Data for the annual Survey of Earned Doctorates from the National Science Foundation shows racial differences in financial support for students who earn doctoral degrees.
For instance, 31.5 percent of Whites who earned doctorates in 2025 had served as research assistants. Only 16.3 percent of African American doctoral recipients served as research assistants. Some 19.9 percent of Whites had teaching assistantships while pursuing doctoral studies, compared to 12.5 percent of Blacks.
About one out of every five Whites who earned a doctorate paid for their degrees primarily from their own funds or savings. For African Americans who earned doctorates in 2025, 38.5 percent used their own funds or savings as the primary source for paying for their education.
Just over 24 percent of all African Americans who earned doctorates in 2025 had no education-related debt when they earned their terminal degree. For Whites, 55.5 percent had no education-related debt. The median education debt for graduate education for African Americans was $75,000. For those Whites who earned doctorates in 2025, they had an average graduate student debt of $45,000.
Of all African Americans who earned doctorates in 2025, 18.7 percent had student debt of more than $160,000. For White Americans, only 3.7 percent of all doctoral recipients had student debt exceeding $160,000.
