I mean usually those external resources are paid for by the student activity fee, a line item that grad students usually cover out of their own pocket. The othe

I mean usually those external resources are paid for by the student activity fee, a line item that grad students usually cover out of their own pocket. The other stuff I mean I guess you can get pedantic and say money is fungible, this gets used to keep the lights on at some building or whatever, but its important to know that these salaries are not making or breaking any department. A department might only have a few dozen grad students, these aren't significant amounts of money for a university. Keep in mind you have to pay this fake tuition for your student after the department takes half your research grant already. Some times its cheaper for a professor to hire a post doc than a grad student even with the salary differences given the tuition requirement.