Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Source? Higher-end universities don't often offer standalone Masters programs in the hard sciences, but "most" Masters degrees are paid for? Seems unlikely.

I don't have an official source.

Note that I said "research fields" - not hard sciences. In fields where the government/companies want to fund research there is more funding available for masters student assistantships. In fields no one cares about, good luck getting funding.
 
in our place, the number of offerings on a given program depend on amount of funding available. all student get tuition+salary, along what was said before. It's the same in most places.
However, after their qualifying exam, grad student's salary is paid for by the PI they are graduating with.
in the long run i think it's worth it both in term of the kind of job will find afterward and the salary you will (eventually) earn.
 
If you do a research Masters here, tuition is paid for (or in other words, they don't charge you), but you don't get any money from them.

Basically, they don't charge tuition, and they don't pay you. You basically just go to the uni, do the research work you need to do, and they give you a degree at the end. That's the exchange.
 
Last edited:
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9A334 Safari/7534.48.3)

I have a friend who was nearly 40K in undergrad student loan debt that decided to go to grad school and take out MORE loans to fund it. SMH. He's going to graduate with over 70K in the debt for a masters degree. Honestly, if you are in that kind of debt before grad, it may be best to work and get it down as much as possible before applying for grad. He's happy about these 7K refund checks he's getting but he's not looking at the big picture...that isn't free money he's receiving.
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9A334 Safari/7534.48.3)

I have a friend who was nearly 40K in undergrad student loan debt that decided to go to grad school and take out MORE loans to fund it. SMH. He's going to graduate with over 70K in the debt for a masters degree. Honestly, if you are in that kind of debt before grad, it may be best to work and get it down as much as possible before applying for grad. He's happy about these 7K refund checks he's getting but he's not looking at the big picture...that isn't free money he's receiving.

It's field-specific. In some fields (most life/hard sciences), it should be done as a one shot deal, all the way through the PhD. In other fields (Business/social sciences), it could make sense to break it up.

The last US statistics I saw were from the NSF and stated that the average life/physical science PhD was 7.1 years in length and the average social science PhD was almost 10 years.

I'm currently working on my habilitation, even though it may not be absolutely necessary for career progression.
 
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.