No, it can’t. Nobody pays to get PhDs in this country. People get paid to get PhDs.
Of course, that these women lie is obvious given their profession but I’ve seen normal people repeat this myth, too. Nobody got into gigantic debt to get a PhD in Basket Weaving. That does not exist.
People don’t know how things in their own country work. “Graduate schools will collapse without international students paying for their PhDs”. Dude, you are so off, you are falling behind the horizon.
Clarissa's Blog 
People absolutely still pay in some fields. I wouldn’t be surprised if paleontology was one of them, because anthropology also tends to be unpaid as well. It’s becoming more common, but isn’t as matter-of-fact as you make it seem.
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If a reputable school is asking a person to pay for a PhD, it’s their way of saying that they don’t want this person in the program and don’t believe they’ll make it. It’s a way of refusing the application. This always existed.
The only real acceptance is a tuition waiver + a stipend. Everything else is a rejection.
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OT: I laughed way too hard at this….
https://x.com/AndrewHammel1/status/1978806798581629426
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“People get paid to get PhDs.”
Can you explain this? Does it mean that a PhD salary is always paid for by some grant?
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Graduate students are either paid by a grant which gives them a research assistantship or they have a position as teaching assistants. If they work as teaching assistants, they are paid by the University and have some teaching duties. In both cases they get a modest stipend and their tuition is either waived or paid for by a grant.
There are some professional MS programs that students have to pay for, but I am not aware of any PhD program that does not offer TA/RA positions to their students.
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Back at Yale, we had a yearly stipend of $30,000 plus health insurance. This was guaranteed for 5 years and then was raised to 6. Only two out of these five years were you supposed to teach. Sometimes, people would get hired as RAs, and that was an extra payment. Yale had the highest stipend in my field (in the year when I was admitted in 2003 it was, I believe, $25,000 and then it was raised). I also had an additional grant from Canada, $60,000CAD over 3 years. The whole point is that you concentrate entirely on your studies and not do any work outside the university.
I was accepted into Brown with a tuition waiver and no stipend, and I correctly interpreted it as not being accepted. People need to know: if you aren’t offered even a tuition waiver, this means you’ve been rejected. Where are the mentors and the advisers who are supposed to explain all this? I can’t bear thinking that people go into PhD programs and actually pay tuition.
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The university pays what’s called the stipend, which is like a salary. Without it, what is the student supposed to live on during the studies?
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