Getting the Feds to Foot the Bill

Georgette Hlepas paid for her graduate studies by lugging rocks in the family stoneworking and interior design business before she found someone else to do the heavy lifting: the Department of Defense.

"I was paying the bills for school myself, and it was getting hard to manage it all," she says. Now, as the recipient of a new type of federal scholarship, Hlepas has her tuition and housing costs covered and receives a modest living stipend. There are no teaching assistant responsibilities, and she has a mentor for her research in soil dynamics at the University of Illinois-Chicago.

In return for the SMART scholarship, she has agreed to work for the Department of Defense after graduation, a hitch equivalent to her time spent studying on the government dime.

"That one-to-one commitment also means that I'm essentially guaranteed a job when I graduate," says Hlepas, who is angling for a gig with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

Plowshares Plus

Soil dynamics -- how shifting soil affects stable structures -- might sound like an odd specialty to pique the military's interest.

But the notion that the Department of Defense is keen only on weapons designers is a common misconception, says William Rees, deputy under secretary of defense for laboratories and basic science, who coordinates the SMART program, designed to attract the brightest minds in disciplines from biology to physics.

"We're not all about bombs and bullets," he says. "The government has, historically, been the leader in funding basic scientific research."

Paying for graduate school is often catch as catch can. At many wealthy institutions such as Cornell, Harvard, or the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, most doctoral students receive fellowships, assistantships, or scholarship combinations that fund their studies. (Fellowships and scholarships usually have no teaching requirements, while assistantships often stipulate that the grad student help a more senior professor with research or classroom teaching.)

Generally, these lucrative awards are easier to find in science and engineering, either through government or corporate channels. In fields like the humanities, fewer than half of the graduate students have equivalent financing programs.

While there is no comprehensive government funding mechanism for graduate school education like the Pell grant for undergraduates, there are many government-sponsored fellowships and scholarships from various departments and organizations.

All told, the federal government is the largest investor in higher education in the nation, so it makes sense for students to try there first for funding. The National Science Foundation, to cite one of the most prestigious examples, receives some 8,200 applications per year for 1,000 graduate-level fellowships.

That's stiff competition, but the payoff is worth it. Students typically receive a $30,000 grant per year for tuition, an annual housing stipend of $10,500, and a travel award of $1,000, designed to encourage fellows to travel around the world in the course of their studies.

"It's about the long-term health of the nation's scientific workforce -- they need support throughout the educational pipeline," says Earnestine Psalmonds, who directs the graduate research fellowship program at the NSF.

The first step for students looking for some federal largess is their own academic department. Committees will often select the most deserving students for in-house awards and those that are given through partnerships between the school and a federal organization.

Other awards require separate applications; one example is the National Institutes of Health Graduate Partnerships Program, which funds graduate studies in a variety of biomedical disciplines. Students are also assigned to work at an NIH facility, giving them both academic and real-world exposure.

"The greatest advantages are the stable funding, advanced technology, and seminars at the NIH," says Richard McGee, who heads the program.

Those were the elements that attracted Patricia Gonzales to apply in 2004. Now, close to finishing her Ph.D. program in chemical engineering, she spends her time at the NIH lab in Bethesda, Md., working with government researchers studying kidney disease.

"It's a fabulous opportunity, and the expectations are a little higher than academia," she says. "So it keeps you on your toes."

Installment Plan

The funding stream doesn't stop after graduation. The average master's degree student will emerge with more than $32,000 in loans, while the average professional degree holder will rack up around $93,000.

Covering that tab isn't easy, but there are several federal outfits (and many state-level programs, depending on your discipline) that will pay those debts in exchange for service.

The National Health Service Corps, for example, staffs medical clinics in underserved areas; it will repay $50,000 of debt for the first two years of required service and $35,000 per year for the third or fourth year.

In the legal universe, too, serving the public can pay off. According to Equal Justice Works, a Washington, D.C.-based public-interest law organization, 30 federal agencies and 16 states offer loan-repayment assistance to lawyers who tackle public-interest law or practice for the state.

Regardless of the terms of the scholarship or award, students say their research is a form of public service.

Amy Finch, a doctoral student in organic chemistry at the University of Maryland, says that the federal government -- through the Department of Defense's SMART scholarship -- was a natural choice to fund her schooling and her DNA research.

"My husband is in the Air Force," she says, "and I thought that the work requirement of the scholarship would be a good way to support the military in a noncombat way."