[rsfern]

Your numbers for PhD stipends are a bit high. I wouldn't be surprised if SCS students were paid that much, but the typical stipend for the rest of us is more like 24k/year.

Even so, there's a PhD student in my program who bought a house last year, and I thought seriously about it myself in my second year. Housing truly is cheap in Pittsburgh.

[nmrm2]

> I wouldn't be surprised if SCS students were paid that much

24 sounds like you're excluding the summer months?

I know in Math and other fields it's pretty common for "no guaranteed summer funding" to be actually meaningful words. But Most CS PhD students at top schools have no problem pulling a summer stipend, making 30 common. I never knew anyone in grad school who had trouble getting summer funding if they wanted it.

And usually CS grad students opt for at least a couple internships; even low-paying CS grad student internships can have 2x+ compensation compared with the phd stipend.

In any case, if a CS grad student at CMU/Stanford/MIT/Berkely is making less than 30k, it's purely by choice or really bad planning/luck.

[rsfern]

24 includes summer, and that's pretty much standard for engineering programs outside of CS, even at Stanford, CMU, MIT and the like. I'm in the materials science program.