Fully Funded Ph.D Programs - Here's 28 of them!

[bjcheung77]

This is an article from late last month: https://www.usnews.com/education/best-gr...d-programs

Yes, top schools such as Harvard has these offerings!  They are competitive which means, it's hard to get in, but if you're not wanting to move out of country, these are the top offerings to go for!

[Alpha]

Most PhD programs are "fully-funded" in this way but there are conditions.  First, they are full-time, on-campus programs.  No part-time, no online courses (obviously this varies due to the pandemic).  Prospective students should also realize that there are responsibilities associated with the funding.  There will be research assistantships or teaching assistantships required on top of your own studies/research and typically, the stipend is barely enough to live on.  It's a great opportunity for some, an impossibility for others.

[freeloader]

Alpha is absolutely right.

My comments are based on my experience with non-profit, in-residence, B&M PhD programs. Your experience may vary.

It’s worth pointing out that these are programs that fully guarantee funding to all students. There are many many PhD programs in the United States (likely most of them) that provide some funding to all students, full funding to most/partial funding to others, and similar arrangements. I interviewed for a PhD program at Northwestern, for instance, where I would have had to pay a reduced tuition amount for the first year. If I did well enough and continued on, I would have been fully funded with a stipend for a number of years (I think it was 4 or 5, didn’t go there and don’t remember). I ended up taking another offer for a bunch of reasons, but a Northwest PhD diploma would have looked nice on my wall...

I attended a big state university in the South where probably 75% of students were fully funded with a stipend, probably 10% were military officers funded by the US government, and 15% were self-funded. Such a program would never appear on a list like the one referenced by OP, I would note.

If you look like a list from OP, you might say “I can’t go to freeloader’s big state university, I won’t get funding”. That’s not the case, at least it doesn’t have to be the case. Apply to multiple programs and select the one that makes the most sense for you.

I applied for PhD programs twice. Each time I applied to 8 schools. In both rounds I had a couple of fully-funded offers, 1-2 partially-funded offers, and 4-5 rejections.

I was in history and my experience is with graduate education in social science/humanities, but it’s also worth mentioning that there are different models for graduate funding in different disciplines. One of my undergrad roommates got a PhD at an ACC school in physics. His program technically wasn’t fully funded. They got funding for the first couple of years and then were required to apply for different grants, scholarships, fellowships, etc to pay for the rest of their degree. Almost everybody got the funding. If you DIDN’T, then the department would basically fund you if they thought you had reasonable potential as a researcher and to finish the degree. Again, it would be easy to look at 2 years worth of funding and say “I can’t afford to fund the last 2-4 years of my degree”, but this really wasn’t how it worked.