<p>Why is that boneh3ad?</p>
<p>^MS pool is a great source of revenue while PhDs are expensive. The schools will lose money if they have half and half unless they really have tons of external fundings for their research and many people. Othrewise, it’s actually common to have lots of MS. Also, when you say half and half in a department, is that at any given time? Remember PhDs stay there for 5 years on avearage while MS students may be there as short as 1 year. So “in a department” is not the same thing as “in a class”. MS students have a much faster turnover and it means MS still far outnumber the PhDs in any incoming class.</p>
<p>MS revenue at a major research institution is much less than research revenue. Even undergrad revenue is significantly higher than MS revenue. Oftentimes undergrad revenue is higher per capita, even. The driving factor is not money.</p>
<p>Departments would love to have more PhD’s because those do a lot more for advancing the reputation of the school and bringing in more research money. Additionally, the professors themselves greatly prefer PhD students to MS students since they keep them around longer and can get them to do more work for them. MS students have that short turnaround like Sam mentioned, so you have to retrain new ones a lot more often than PhD students, so you get a greater level of sustained productivity from the PhD students. This increase in productivity can help produce more and better results, thus helping attract more research money, which helps offset the loss of an MS’s tuition. If there are any more factors, I don’t know them. I can only go by what came directly out of my department head’s mouth.</p>
<p>When I say in a department, I mean it just how it sounds. In general, a specific department would prefer to have a roughly equal number of PhD’s and MS’s that are currently enrolled, regardless of their progress through their degree. I also said that this is rarely the case, if ever, it is merely something that the departments would ideally like to see. We all know that things are rarely ideal.</p>