The short version
Every stipend, tuition and cost-of-living figure on GraduateLedger shows where it came from and how well it's sourced. We would rather show "Not yet available" than a confident-looking guess.
Source labels
| Label | What it means |
|---|---|
| Official | Published by the university, department, union contract, or agency. We link the source and show the date we last checked it. |
| Crowdsourced | Self-reported by students (for example on public forums). Useful, but unverified. We don't mix these with official figures. |
| Estimated | Our own calculation or a stand-in: for example a university-wide stipend used when a department's figure isn't confirmed, a rate inferred from a college schedule, or a per-credit total we derived. |
| Unverified | We found a figure but couldn't confirm its source or year. |
A figure never gets a stronger label than its source supports.
Where each kind of data comes from
- Stipends: university provost, graduate school and department pages; collective-bargaining agreements and union-published pay scales; official offer-letter templates. Where only a university-wide minimum is published, department pages show it labeled Estimated.
- Housing: published rates for university-run graduate housing, converted to a monthly, per-person figure. Conversions (for example from per-semester or per-year prices) are described in each row's notes. City-median rent is shown separately and labeled as city-level.
- Utilities, transit and parking: the transit authority or university transportation office and the parking office's published rate pages. Free transit with a student ID is shown as free. Parking is shown as an annual or monthly range as published.
- Master's tuition: the registrar, bursar or provost's published tuition schedule. We show published tuition before any aid, separately from stipend math. PhD students usually have tuition waived under their offer; your offer letter confirms.
- Program profiles: each degree's official program, department or admissions page: research areas, application deadlines, GRE policy and general information. Faculty listings link to the department's own directory rather than being reproduced here.
- Fellowships: the funding agency's or foundation's own program page.
We do not publish acceptance rates. Most universities do not publish them reliably, and we don't want to present crowdsourced guesses as fact.
How the research is done
Research is compiled with AI-assisted tools working from the official pages above, then organized into structured data, labeled by source type and date-stamped. Items we are unsure about are flagged for recheck instead of being published as settled.
How current is the data?
Each figure shows a verified date. Stipends, rent and parking change most often at the start of an academic year, so we re-check them each year and when we learn of a new contract or rate sheet.
What we don't do
- We don't accept payment to change a figure or ranking.
- We don't copy proprietary databases.
- We don't present estimates as official numbers.
Spotted a mistake? See our editorial standards and corrections policy or contact us.