It's a bit of a shame that the US doesn't really allow part time PhDs (at least not in any of the schools that I asked). If they did, conceivably a lot of these students could get a relatively well-paying job in engineering or a lab or something, and as such the schools could get away with paying less. Part of the reason that I didn't bother trying to pursue the CUNY PhD in mathematics was specifically because the stipend they were offering wouldn't be enough to cover my mortgage (~$2,000/month), and they didn't offer any kind of part-time plan.
Where is all this tuition even going to? Schools in the US charge an absurd amount of tuition compared to schools in Europe/Asia and yet these colleges are also systematically underpaying PhD students, Teaching Assistants, etc.
College Professors don't exactly make the big bucks either.
Yet, universities in the US have made put many Americans in lifelong debt.
These colleges are all "nonprofit" (and get significant tax benefits), so where is the money even going?
I have a family member who works in the “alumni relations” department of a small, regional public university. Probably ranked like #300 or something. There are like 5 people in the department. They make a magazine, email newsletter and schedule alumni events.
It was really surreal when they explained their job and that the department exists.
There’s an admin costs problem in this country. There’s no sufficient governance or oversight in controlling university spending. This is even a public university and it’s just bizarre that they can make up positions that shouldn’t even exist.
Alumni relations is a profit center for universities, not a cost center. Many universities are funded as much by alumni donations and endowment gains on them as they are by tuition.
Society has decided that it doesn't want to support American universities through tax dollars [1] so you can't really blame universities for trying to find any and all other sources of funding.
>"Society has decided that it doesn't want to support American universities through tax dollars."
This is hyperbole, the government is spending billions on American Universities in a myriad of different ways. And, many ways of support are not direct. One could argue that the guaranteed student loan programs are a roundabout way of supporting universities through tax dollars as well.
> One could argue that the guaranteed student loan programs are a roundabout way of supporting universities through tax dollars as well.
No, guaranteed student loans are a way to transfer wealth from future taxpayers and borrowers to beneficiaries of tuition such as university staff and whoever is receiving money from the university such as construction companies and whatnot.
The guaranteed loans with no underwriting obfuscate costs and thus result in a mid allocation of society’s resources. Such as leagues of people spending their valuable years learning “communications” or “business” degrees and then sitting in a call center or other role that does not pay enough to make the degree they paid for in time and money to have any decent or even positive ROI.
Providing education isn't expensive; big campuses and teams of administrators are. Universities could easily return to the old ways, just cap annual loans at $20k per head. It would be painful, but they're fat, and what they're doing is bad for society.
You don't understand university sports revenues and expenses.
Feel free to download a breakdown of revenues and expenses for the university of your choice at: https://ope.ed.gov/athletics/#/
You are going to find that almost every school is net neutral with respect to their sports programs. Football and basketball typically funding all other sports.
“University of Georgia Athletics approved a new budget for the 2022 fiscal year on Friday. The budget is set at $150,290,994, which is $7.7 million more than in 2019 and $3 million short of the 2020 budget.
Georgia athletic director Josh Brooks told media that the 2020 budget shortfall is currently $30 million and was previously $53 million amid the COVID-19 pandemic.”
Later in the article, it states that the stadiums were at partial capacity (mid 2021), so once stadiums went back to full capacity revenue surely increase significantly.
Sports teams are a profit center. Season tickets are hundreds or even a thousand dollars. And then there's the absurd money they make at the concession stands and merchandising.
The money goes to the college administrators. They're major bureaucracies that plague and control universities money supply and more or less dictate universities' policies.
The data I've seen doesn't, by and large, bear this out.
The money goes to the athletics and the infrastructure. (Not in the sense of "the best infrastructure money can buy", sadly; no, it's more like "raise $300 million to build this new dorm and let the richest donor put their name on it, then spend about 30% of what it needs for maintenance for the next 30 years...and then spend 5x the amount we would've had to if we'd just maintained it in remediation and renovations".)
> The money goes to the athletics and the infrastructure.
Athletics for most schools are a net profit center, even for the #100 football program. The smaller schools aren't spending nearly so much on athletics as the schools with football programs.
First of all, I don't believe that's actually true based on what I've seen: what seems to be more often the case is that the tickets pay for the marketing and some of the athletic infrastructure.
