Colorado Technical University

Is this true about what the students receive in a doctoral program?

I was researching some information on a doctoral program since a friend I knew went into one last year, and was wondering if anyone else can corroborate what I found: - the tuition is waived for the student during their entire term - the student receives compensation while working as a research assistant or T.A. - the student receives free room and board at a dorm - the student receives an annual stipend to help pay for other costs - the student has to maintain a certain GPA in order to keep said benefits - one drawback being that the student sacrifices several years of good income while attending the program. Wow, free tuition and free roam and board while getting a great degree, what more can a student ask for. (And here I was worried that my friend might be stretched money-wise while going to school, like so many other current MBA students that I know). Can anyone corroborate this info? Why does the doctoral program do this and not an MBA program?

Public Comments

1. I am not sure those rules apply to every college. I do know that Colleges like the University of Pennsylvania offer students a certain amount of money a year, say $20,000 and they dont have to pay for tuition. This is why it's so hard to get into a doctoral program at very prestigious universities. Why do colleges do this? 1) Doctoral degree students are basically keeping a college alive by conducting research and drawing out conclusions. Colleges are research facilities as well as learning facilities and many doctoral degree students conduct research. 2) Im not too sure why MBA students dont get this, but I think it's because MBA students are usually not as involved with the University because they dont double as TAs or conduct research. I suppose colleges get "more" out of doctoral students.
2. I have seen this sort of "benefit package" advertised before. Basically you are hired into the University as a "Staff" position which qualifies you for tuition waivers. You work as a TA and/or other positions within the school as needed in exchange for the stipend, which is usually CONSIDERABLY less than it would cost them to employ a full-time person for the jobs that you do (because they don't have to pay for any real benefit packages.) I would assume that MBA programs don't do this because you are not really qualified to be a TA when you are in a Master's Degree program. Plus, I think that the experiences that you receive when you are acting as a TA enhanc your PhD dissertation, and give you experience in the areas that you will be earning your PhD in.
3. If your friend gets all of those benefits, s/he is very lucky. Not all schools provide dorms, or guarantee stipends and waived tuition for all of their students - and those that do provide stipends don't always give students enough to cover expenses. As for why MBA programs don't provide these kinds of benefits, the presumption is that either students' employers are footing the bill, or that graduates will take their degree and go right into a high-level job that will allow them to pay off any loans quickly. Academia (which is where a lot of full-time PhD students end up) doesn't provide that kind of guaranteed return.
4. Yep. That's approximately how it works, though most schools don't do the dormitory part of it because many graduate students are married and need different living arrangements. They just pay you a stipend, and you figure out how to live on that. There's no additional stipend for different duties, I don't think. As for the GPA, you have to maintain graduate student status, which means that you must maintain at least a B average, and if you get as low as a C in any course it means you're in some trouble. This usually is the least of anyone's worries; professors are reluctant to issue low grades to grad students. At most schools you take nine credits in a semester. Once you're done with your course work, you sign up for what are called 'research' or 'dissertation' credits, nine per semester, while you do your research project. This will take as many years as it takes. You might be asked to teach courses during that time, or you might become a 'research assistant,' which means that they just keep you there and you work on your research. Note that you could keep this going for quite a long time, and some people have done just that. But almost everyone gets sick of it rather quickly and want to get on with his or her life, and when you've hung around long enough they dust you off and let you graduate. MBA programs are not generally related to academic research, which means that the students do not contribute to research work at the university while they're getting their degrees. They take courses, take tests, and when they're done they go back to whatever executive jobs they had before and get a pay raise. At least that's the theory. There are graduate programs in business that have stipends and assistantships, but the MBA typically isn't one of them. The money for all of the stipends and assistantships usually comes from research grants that a professor has obtained from outside the university. For example, if you give money to the American Cancer Society, it goes into research. Some professor of, say, pharmacology will write a grant application to the ACS, and if they like it, they'll give him a sum of money to investigate why rats shouldn't smoke cigarettes or something. The professor will use the money to pay stipends and tuition for several graduate students while they work on this project. Their dissertations will describe various details of the work, and they'll also assist in the publication of academic papers on the subject of rat smoking.