The graduate student stipends offered by many US physics departments are insufficient to live on, even for students who split housing costs. That’s according to Physics Graduate Student Compensation: Academic Year 2023–24, a recent report by the statistical research team of the American Institute of Physics (publisher of Physics Today). The report includes the analysis of compensation data collected from more than 100 public and private PhD-granting physics departments.
For first-year teaching assistants, stipends ranged from about $18 000 to $47 000; the average was $30 000. For fifth-year research assistants, stipends were from around $20 000 to nearly $50 000; the average was $32 700. In addition to a stipend, students often receive benefits such as health insurance and free tuition.
In the 2020–21 academic year, a teaching assistantship was the main source of financial support for 56% of first-year physics PhD students. In the same period,...
