Steve Tippins explains how PhD students can make their stipends work by choosing university housing over market-rate apartments and budgeting carefully. Shared dorm rooms cost far less than renting off-campus, and calculating monthly expenses against your stipend shows whether you can cover necessities. A PhD program is about earning a degree, not living luxuriously.
Now that assumes you have to pay ongoing rent rate. Many universities have graduate student housing. It's not luxury housing. You're not going to have a pool and a cabana boy and all kinds of things like that, but it's a roof and it's a bedroom or two. Many students share, get two students to go in. Graduate student housing typically is not free, but it's a lot less expensive than ongoing rates at apartment complexes or houses that you rent in the area. But again, you're not going to be living in luxury there. But the goal of a doctoral program is not to live in luxury. It's to get the degree and move forward. So what you want to look at is how much money am I making now? What's that going to break down monthly for me? And what are my costs going to be? Join our free Dissertation Help Community and we'll provide as much support as possible.
