Wages for UCSD graduate student researcher assistants may vary by as much as $3,000, according to data from a new study released by the Chronicle of Higher Education.

The October study reported discrepancies between graduate pay at UCSD departments, including biology, economics and history. While graduate student research assistants in the biology department receive $17,325 in an academic year, those in economics are paid $14,157 and wages for history department researchers are less than $10,000.

The study also showed that while wages for research assistants vary from department to department, teaching assistants in all departments are paid the same.

The discrepancy can partly be attributed to each department’s curriculum as well as their availability to fund research, history department chair Daniel Vickers said.

“Historians do not normally conduct these sorts of big collaborative projects that scientists do, so we don’t get the funding,” Vickers said. “Historians more commonly work by themselves.”

Certain departments, like biology, have greater market appeal than others and are able to obtain external funding from private sources, Graduate Student Association President Kris Kohler said.

While external funding is not unheard of in the history department, it usually comes from small, private endowments because it is “very difficult to get sizable government grants and sizable corporate grants,” Vickers said.

Although the UCSD biology department’s graduate program pays its research assistants considerably more than programs in history and sociology, finding financial sources is “a constant struggle,” biology graduate program chair Darwin Berg said. The biology department is primarily funded by private grants, fellowships and corporate partnerships, and receives only “a tiny portion” of its money from the university, Berg said.

As a result of the university’s inability to provide complete funding for graduate programs, graduate student admissions will most likely decrease in the future, Berg said.

“The talent pool is staggering, [but] that’s not the problem,” Berg said. “We just don’t have the funding.”

Because campus departments want to recruit the very best graduate students, they still must offer competitive packages, though fewer in number, Vickers said.

“The entire graduate funding issue is moving in the direction of crisis,” Vickers said. “The size of the grant that we’re given as a department is basically not large enough to allow us to give fellowship and teaching assistant packages that can compete with other universities. As a result, we have to carve the amount of money that we have into fewer and larger units.”

In addition, students in closely related but different departments can potentially take the same classes and join the same labs while being paid differently, GSA Vice President of Internal Affairs Jeff Gold said.

The disparity of funding and graduate student pay is closely linked with the department’s practical application and its research methods, according to biology graduate student Susy McKay.

“Biology typically brings in a lot of grant money, whereas something like math wouldn’t be as heavily funded by outside sources,” McKay stated in an e-mail. “Cellular and molecular biology are more heavily funded because many of the projects have applications to things like cancer, anthrax and AIDS. Biology experiments certainly take more time than thinking about math.”

While fields like those in the neuroscience department cover tuition and fees and provide a stipend for graduate students, the same is not true for other areas of study, especially those in social sciences, Gold said.

“In the neuroscience department, you are expected to TA one class, but it is not required that you TA to receive funding for the first two years because [neuroscience] has external funding,” Gold said.

Because fewer research assistants in such fields as history are needed and those who find work are paid less than science departments, most graduate students in these departments turn to teaching assistant positions for funding, Vickers said.

“[History graduate students] certainly have to do more teaching assisting than people in the sciences do,” Vickers said. “History students regard their work as teaching assistants to be burdensome, there’s no doubt about that. It seriously slows them down.”

Admission of international graduate students may also fall in the future due to the lack of funding, sociology department chair Andrew Scull said.

While the UCSD Office of Graduate Studies and Research offers financial aid through fellowships, scholarships and fee waivers, most of these are not offered to international students. In addition, many of these fellowships, including those from the National Science Foundation, are offered to students in the science field.

The increasing reliance on private, external sources of funding may have an impact on public educational priorities in the future, Kohler said.

“I think that the state has to fully fund public higher education,” Kohler said. “They have to restore the word ‘public’ to higher education.”