Meanwhile, the coaches are being paid millions of dollars per year. I don't care how much money the athletic program is bringing in; that's not a responsible use of the money. (I get that it's something of a prisoner's dilemma at the individual institution level; I'm more talking about the broader issue.) If you have the money to pay the coaches $2M/year, that means you could, instead, stop paying your adjunct professors and regular staff sub-poverty wages, and/or perform proper maintenance on the buildings.
And do not get me started on the economics of stadium construction.
They're profitable because they pay their workers (the athletes) next-to-nothing. And even so, colleges would be better off spinning off their teams into professional entities that pay royalties to use the school's name. At the very least, it's one less distraction for the college administration and they can focus on their actual jobs: education and research.
Part of the issue is TOO MUCH governance. We have loaded colleges down with regulations and requirements, which then require administrators to handle these rules. Most of these administrative roles are not optional (at least not if you don't want to get sued).
Most of these requirements independently make sense, but the sum impact weighs down universities and drives up cost.
Factually unsupported cynical take: Without the made up jobs there would be even less of a market for the type of non-STEM graduates public universities like to produce.
The regulations provide the justification for the jobs program needed to soak up the excess supply of non-trade graduates generated by overenthusiastic student loan policy.
> Most of these administrative roles are not optional (at least not if you don't want to get sued.
They are mostly not optional if you want to receive federal funding. There are some small colleges that are totally private, do not take government funds, and so don't have to implement and administer many government regulations.
You haven't presented enough evidence to show that there is a problem. If the alumni relations department is bringing in donations greater than their salaries, they are a net benefit to the university. Even if they don't bring in that amount every year, it might still be a net plus: it might bring in better students, spread the word about the university, and it might lead to big gifts later down the line.
The alumni donations total about $50k/year and I think there’s only like 200,000 alumnis that exist. The department is five years old and the growth is minimal as donations were like $30k with no department at all.
My anecdote wasn’t intended as evidence.
But there’s definitely a problem. You can look at official sources [0] for evidence showing that admin expenses are 21% at public, four year schools.
I found this article while looking for the official stats [1] that claims the average university in the US has 45 people in DEI. DEI is very important, I think, but 45 employees boggles the mind and seems to be more of a symptom of runaway costs and lack of controls that would allow for so many admin staff on a single topic.
I also reject the assertion they shouldn’t exist. The “Alumni network” is listed as one of the additional benefits when enrolling for a degree.
Further when the engineering firm you started after graduation with some of your classmates wines a National science award. Getting that profiled in the alumni newsletter could be unlocking a range of oppprtunities for your firm from grant funder interest to new commercialisation opportunity, all coming out of the alumni network.
Just cause the work is quiet doesn’t mean it’s pointless.
An alumni network is great. I think the issue is having so many admin staff working on low value activities like magazines and newsletters.
I’m a big fan of quiet work, but this is pointless. It’s not pointless because it’s quiet. It’s pointless because it has minimal to no positive impact.
Administrative bloat in higher education is well known at this point, and it's absolutely a part of where student money is going. All I see is a lot of "mights" in your post.
> Even if they don’t bring in that amount every year, it might still be a net plus
Or it might not.
Thats the root of the problem. The administrators are the people coming up with the metrics and arguments to justify their own existence.
I’m sure many of them believe they’re making a positive contribution, and the situation is more complex and tragic than just “these are the baddies” type arguments suggest, but there’s still an accountability problem that needs to be reckoned with.
For my family member the salary isn’t huge, I think like $40k so the whole department is probably less than $500k/year including overhead and whatnot. My assumption was if they are spending stupid money on this they are likely spending stupid money on many other things.
It’s stupid because there are no alumni donations for this school. They are nowhere near breaking even and won’t because there just aren’t many alumni.
The problem is that these aren’t efficient dollars anyway. Spending $500k to net $500k is not a good return. Schools should focus on better returns, like teaching and research.
I'm not suggesting that there is not an abundance of staff at some institutions, but at most institutions, "alumni relations" is a profit center not a cost center. At least if they are doing the job that our "alumni relations" department does. Yes, ours produces a magazine as well but their real job is (or should be) to entice giving.
