You don't pay for a Ph.D. in the U.S. They pay you.
You make this money either by 1) having such a strong application they give you all the money you need and cover tuition or 2) they make you earn your money by working as a teaching assistant or, in the case of students who have passed their qualifying exams after their second or third year, teach your own classes.
At worst they will pay you too little to survive (say hello, Columbia, NYU, University of Chicago) and at best they will give you a living wage relative to your surroundings (Cornell, Yale, Harvard, here's looking at you). In some cases (hi, Brown) they don't pay you at all some of the time, and you depend on being really competitive and being successful at applying for academic fellowships to survive the 5-7 years it takes to complete a Ph.D. (all your M.A.s are for naught once you're in a Ph.D. program, except the useful knowledge you've gained to write a better dissertation).
Flip side of this is that competition for these programs is ferocious. I would guess Cornell, where I've been for 7 years, has about a less than 5% acceptance rate. That's about par for the course for the top 10-15 schools in every field. The schools vary a lot. Ivy League schools tend to proliferate in the top 15 for every field, but the composition always varies.
Again, I have no notion what it looks like for linguistics. If you're interested in other fields aside from linguistics, it's perfectly normal for you to have two more fields to go along with your primary field. Mine is American History, with minor fields in European History (sorry folks, I know British, Spanish, Russian, German and some French history, not anything Scandinavian) and African history / decolonization. But I could have had, say, Musicology as a field if my advisor would have allowed it (in my case, he would have said no and hit me with a book).
You make this money either by 1) having such a strong application they give you all the money you need and cover tuition or 2) they make you earn your money by working as a teaching assistant or, in the case of students who have passed their qualifying exams after their second or third year, teach your own classes.
At worst they will pay you too little to survive (say hello, Columbia, NYU, University of Chicago) and at best they will give you a living wage relative to your surroundings (Cornell, Yale, Harvard, here's looking at you). In some cases (hi, Brown) they don't pay you at all some of the time, and you depend on being really competitive and being successful at applying for academic fellowships to survive the 5-7 years it takes to complete a Ph.D. (all your M.A.s are for naught once you're in a Ph.D. program, except the useful knowledge you've gained to write a better dissertation).
Flip side of this is that competition for these programs is ferocious. I would guess Cornell, where I've been for 7 years, has about a less than 5% acceptance rate. That's about par for the course for the top 10-15 schools in every field. The schools vary a lot. Ivy League schools tend to proliferate in the top 15 for every field, but the composition always varies.
Again, I have no notion what it looks like for linguistics. If you're interested in other fields aside from linguistics, it's perfectly normal for you to have two more fields to go along with your primary field. Mine is American History, with minor fields in European History (sorry folks, I know British, Spanish, Russian, German and some French history, not anything Scandinavian) and African history / decolonization. But I could have had, say, Musicology as a field if my advisor would have allowed it (in my case, he would have said no and hit me with a book).
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