Looks like it's gone up sizeably! I was making ~$20K/yr base at Berkeley as a EECS PhD ~7 years ago, and ~double that by interning at top R&D orgs every other s

Looks like it's gone up sizeably! I was making ~$20K/yr base at Berkeley as a EECS PhD ~7 years ago, and ~double that by interning at top R&D orgs every other summer. It wasn't great, but doable. (It also went +$5-10K/yr depending on when I had brought in some top gov+private fellowships and maybe TA'ships.) The housing thing is real. I lived frugally yet well, with most $ going to rent and then food: just biking etc. Places in broken real estate markets like Berkeley/Stanford/UCSF/etc. should make super high density grad housing: grad students know they'll have roomates anyway, and the univs already own crazy amounts of land, so either univs pay it in salary (they won't) or in subsidized real estate (cheaper for them!). Likewise, donors love paying for buildings. I know many top folks who turned down UCSF and Stanford b/c of this, and that trend has been going up, so it should be a top ~5 priority. I wouldn't be surprised if the cities are probably even more to blame here however for not letting folks build, which is esp. uphill for lackadaisical univ staff. It took forever for UCSF's mission bay campus to build up, and 10-15 years later, it led to an emerging neighborhood for young professionals... and is still not built up as much as it could be. On the plus side, that meant I learned how to live quite well in one of the most expensive US cities on a below median salary. Great skill for entrepreneurs here!