This kind of thing would be like saying your typical account manager's job is surreal and perhaps in some cases that might be true :-)
About 70% of the UC budget goes to salaries and benefits. Of that, 70% of staff is non-academic.
Full context below:
Non-academic staff employees constitute nearly 70 percent of UC’s workforce and are responsible for health services, student services, instruction and research support, compliance, and general administration (6.1.1). In October 2020, this group included 143,188 individuals. Overall, this staff workforce represented over 115,577 full-time equivalent (FTE) employees in that month.
STAFF WORKFORCE
About six out of every ten UC staff FTE are working for the University of California Health system. These frontline workers (including doctors, nurses, administrators, technicians, and allied health professionals) are playing a critical role in California’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Over 97 percent of these employees are supported by non-core funds, typically the revenues generated by hospital services.
Students often work part-time on campus as part of their financial aid packages or for research experience. During the pandemic, UC campuses transitioned to remote instruction. With staff, faculty, and students no longer on campus, student employee headcount at general campus halved from 36,000 in October 2019 to 18,000 in October 2020.
General campus, non-student employees are the remainder of the University’s staff, at 43,752 FTE. This includes student services employees, career advisors, IT specialists, research administration, laboratory staff, food and auxiliary service workers, accountants, maintenance and janitorial staff, safety workers, and analysts (6.1.1).
Some quick caveats, the employee count is for a year, and the UC system has about an 8% separation rate. The employee count also includes 29k student employees. Even so, that feels like way too many employees to service that student count, a bulk of which are listed as non-student professional and support staff.
Note that these employee counts probably include whole hospital staffs (since teaching hospitals / academic medical centers are frequently part of universities).
Yes, that is a good point. Staff employed by the hospitals are included. UC Davis alone is more than 10 thousand employees. I'd imagine a few of the other UC hospitals are also significant portions of that support staff.
So 40% of employees aren't paid by the university system's academic arm, but by the healthcare section. 30% are academic staff, and 30% are support staff.
Even with the cost of medicine going through the roof, college kids don't incur a whole lot of medical costs on average. So it's surprising the university would need to spend so much there.
- Too much admin per student compared to 40 years ago
- (Much more likely): Severe decline in funds from the state. I know at least one nearby university that showed the data that the increase in tuition from 1980 to 2010 was almost entirely due to government cuts, and that the budget spending per student hadn't changed in that time frame - adjusted for inflation.
> - (Much more likely): Severe decline in funds from the state. I know at least one nearby university that showed the data that the increase in tuition from 1980 to 2010 was almost entirely due to government cuts, and that the budget spending per student hadn't changed in that time frame - adjusted for inflation
This may be a good explanation for public institutions, but what is the justification for private institutions?
For example, a year at the University of Pennsylvania (a private university) in 1980 cost about $7200 (equivalent to $25K today), but Penn currently charges about $75K per year.
What is the justification for the additional tripling of charges, even after adjusting for inflation?
>Schools in the US charge an absurd amount of tuition compared to schools in Europe/Asia
US schools get far less from the state than Europe and Asia. You can find many school budgets online, including sources of revenue. So this is easy to check. [2] lets you look at country per capita spending on tertiary education - the regions you mention tend to spend significantly more tax dollars than the US does.
The result is that most European and Asian schools get funded by taxpayers, i.e., those not attending university end up helping pay for those who do, while in the US more of the funding is paid by people that attend schools.
Also, the US, as a result, also ends up with a higher percentage of adults with college degrees than those with state sponsored schools [1], since those places tend to make it harder to go to college, since taxpayer pressure on cost reduces opportunity.
> [2] lets you look at country per capita spending on tertiary education
The link shows government spending per student as a percentage of GDP per capita, rather than overall government spending per capita. This figure can get distorted when there are more students in the system for any reason (such as due to private investment).
> since those places tend to make it harder to go to college, since taxpayer pressure on cost reduces opportunity.
This does not follow. Rather, having more students decreases the per-student government expenditure figure, even as the burden on the taxpayer stays the same.
As a percentage of GDP, US government expenditure on tertiary education is roughly in the middle of what various countries in Europe spend.
>Rather, having more students decreases the per-student government expenditure figure, even as the burden on the taxpayer stays the same.
