THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
Financial Support
All PhD students enrolled in the Division of the Social Sciences will be funded for the duration of their program with funding support from the University of Chicago, external sources, or a combination of the two, regardless of citizenship or other factors. Funding support includes a full-tuition scholarship, health insurance premium (for the student only), coverage of the Graduate Student Services Fee, and a living stipend. Additional funding from fellowships, research work, teaching, and department-based awards is common. External funding through extramural agencies is encouraged.
The UChicagoGRAD Fellowships Database features several hundred fellowship opportunities for prospective applicants, doctoral students, and postdoctoral students in the Social Sciences.
All students are required to fulfill five required teaching assignments before the end of their fifth year. Students may complete one required teaching assignment outside of the department before fulfilling the required departmental points. Students are welcome to take advantage of additional paid teaching opportunities after completing required teaching.
Read about the teaching requirement in the Graduate Program Handbook. For questions about required teaching please contact the Graduate Student Affairs Administrator.
The department confers annual prizes to exceptional students, including the Martin and Margaret Lee Prizes, the George S. Tolley Prize, the Yiran Fan Memorial Prize, and the Outstanding Undergraduate Teaching Award.
To help advance students' research through publication prior to research, the department has special funds to offset the cost of journal submission. Learn about journal submission reimbursement here.
The department has special funds for travel to partially defray expenses associated with presenting a paper at professional conferences. Learn more about conference travel funding here.
"The funding covered my travel and housing for the Graduate Women in Economic Theory Conference in New Haven. I presented my job market paper, Collusion-Robust Auction Design: Posted Price and a Knockout Auction, and met several women graduate students and faculty researching similar topics. "
"The funding allowed me to present at a conference for applied economics in developing economies hosted at the University of Cape Town. The paper, "Reallocation under Rationing: Evidence from Electricity Outages in South Africa", uses digital transaction data to analyze the effects of electricity rationing ("load shedding") on firms in Cape Town in the short and medium term. I received crucial feedback from an audience who have direct experience of the studied policies in daily life."
The department has special funds to partially defray expenses associated with acquiring data sets and support for data projects. Learn more about data project funding here.
"The Department’s student research funding allowed me to purchase rich individual-level consumption data. This data was vital for estimating demand, allowing me to demonstrate that automakers’ ideological brand positioning significantly shapes consumer willingness-to-pay for major purchases such as electric vehicles. This concept is further discussed in Changing Gears: The Welfare Impacts of Brand Ideology."
"I'm grateful for the funding, which I used to annotate training data and fine-tune state-of-the-art computer vision models that digitized thousands of phonebooks. I'm now using this data in my thesis to study the evolution of economic geography in American cities."
For questions about the financial support described above, please contact the Graduate Student Affairs Administrator.
Kate Falzareno
Graduate Student Affairs Administrator
Email: kfalzareno@uchicago.edu
If you apply for non-departmental funding—even if it is through the University of Chicago—please contact the Grants and Contracts Administrator about your application.
Crystal Taylor-Nevils
Grants and Contracts Administrator
Email: crystal1@uchicago.edu