Tuition is supposed to pay for something – an academic education. For many PhD students. However, students in Stanford’s STEM departments I would estimate that about 75% of total tuition dollars go to independent graduate research units, or as I like to call them, “pretentious courses.” There are no exams, lectures, tests, and certainly no syllabus. Stanford does not set or enforce minimum university-wide advising standards, and faculty contact hours are often well below the standards for regular academic units. PhD students deserve better. Either Stanford should define and enforce clear standards for what research unit tuition provides, or it should specify exactly how tuition money is otherwise spent to support graduate students.

In a way, the Ph.D. student tuition seems like an accounting fiction. PhD the students do not pay tuition directlyso it’s easy to see it as a made-up number that the University pays for itself—in this case, about $13k-14k per quarter. But tuition fees are not paid out of thin air. For Ph.D. students in a STEM department, as I was, tuition is often taken from research grants awarded to a student’s faculty advisor, money that could otherwise be spent to further support students and their research. If Stanford wants to take such a big cut of grant money under the guise of tuition for graduate research units, there has to be a clear educational benefit to the Ph.D. the students.

Research units are usually listed as 399 or 499 in course catalogbut the enrolled experience is much more like having a job as a researcher than taking a class. Usually a unit in a Stanford course MEET to one class hour per week, but the Ph.D. students typically get much, much less instructional time, even when enrolled in 10 units of research. My graduate school experience averaged one or two hours of one-on-one counseling per month, though in the some programsup to one hour per week is common – still only 10% of the hours involved in a 10-unit enrolment.

In a normal workplace, meeting once a week with your advisor would be called “having a manager,” and companies don’t usually charge more than $40,000 a year to provide managers to their junior employees. Indeed, Stanford’s tuition-free postdoctoral researchers also receive faculty advisors and many of the same workplace benefits as Ph.D. working students.

Fees for research units add up quickly. Stanford requires 135 units to complete a PhD, but the departmental requirements are usually much less, for example up to nine units for informaticsor 30 units for applied physics. Beyond these requirements, it is often not possible to find enough courses relevant to your field. of specific research to achieve the minimum units required by Stanford. That leaves about 100 to 120 units taken as independent research units, which equates to over $130,000 in tuition per student over the course of the Ph.D. for research units only.

How should Stanford fix this problem? I see two possible directions: increasing quality or adjusting costs. In terms of quality, Stanford could raise academic standards for research units so that they are in line with other courses at the University. PhD students enrolled in 10 research units will be guaranteed 10 hours each week with their advisor, either individually or in small groups. If a faculty member downloads the preparation of the new Ph.D. to their graduate students or postdoctoral researchers, this should be formalized and compensated. However the academic program is organized, Stanford should monitor and enforce meaningful instructional and advising standards in a way that has been lacking to date.

In terms of cost adjustments, Stanford could officially recognize that research facilities offer Ph.D. students with fewer academic resources than normal and redistributes tuition dollars accordingly. If Stanford were to redirect research unit tuition fees to Ph.D. student research salaries, could afford to increase their salaries by $22,000 per year spread over a 6-year degree. That would be a large, though not unthinkable, financial adjustment to about 1 percent of Stanford’s annual budget.

In fact, we already have a peer institution model that does something quite similar. In 2022, Princeton REMOVED tuition fees for graduate students on research fellowships, while simultaneously increasing the salary of graduate students. Not coincidentally, this also came with good news for graduate student workers. As Princeton President Christopher Eisgruber announced“Princeton graduate stipends across all fields will increase by an average of 25 percent,” which is “the largest one-year increase in graduate stipend rates in the University’s history.”

Stanford’s administration should clearly answer these two key questions: 1. What are the academic services that Ph.D. Should students be guaranteed per unit independent research tuition? 2. In the current status quo, what benefits per student do research facilities pay for in tuition fees that are above what non-tuition-paying postdoctoral research workers get?

University finances can be frustratingly opaque, and I think Stanford owes more to his Ph.D. student workers here. Tuition is supposed to pay for academic instruction, however, right now, Stanford doesn’t offer enough to justify taking dollars for the research unit’s tuition.

Ben Parks Ph.D. ’23 is a recent graduate of the Stanford computer science PhD program. Contact him at bparks ‘at’ cs.stanford.edu.