Depends on where you live: https://csstipendrankings.org/ https://csstipendrankings.org/ NSF grants are hard to get, with a small award being for about $600K o

Depends on where you live: https://csstipendrankings.org/ https://csstipendrankings.org/ NSF grants are hard to get, with a small award being for about $600K over 3 years. That translates to about $300K after the university takes its overhead. For me, that would about fund about two PhD students for 3 years for about $31K per year during the 9 month academic year. Many PhD students in computer science do internships during summer where they make a lot larger salaries, or they are funded by me for that period instead. In my city, Rochester, according to this website, our stipends are the most generous in the USA based on the low cost of living here. https://csstipendrankings.org/ https://csstipendrankings.org/ We would all like to pay students more, but either we then have fewer students or need the government to award larger grants. As someone who had a hard time getting into a PhD program due to how competitive it is, I would be opposed to depriving folks of educational opportunities. Students typically take classes and do little research for their first 1-2 years, but they do receive a stipend during that time period.