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| Paying for Grad School | |||
| You probably will need to borrow money to cover the cost of an advanced degree. Find out what type of loans are available, as well as what tax breaks can help ease the burden. |
At age 23, Elizabeth Kerr is a full-time PhD student in religious studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara -- and she makes a decent living to boot. Thanks to two fellowships, she'll earn the equivalent of $42,000 this year, including the full cost of tuition and health insurance plus a stipend for living expenses.
A year of graduate school costs, on average, anywhere from $17,000 for a master's at a public university to more than $56,000 at a private dental school. Four out of five full-time grad students receive financial aid, and the average package is $20,000 per year; student loans usually make up 75% of the total.
But Kerr will graduate virtually debt-free. So will Matthew Freyer, who's in his second year of a two-year master's program in industrial engineering at Penn State University. Freyer, 25, covered his first-year tuition with a fellowship, and this year he has a 20-hour-per-week teaching assistantship that covers tuition. He receives $5,000 a year from another fellowship.
Compared with undergraduate education, far less money is available for grad school on the basis of financial need alone. "Grad schools give awards based more on merit than need," says Kalman Chany, author of Paying for College Without Going Broke (Princeton Review, $20). In 2003-04, one in five graduate and professional students received a fellowship or grant -- averaging $7,500 -- with no strings attached. Students in the physical sciences, economics, engineering, religion and theology have the best shot at getting a fellowship; fewer grants are available for advanced degrees in business and education. (For more information on fellowships, visit FastWeb.com or www.cuinfo.cornell.edu/Student/GRFN.)
Assistantships, which require you to work in return for a stipend (the average was just over $10,000 in 2003-04), are most common in the physical sciences. Nearly half of all full-time candidates for master's degrees in science are paid for work as assistants.
As a research assistant, Kate Kierpiec, 25, who is a fourth-year PhD candidate in immunology and microbiology at Georgetown University, earns $1,750 a month studying DNA in-vitro. The money covers her rent and supplements the fellowship that pays her tuition. "It's enough to survive but not enough to live on," says Kierpiec, who waits tables for extra cash.
Awards are competitive and not widely promoted. But you can boost your chances of getting a share.
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