an internship, where the RA assignment is supposed to benefit the student moreso than the faculty member. Further, PhD classes are incredibly small. It’s common to have a faculty member teaching a section with fewer than 5 students. That faculty member receives exactly the same teaching credit for that as they do for teaching a full course of 45 (paying) undergraduates, so there are opportunity costs that go beyond the actual outlays.
There’s no question in my mind that the PhD program is, financially, a large net negative. So why do it? This is the same question that a lot of MBA programs, faced with significantly declining enrollments, are asking. These programs are losing money because they have to offer so much scholarship money to attract students that they can’t actually generate a positive margin. The argument then becomes, “Well of course we can’t drop our MBA program - that would send a terrible signal about the quality of our school. There’s a halo effect that isn’t captured in the spidercrab financial analysis, and if we dropped our MBA program, our undergraduate programs would suffer in response.” (This is an argument that I’ve heard, ironically enough, from a school whose MBA program was substantially lower ranked than the undergraduate program, so if anything the halo effect would have gone the other way.) Yet they continue on the MBA program, convinced that if only they revamp the program they’ll be able to buck the nationwide decline in demand and return the program to its prior glory.
The thing about business schools is that they generally bring in enough money that they can support the PhD program (and a money-losing MBA program) while still being in a net surplus position. But if finances were to go really south (and at many schools, they are), I would expect the PhD and the MBA programs to disappear fairly quickly.
Is part of the argument that if you want to attract top researchers, then you want to have a PhD program because top researchers want good grad students to teach, TA, RA, etc.? And you want top researchers for grant money and prestige reasons.
I think this is partially true, but less so than in the sciences. Some faculty do get utility from training new PhD students. The TA thing is largely irrelevant, because we encourage our students to not TA at all (because basically all non-research tasks are bad uses of time compared to time spent working on research). So our TAs generally come from the undergraduate ranks. Business school faculty are generally not required to pursue grant money because, as mentioned earlier, the school brings in enough to cover research expenditures.
But I think you end up with the right answer, which is some faculty and administrators perceive there to be intangible benefits to having a PhD program, and those benefits are presumably worth the tangible costs of the program. As PhD enrollments decline, and as the market for new faculty gets tougher, that’s a harder and harder argument to make.
Are the business schools bringing in the money through undergrad students of various majors or something else entirely?
I would expect it’s mainly a robust undergrad population taking their classes, often paying a higher per-credit tuition amount than in other schools like Arts & Sciences. Some graduate programs can be profitable, even if MBA programs might not be. For example, executive education and specialized masters programs. Also, I think there’s an increasing demand for non-degree education (e.g., companies want the school to create a customized 3-day program on data analytics for their employees. They won’t get an actual degree, but it can still bring in decent money. Also a pain in the butt for the person teaching it.)
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