To add some relevant facts from my experience as a current Stanford PhD student: If I work over the summer my yearly take-home pay is about $50k pre-tax [1]. Th

To add some relevant facts from my experience as a current Stanford PhD student: If I work over the summer my yearly take-home pay is about $50k pre-tax [1]. This is theoretically for 20 hours/week of research work "for my advisor", and the rest of my time is theoretically research work "for my degree completion". (In practice this is the same research) The money flow shenanigans as best as I can tell are: 1. My advisor gets grant money from the government 2. Stanford takes about 40% as "overhead" 3. Stanford charges my advisor my tuition costs, paying for my "class" which is just doing research with my advisor. This is about $35k/year for years 1-4, dropping to $14k/year for years 5+ with a "TGR" registration [2] 4. I get $50k/year as the remaining money Note that my advisor also has to spend some portion of his post-overhead grant money on paying Stanford for research space and paying for part of his own salary. Numbers are of course opaque to me, but it leaves me confused what "overhead" pays for if it's not fully covering building space and faculty salaries. From my perspective, had I skipped grad school and gone straight to work at a big tech company, I would have 5 extra years in my career earning a take-home salary of ~$250k total comp. This makes the opportunity-cost of my 6 years of graduate school about $1.5 million compared to going straight to industry out of undergrad. Of course, grad school offers lifestyle and work-focus flexibility that can be far greater than available in industry. I feel for myself the monetary tradeoff has been okay, but only because I had no debt from college and have the option to enter a highly-paid career track (software development) immediately after graduation. For students with debt coming in to grad school or less lucrative career prospects, even Stanford's $50k/year would be tough swallow in a high-cost area like Palo Alto. [1] https://gfs.stanford.edu/salary/salary22/salary_tables.pdf https://gfs.stanford.edu/salary/salary22/salary_tables.pdf [2] https://studentservices.stanford.edu/my-finances/tuition-fees/tuition-rates/2021-2022-graduate-and-professional-tuition-rates#Graduate https://studentservices.stanford.edu/my-finances/tuition-fee...