That does not follow unless students cost zero to educate.
As more students enter, it costs more.
>As a percentage of GDP,....
And the US educates a larger portion of their population than most (if not all?) European countries. This is why using % of GDP is misleading, since the countries are paying for a different rate of educated people. The cost per student is more applicable, since as those other countries scale up the number educated will necessarily spend more, since on the margin people don't cost zero to educate.
This is why I pointed out the rates of education are different. Comparing a country spending 1% to educate 2% to one spending 3% to educate 10%, only looking at the 1% and 3%, is missing important information.
> That does not follow unless students cost zero to educate
The remaining funding comes from the private sector (e.g. tuition fees).
Comparing the US with Germany, for example, the US spends 0.9% of GDP from public funds and 1.6% of GDP privately for a total of 2.5% of GDP, resulting in 44% of the population being tertiary graduates.
Germany spends 1.1% of GDP from public funds and 0.2% of GDP privately, for a total of 1.3% of GDP, and 27% of its population are tertiary graduates.
So as a proportion of GDP, Germany pays only about half of what the US does, but still manages to have three fifths as many graduates as the US, proportionally. That is better value for money spent overall.
>The remaining funding comes from the private sector
Again, that does not follow. Adding students means more students will apply for government aid, so more aid will be allocated. Lots of places get paid $X per student from the govt - adding students adds public cost.
So yes, more students means more govt cost. Any student can apply for govt help, and if they meet requirements, they get the aid. They're not told sorry, you're number N+1 and we only fund N. You have to go private funded.
>That is better value for money spent overall.
Germany, (and pretty much all countries) pays far less for all advanced jobs. You cannot hire professors in the US for what you get them for in other countries (Baumol's cost disease, for example), so again this is not an accurate comparison.
>That is better value for money spent overall.
Such things are not linear - educating the last % would cost far more per person than educating the first 1%. Just like making something 50% burglar proof is not half the cost to make something 100% burglar proof. As you reach deeper into the pool of candidates they will take more effort, more time, and more money, per person to educate to some fixed level.
To be fair, if you graduate in four years, and are alright with state universities or community colleges, and major in some kind of field that allows you to be an engineer, university doesn't have to put you in lifelong debt. Many students do community college for the first two years, and then finish at a university, and end up on the order of ~$30,000 of debt. That's a lot of money, but generally not a life-ruining amount for an engineer.
That's not even counting the weird universities like WGU, where you can get a bachelors for less than ~$15,000 without too much trouble.
> Many students do community college for the first two years, and then finish at a university, and end up on the order of ~$30,000 of debt.
For people in many European countries, this is an absurd amount of debt to get a university degree.
Edit: For context: About 20 years ago, my university's annual fees was $15000/year for out of state students, and $4600 for in state - in today's dollars. Now that university charges $28K for out of state and $8.3K for in state - almost doubled after accounting for inflation. In other nearby universities I see people paying $15K/year for in state. This is a huge increase in two decades.
That's entirely fair, I'm a big proponent of making colleges either free, or extremely heavily subsidized by the government. I completely agree that it's still ridiculous to leave with $30,000 of debt.
I'm just saying that, for someone working an engineering job, that is not generally a life-ruining amount of money, especially in comparison to the increased earning potential that a degree affords you (which is, I suspect, why they get away with charging such exorbitant tuition in the first place).
I was taking them as separate. I did my bachelors online (while working full time), so I didn't know how to factor that into the calculation. I just texted a friend to ask, and he said he left his state school with about $35,000 in debt, but that was with a partial scholarship for the tuition, so I suspect a good chunk of that was the dorm.
If we double the number I gave to $60,000, that's a lot more, and starting to approach life-ruining territory, but I'd say still falls a bit shy of it for an engineer.
I met a person who went to a for profit university, never got a degree, and works at Cheesecake Factory. He owes $120,000 and has three kids. His life was effectively ruined by this college.
I'm sorry to hear that; I think that a lot (most?) for-profit universities are really predatory. You pay an obscene amount of money to them, you get an education that's maybe on par with a local community college, and if you drop out you end up owing a ton of money without even that. That's why I qualified my statements with "state school or community college". They're generally at least somewhat respected, and don't cost anywhere near as much as a for-profit school. There are also some non-profits private universities that don't charge a ton of money for tuition, like the aforementioned WGU.
