But ability to arrange to do so without incurring new debt is very much a personal matter and depends on many variables, such as marital status, existing dependents, current debt load, existing health issues, etc.
It's preparation to become either a professor at a university or an independent researcher at an industrial/government research lab. It won't increase your lifetime earnings or job prospects, but it does open up doors to jobs whose primary allure is intellectual freedom rather than material reward.
If you don't go one of those two routes after a CS PhD, then a CS PhD has rather high negative expected value except in a few special circumstances (e.g., BS from NoName Branch Cappus to PhD from mit/cmu/stanford. But that's not the typical case for non-immigrants.)
How do?
Grants.
Going to school where college is cheap and/or cost of living is low.
Testing out of classes.
Taking a job where your employer will pay for your education.
Living with relatives while attending school on a pay-as-you-go basis.
Different people work this out different ways. The exact details will vary tremendously.
I have done all of the above at various times. I have nearly six years of college and only ever took out one student loan for a boot camp style summer program where I completed a year-long certificate program in eight weeks.
But who is getting 30k anyways? If that is the stipend of one grad student, you need to double it to get the household of two grad students, and then it is over the median household income. The median income is not poverty
Typical grad stipends outside of top-5 schools are closer to $20K.
$30K is damn close to an upper bound. That's what the tippy-top schools pay the top 1% of students. The few schools that go higher -- AFAIK in CS only NYC+Boston+CA -- are in markets where a single bedroom in a shared house runs $1K+/mo. And in that sort of rental market the federal poverty guideline is rote bullshit.
$16K is perfectly normal for the vast majority of folks who aren't at top 5 programs in the most in-demand field.
> But who is getting 30k anyways? If that is the stipend of one grad student, you need to double it to get the household of two grad students
Yeah but then you subtract child care and someone might as well stay home because it's literally costing them money to work.
I am doing a PhD in Germany and get 54k €
The wage is regulated, everyone who has worked full-time at the university for a few years will earn the same. Although most grad students will earn much less, because most only have a part time position, and finish their thesis sooner.
In the first year without a full-time position, I was getting 20k €
>Yeah but then you subtract child care and someone might as well stay home because it's literally costing them money to work.
In Germany, child care costs between nothing and 500€/month depending on the city (e.g. in Hamburg it is free for 30h/week)