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by bachmeier
1483 days ago
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> universities should guarantee the 12-month stipend I'm not sure how this would work in practice. If you hand out 12-month contracts, you'll lose a ton of students, because they often want the summer for themselves (in many cases, they are from another country and want to travel home, or they have a spouse working somewhere else in the country). If you give the students the option on an annual basis, a school like Columbia might have the money to cover unanticipated expenses, but mine does not. > rather than making summer stipend dependent on availability of advisor funding or student jobs (like TAing) The money has to come from somewhere. |
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It's already working in practice for almost half the universities: summer stipends are guaranteed, but if students choose to intern elsewhere, you don't get the summer stipend. Nothing changes if their advisor is already funding them. I'm just saying the other half of universities should be doing this as well, that it should be universal.
Yes it does cost a bit, but if you think about what's happening now for universities with no summer guarantee, it's that PhD students without summer internships are getting no pay in the summer. And even the ones that do find summer pay, it's still a stressful situation for them during the academic year, so a complete distraction.
Honestly, I can't think of a better use of university money than to be paying PhD students who would otherwise be working for free in the summer (if their advisor can't fund them).