The first time I attempted school and dropped out, I started getting a ton of advertisements for for-profit universities in the mail. I knew that they were often scams, so I threw them away, but I can totally see an alternate universe in which I don't know that and end up with a boatload of debt for the rest of my life.
Your European parents paid that $30K and more in additional taxes though. The money came from somewhere; land and buildings and qualified professors do not come for free in Europe.
Well, sure, but it isn't like taxes are that much higher - honestly, my taxes moving from the US to Norway weren't realistically higher than state + federal + health insurance, and if you consider the out of pocket for health care, the bill is cheaper. Not to mention that Folks that go to school and wind up working a lower-paying job (teaching, for example) aren't on the hook for all of it either.
And you aren't even paying for the same sort of things: Many colleges have sports teams in the US, for example, and the degrees take longer in the US. For example, you don't have to get an undergraduate degree in Norway to become a doctor so you spend less time actually in school.
I'm failing to connect your comment with mine. Yes, of course it came from additional taxes. Those additional taxes did not put people into $30K of debt in those countries. If you're poor, you don't pay that much in taxes. My mythical European parents did not get go into debt paying those taxes so I could go to school.
Another commenter pointed out that German universities need 1.3% of GDP to educate 27% of the population without charging them tuition. USA actually gives more public funding to colleges than Germany and yet those colleges are still asking for tuition.
~6 years ago, the Univ. of Michigan did major renovations on its large student dormitories. We're talking old but structurally quite sound reinforced concrete & masonry buildings, each housing ~1,000 undergraduates.
U of M spent about $100,000 per student bed (not per room) on those renovations. They could have bought brand new, custom built, state-of-the-art suburban-sprawl McMansions and given every student their own bedroom (vs. mostly-shared dorm rooms) for less money. And had the old dorms left over.
Yes, that money was on UM's Housing (vs. academic) side. But you should not expect other non-classroom, non-academic spending (by any part of UM, or similar institutions) to be any less profligate.
Coach salaries -would- look like a bargain if revenue correlated with win-loss rate or quite frankly any measurable activity the coaches do. But, they don't.
IMO the guy in big-10 football who deserves a multi million dollar salary is the guy in the mascot fursuit.
The vast majority of coaches don't make this kind of money. I refuse to believe tuition is insanely high because of coaching salaries. I was actually under the (possibly incorrect) assumption that coaches salaries come largely from boosters and things like ticket sales, jersey sales, etc.
Athletics is normally (always?) a separate self-funding enterprise attached to th e university. Tutition dollars don't pay the coaches; alumni donations/gifts, sponsors, and ticket sales do.
Most of it goes to academic instruction expenses, and operations. The fast growing expense is more likely the latter as administrations have rather grown in size per student.
Land appreciates in value too, even if the universities may own campuses, it remains in the balance sheets.
Research is also a cost, even though they some of it back, they aren't VCs so this can bleed money there as well, and pretty fast, especially for underperforming institutions.
I'm shocked shocked by the tuition fees in the U.S. But comparing with India and even Europe is a bit silly since those places don't compare in term of university ranking and average income level. Those professors/researchers are packed with long years of studies plus a loan they had accumulated themselves so it's a bit like a positive feedback loop.
I don't think it is fair to compare with Europe. The Norwegian University of Science and Technology, as an example, got around 1b USD over the national budget. Stipends and loans to students are provided by another governmental body (Lånekassen), but in the US some students get a "full ride" (incl. accommodation and so on). However, the amount of debt you hear some americans ending up with is crazy.
Just to add to that - Students at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology do not pay tuition fees. So the stipend and loan provided by Lånekassen go mainly to living expenses.
No idea. But aren't those campuses wonderful with their huge buildings, new carpet, great landscaping, and every admin staff member has an amazing office chair and fitout. They even refresh that carpet every year along with brand new seating. The art! Its always changing as well. The university cars are great too. I've seen plenty of amazing cars that researchers drive around. The libraries are constantly changing each month. They renovated that building just last summer, didn't they? That oval is being redone as well. Amazing.
