Like the rest of American society, graduate students are getting older, with the current average age for both master's and doctoral students standing at 33. As shown in Figure 1, the largest concentration of graduate students is in the 25 to 29 age category. Although the age profile decreases rapidly after age 29, about one-fifth of all graduate students are over the age of 40. For doctoral students, the largest numbers are in the 25 to 39 age cohorts. Not surprisingly, master's students are both younger and older than the doctoral population.
Most graduate students are married, and about one-quarter have dependents other than their spouses.
For those with dependents, the average number of dependents is two. Those with dependents are more likely to be women, and older than graduate students without dependents. In fact, about one-half of all doctoral students report working on campus, in contrast to the 16 percent of master's students with jobs on campus. Nevertheless, the high percentage of students working in positions not directly related to their studies has wide-ranging implications for the delivery of graduate programs. Again, students in arts and sciences graduate programs tend to be involved in on-campus employment at a higher rate than students in other fields.