University of California PhD Pay is Among the Lowest in the U.S. After Accounting for Cost of Living

Daniel Masterson
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Daniel Masterson: University of California, Santa Barbara

No 83wfm, SocArXiv from Center for Open Science

Abstract: How much do PhD students earn in university pay and how far does this income go toward basic cost of living? In this paper, we describe the PhD workforce, focusing on their wages and cost-of-living adjustments. We present nationwide data and a focused comparison to University of California wages. We find that after adjusting for cost-of-living in the county where a school is located, the UC’s wages are among the lowest at top institutions in the country. This trend holds when the UCs are compared against both public and private peer institutions. We find that even if UC PhD pay were 7% higher, it would still fall near the bottom of the pay distribution for peer institutions. We also examine the cost of housing alone, and we find that at most of the UCs, a fair-market rent in the school’s county is roughly 100% of the average total PhD income

Date: 2022-11-30
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:osf:socarx:83wfm

DOI: 10.31219/osf.io/83wfm

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