Administrative staff, which has ballooned over the past several decades. Many of these people have mediocre ability, don't really do much, but once a position is created it is hardly ever eliminated.
Buildings and renovations. Ever seen a modern student dorm? They are luxurious compared to what they were in the 1980s. It's a constant competitive war as students will actually choose a school based on the living accomodations over the education.
Programs to assist students who should really not be there, and other programs that don't seem to recognize that college students are adults and should be expected to manage their lives by themselves. Do they really need the university to arrange coloring book time to help with the stress of mid-terms?
>Many of these people have mediocre ability
Perhaps. University never intends to compete for top talent with their salary offerings. I recall during a salary discussion years ago, my manager at the time mentioned that the salary was indeed below market but offered up the point below as an advantage.
>don't really do much, but once a position is created it is hardly ever eliminated.
Yup. This was true and was a definitely a benefit.
Source: 6 years working as IT for a public university.
Baumol's Cost Disease. Basically anything that requires non-scalable human interactions is super expensive, because the cost of labor in the U.S. is super expensive. People don't realize it because when the Baby Boomers grew up, the U.S. effectively had a monopoly on capital, which meant that our "ordinary factory workers" could enjoy massively outsized productivity relative to the rest of the world. Now our ordinary factory workers are being undercut by ordinary factory workers abroad, since the rest of the world has rebuilt its capital stock, and so only professions that still enjoy global monopolies (eg. big tech) can afford service workers.
For comparison, a mid-range preschool in the Bay Area costs about $30K/year, vs. $14K/year in-state tuition for UC Berkeley. If students get about 24 hours of instruction/week, for two 13-week semesters, that works out to about $22/hour. A nanny is about $25-30/hour, a therapist is $100+/hour, plumbers are about $200/hour, a lawyer can be $750-1000/hour. Given 20-30 students in the classroom, costs are not all that different from lawyers.
Schools in Europe/Asia are government-subsidized, like the public school system in the U.S, so you don't see the true cost.
I worked at a small private college for a few years in IT. Tuition increased every year, yet our budget always seemed to be the same or smaller ("we need to do more with less"), and my salary certainly didn't get proportionately larger.
Admin and prestige buildings, across decades, along with the upkeep related to those things now and going forward (pensions/retirements, building maintenance & upkeep).
Also, US incomes are among the highest in the world, everything should seem expensive here compared to the typical European nation. Comparing to eg Japan or Britain doesn't work, our incomes are far higher. If you want to look at costs for the median or above, you have to reference Sweden, Finland, Norway, Switzerland, Denmark, Australia for comps. Simultaneously our costs are still too high even after you adjust for that (in things like healthcare and education).
This article is about graduate student stipends. Tuition does not have a cost for these students, so the stipend only needs to cover living costs (which as the article points out, it frequently does not).
In CS, graduate students often intern over the summer and can make up for some of the difference.
Tuition is paid by the university, typically from a grant.
They definitely do in engineering - USC and UCLA had most of its PhD students working full time in industry and only part time in their PhD program and grad school generally. I know because I was one of them.
I did a part-time PhD (not in the US, so I am only responding to the latter part of your comment). It's hard, exhausting and can occasionally be frustrating. I gave up most of my weekends during the time. My sleep hours were less than what they should have been - and I did this for years. If you're wondering, it did lead to some health problems (esp. my back), thankfully not major, most of which I've recovered from.
Do it only if research really interests you - this was my case, so the sense of gratification from learning and finding out things offset many of the negatives. Also, having a patient advisor and good friends helped a lot.
Out of curiosity, since you've gone through this before, do you have any advice on the best way to manage your time doing a part-time PhD.
I've started my part-time a month ago, and it's been pretty exhausting already, and I suspect it will get harder. How did you budget time to talk to family, or to do something for yourself to avoid burnout?
It was hard for me to set aside specific hours of the day for PhD during the week - because I occasionally had early morning and late evening meetings for my day job. And on some days the work itself would spill over. So the simple policy I followed as: if I am not involved in work from my job, work on the PhD. Far from simple to follow though.
