Although Brown is primarily known for its undergraduate program, the Corporation's February decision to increase graduate student stipends is part of the graduate school's steady coming into its own. Since the 2001-2002 school year, the graduate school has celebrated its first centennial, seen its student body expand by almost 200 students, launched eight new programs and experienced a 46-percent increase in applications, an increase unmatched by any of the University's peer institutions.
Today, the graduate school offers degrees in 55 departments, and boasts a 17-percent acceptance rate that rivals the college's selectivity.
In 2001, the University's $12,800 base stipend for fellowships awarded to support graduate students' studies was lower than every other Ivy League school, as well as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; the University of California, Berkeley; Stanford University; and the University of Chicago, according to Dean of the Graduate School Karen Newman, a professor of comparative literature and English. This year, stipends totaled $16,000, putting Brown fourth from the bottom among "Ivy plus" schools. For the 2005-2006 school year, stipends are anticipated to be $17,000.
"We've certainly increased aid - we were at the bottom of our peer group," Newman said. "(The increased stipends) make us more competitive."
"It's no secret that the graduate school needed attention in the last few years," said Provost Robert Zimmer.
Brown has always had a distinct reputation for encouraging undergraduate study, especially compared to universities like Harvard and MIT, which feature big professional schools and graduate student bodies larger than their undergraduate populations.
"I've never heard a justification for why Brown doesn't have any professional schools, other than its dedication to the liberal arts," Newman said.
Even given the recent growth of the graduate school student body - there were just over 1,400 students when Newman became dean - it is still the smallest graduate school in the Ivy League, with 1,600 graduate students to the college's 5,700 undergraduates. Princeton, whose graduate school Newman described as comparable to Brown's, has about 2,000 students, but conferred 282 Ph.D.s and 155 master's degrees in 2004 to Brown's 143 Ph.D.s and 124 master's degrees. Dartmouth College is the only Ivy League school without a graduate program.
Zimmer emphasized that the University encompasses more than simple comparisons. "Undergraduate versus graduate is the wrong question to ask," he said. For him, the graduate school is especially important as one distinct "fabric" of the University's overall composition.
Newman is happy with the growth the graduate school has experienced so far and says she is aware its small size brings good and bad ramifications.
"Staying relatively small is a positive - when (potential students) come to visit, they are excited that it's not a big factory churning out Ph.D.s, but instead they have lots of opportunities to interact with undergraduates and faculty in lots of different ways, and not just get lost in the shuffle. It's one of the attractions of Brown, so we certainly want to keep our size," she said.
On the other hand, "when students come and it's so small that they feel that they won't have a cohort of students to interact with it can have a negative effect," she added. For this reason, most graduate programs have expanded in the last four years, particularly in the sciences.
The graduate school had excess grant capacity, according to Newman, which meant there were faculty members with excess money from federal grants who could afford to support graduate students as research assistants, but the University had not been giving enough fellowships to students to make use of that money.
Newman said the computer science and engineering programs have used this excess grant money to attract more students.
Some of the humanities departments in the graduate school award fewer than five degrees each year, which means that they run the risk of having "not enough critical mass to really make a class," Newman said. "As part of the Academic Enrichment Plan (the University) is expanding by 100 faculty - those faculty need students," she said. Humanities departments that used to accept between two and four students each year now accept between three and six, she said.
The University's 2001 consortium with Trinity Repertory Company offers master's and doctoral degrees in acting and directing in three years, adding between 14 and 16 students to the graduate student body each year, according to Newman. Master's degrees were recently added in public policy and public affairs, and doctoral programs were added in computer music and modern culture and media. Graduate degrees are available in biology through a partnership with the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, Mass., that also includes research collaborations and faculty exchanges, and a partnership with the National Institute of Health will offer a graduate program in neuroscience starting in the fall of 2005, according to Simmons' Status Report.
"To recruit good faculty, you need a good graduate program as well as undergraduate program. They need students working in their labs and working on research that they can collaborate with," Newman said. "Everybody feels that it's really important for Brown to be involved and engaged in producing the next generation of scholars and teachers - we want to be sure that there are brilliantly trained and really smart and engaged teachers and scholars for the next generation of faculty," she said.
One of Simmons's 10 academic initiatives is "Excellence in Graduate Education." Another initiative, which involves the graduate school extensively, is "Fostering Multidisciplinary Initiatives."
Newman said fostering interdisciplinary work and collaboration across departments is paramount to the future of the University.
"The reason we're moving in that direction is because the issues and problems in our society and the way in which knowledge is produced increasingly requires that kind of thinking and collaboration," she said.
"Increasingly in our society, problems require cross-disciplinary approaches. You can't solve environmental problems just by doing the science. We need to change people's behavior, incorporate literary and artistic and rhetorical analysis and questions - psychological ones, even," Newman said. "As knowledge has become specialized, one person hasn't been able to provide everything anymore."
