OK - all day today I've been refreshing thegradcafe.com to check out whether any of my schools have given admission notices yet.
So far it's just been a lot of Yale, Rice, and American (I got my admission to American).
The Yale rejections have been interesting... I've seen one obnoxious one and one funny one. First, one guy wrote of his Yale rejection: "sad, the backup uni of my applications". Look, dude - if Yale is your backup then, (1.) you're probably a dumbass for having Yale as your backup, and (2.) you're definitely a jackass for feeling the need to tell everyone that was just your backup, and (3.) you're definitely a dumbass for telling us that after receiving a rejection from them.
Later, there was a funnier Yale rejection that took the self-absorption down a notch. He wrote "I did not want their 37k stipend anyway - too much for me" :)
Why in the world does Yale have that kind of stipend anyway?
Wednesday, February 16, 2011
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Well...do high stipends attract or keep good talent?
ReplyDeleteI am guessing long years of graduate and post-graduate studies are exhausting and difficult and there may be at least some people who opt out early and want to get a job? And Yale wants to keep them?
Well sure, definitely. That's what the stipends are for, but Yale is a good department so it shouldn't have trouble keeping them, and that stipend is twice as much as most that I've heard.
ReplyDeleteIf any department could figure out what the subsistence wage level is, it would be economics departments!
You know what is outrageous?
ReplyDeleteA college graduate - yes, college - from Shri Ram College of Commerce in Delhi University after graduation received a...
$120,000 position in Deutsche Bank.
That's...that's...just crazy. It was in the newspapers here. God knows how that happened. Maybe it had to do with the fact that his mother was a professor at the same college and pulled some strings at placement, but what about Deutsche Bank? I can only guess that a relative of his at the bank hired him. Or maybe a relative secretly pays his salary and used his own funds to create a purely nominal office with purely nominal work for him.
But even that doesn't hold. From the very same college, students are hired by Deutsche Bank for $64,000-$80,000 a year. Using economic logic of "wages=marginal product", these people have to at least contribute to $80,000 of profits if they are paid $80,000. Of course, we also to have consider that paying $80,000 to one person means having to pay the same to already existing equally qualified employees, so the marginal expenditure of hiring this student is obviously higher. When I asked my father what marginal product was expected in telecom from new employees, he said it was up to ten times what is paid in salary.
How is a college kid going to bring $1 million in revenues to a business?
And here I hear that even American applicants' jaws drop on hearing about $37,000 stipends for the best graduate students.
True, although salaries and stipends are two very different things!
ReplyDeleteAre the Deutsche Bank locations different? If that guy is getting a job in NYC, that doesn't sound so unusual (based on my limited knowledge of friends going into investment banking out of college). The $60-80K might be for a non-NYC location or a non i-banking occupation.