I'd often work out of cafes and libraries (I used to cycle between a small set of my favorites), because the change of atmosphere, and often the ambient activity, helps. Not to mention, if you're tired and trying to work from home, it's easier to get distracted (I could justify dozing off), than when you're at a cafe with your laptop in front of you and there's little else to do. I found that university cafes can be particularly helpful because you see a lot of people working around you.
Family and friends: I didn't really plan talk time with my parents or friends but was mindful we talk without too much of a gap in between (at least twice a week with parents). I used to reserve the times when I really needed to unwind for these chats. Note: I was single for most of my PhD, and got married when things were winding down.
On weekends, I would typically allow myself Sat morning off for a change of pace. On most weekends, I would drive off out of my normal ambit of travel, and work from a cafe/library away from home.
Of course, none of above advice worked during the pandemic- working on the PhD became relatively harder then.
Essentially, since I couldn't have changed the amount of work I needed to do, I substituted that lack of variation by constantly changing the atmosphere I worked in. That helped a lot.
Fair enough; when I reached out to schools within commuting distance of me (the general NYC area), none of them offered any kind of part time plan for Mathematics or Computer Science (the only fields I'm really interested in).
Sadly, there are not a ton of universities that offer an online PhD in CS or Math, meaning that I was limited to what I could easily get to via train, at least in regards to schools in the United States. Eventually I found one school in England that was willing to let me do a part time PhD online, which is where I'm enrolled now.
Yeah, a friend of mine has a PhD in Economics, that he got while working full-time at FDIC. I know a number of people working full-time at government research labs in various math and science fields that are PhD candidates. The part-time PhD seems like it's extremely common as long as there is real, employment-market demand for that PhD, too.
On the other hand, all the history PhDs I know can't even get work at their own university.
Tbf, if it's not a lab-based PhD, you'll usually manage to work on the side. I know several people who were in full-time employment throughout pretty much their whole PhD (aided by supportive employers and sabbaticals). Even at (elite) universities that had explicit rules against it, and cases where the university and the jobs were in different countries. I even know one guy who did a lab-based engineering PhD and continued doing a bit of consulting work for his old employer. It's not even that uncommon among people with prior work experience and skills that fit well with consulting/freelance work. You'll see it on LinkedIn. Internships are also common in many disciplines like Math and CS, and good advisors can even help you get them (I know a prof who sends at least one grad student to intern at Google every year).
It's not advertised and usually not recommended, but it's definitely possible. The key is to find a supervisor who's fine with it, don't even bother asking the administrators.
I don't really know how one does a part-time PhD. The kind of work that you produce during a PhD requires 4-6 years of full dedication. A part-time masters I could see.
In England a PhD tends to take on the order of 3-4 years if done full time, largely because they generally require a masters as a prerequisite to even start the degree. A part-time PhD tends to take on the order of 5-6 years.
Of course, even doing a part-time PhD, you end up spending a fair bit of time studying (on the order of 4-6 hours/night).
A PhD is a full-time job, time-wise. I'm not sure how _really_ feasible a part-time PhD + part-time job really is. Maybe for some, but most likely not for most imho. Agreed that it would help financially though.
I believe that the stipulation of no part-time PhD is dependent on training grant requirements. I couldn't have a second job during graduate school and it would cause big problems for the department, and by extension, me, if I was found to have a second job. It might work differently in other fields, but this is at least my experience in a hospital-affiliated biology department.
when I was a phd student at Columbia, we had a student in our lab who was a full time employee at TJ Watson and his work at Watson was part and parcel of his phd. Basically supervised by both his IBM manager and my advisor.
When I was looking at programs, as I already had been working at a military lab since I was in HS, I asked every advisor I interviewed with if research work I was doing at the lab could be the basis of the phd if I wanted (i.e. to do the same thing as the labmate mentioned) and almost everyone I spoke to had zero issues with it, with the proviso that the work was appropriate for a phd.
At the end of the day, I did it all on campus (with many summers spent at labs or industry), but a good chunk of the work I did could easily have been done with proper guidance in an industry setting as well (though that's more in retrospect, I wouldn't have known how to sell the ideas to industry back then).
Engineering PhD candidates often have summer internships that pay extremely well. Most thesis advisors encourage their students to do this, since it helps ground research in real world problems (and conserves grant money, of course!)
