03-07-2025, 01:50 AM
kj wrote:
[quote=pdq]
[quote=kj]
[quote=Lemon Drop]
They also want to do away with federal student loans.
I know zero people who did their masters, med or law school without those.
How did JD pay for Yale?
Just a fwiw, not a pro-trump, but I got a graduate degree and my wife did as well living on an assistantship, and I don’t even think we had access to student loans. We got 10-12k a year, which was enough to live. I know my daughter’s ex-boyfriend was in grad school about a year ago and lived on his assistantship in Riverside on 30k+ (they successfully negotiated a raise). So I’m not sure student loans are a thing for graduate degrees, though they definitely are for undergraduate degrees.
But where do you think the money for the assistantships comes from?
Not student loans. Mine was a mix of teaching and research assistantships. Some of the research was a grant from Eli Lilly, so not necessarily federally funded. Not long ago I took a math class and a graduate student taught it, so it can’t be that unusual.
Indirectly some of the money for teaching assistantships does come through student loan money used to pay tuition. At the university I retired from, TA money was funded by the university to the various departments to hire grads to teach or run discussion sections for courses. Research assistantships were funded out of each faculty member's grants, or possibly grant seed money given by the university to new faculty. Especially in STEM fields a lot of those grants came from the federal government through NSF, NIH and other sources. Yes, some research grants come from industry, but not like they used to decades ago. Overall they are a smaller portion of funding than they once were.