>30-40k for tuition, which comes out to hundreds of thousands of dollars per grad student
Are there schools where tax money is actually paying tuition though, as opposed to the school just waiving tuition?
> Can’t join the marines after 28, for example
That's enlisted. If you have a phd you'd almost definitely join as an officer, which you can do until 30. And you have until 39 if you want to go into the Air Force.
In biomedical fields, the NIH provides institutional training grants that often cover all students' first 1-2 years. There are usually slot for more advanced students too. In parallel, there are also individual training grants (like the NSF's GRP and the NIH's NRSA) that also cover tuition. Alternately, an advisor's research grant (again, often tax-funded) can cover a stipend--and sometimes tuition too.
Waivers do exist, but they're often used for international students or in exchange for "service" (i.e., teaching) and fairly few people get through grad school entirely on waivers.
What percentage are funded through NIH training grants? Also I could definitely be wrong, but from a quick Google search it looks like NIH training grants limit tuition to $16k per year.
They're covering a stipend at $24,816, tuition at up to 16k, "training-related expenses" at $4200 and an institutional allowance of another $4200. There are undoubtedly other sources of money too (center grants, etc).
I'm emphatically not saying this is a bad thing in general. However, I do think it might be worth considering diverting /some/ of this money to fund jobs for the people we're training.
>They're covering a stipend at $24,816, tuition at up to 16k, "training-related expenses" at $4200 and an institutional allowance of another $4200. There are undoubtedly other sources of money too (center grants, etc).
I get the stipend and expenses. It's the 30-40k in tuition that I'm questioning. At my school CS grad students just got a tuition waiver, and as far as I know it wasn't directly paid for by grants.
As for the stipend. They are doing research, so you have to evaluate the money in that context. If they are doing useful work for that $25k it's not a waste even if they don't end up working in research after finishing.
I don't have my offer letter (and in any case it is a decade old), but the tuition part was definitely higher than $16k. It is possible that the sticker price isn't very useful, and they're taking whatever they can from outside sources and waiving the rest.
There are other costs too: here's an interesting study that tries to estimate non-tuition, non-stipend costs https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4353078/#B6 These, since they're mostly faculty time, are also partially paid for by funders.
In any case, my point is that grad student labor is both important surprisingly expensive and it's not at all clear to me that we have the "right" amount of it. Specifically, I think it might be better, from a research productivity and a "system health" persepective, to have somewhat fewer grad student slots and a few more staff scientist positions: Maybe 70/10 instead of 100/~0.
Are there schools where tax money is actually paying tuition though, as opposed to the school just waiving tuition?
> Can’t join the marines after 28, for example
That's enlisted. If you have a phd you'd almost definitely join as an officer, which you can do until 30. And you have until 39 if you want to go into the Air Force.