The Graduate School faced a $2.5 million budget shortfall last academic year, resulting in a reduction in the number of graduate students entering the University this fall.
Dean of the Graduate School Sheila Bonde told The Herald that 23 fewer grad students matriculated at the University this year compared to last year. Bonde called the number a "relatively modest reduction" that was the product of a "predicted but unplanned shortfall" resulting from the University guaranteeing five years of funding to most doctoral candidates, a policy which starts this fall.
The reduction in the number of students coincides with an increase in applications to the Grad School. For the 2007-2008 academic year, applications were up 9 percent - an increase of 570 applicants - from the previous year.
"What we did was to restrict slightly the allowable offers of admission that departments were making so that we had a slightly smaller incoming class in some departments. But that did not touch the amount of support for continuing students," Bonde said. She added that the Grad School budget was boosted by $2 million "on account of the predicted pressures on it" and was "balanced in the final analysis ... at the end of the year."
P. Terrence Hopmann, professor of political science, chair of the department and coordinator of its Ph.D. program, said the effects of the budget shortfall were felt in his department.
"We feel basically that we had to turn down some quality applicants last year ... because we just didn't have the resources to offer them fellowships and teaching assistantships," Hopmann said. "Ideally, we'd like to take advantage of the fact that we see ourselves as a department on the rise ... to be a little bit more aggressive and generous in recruiting some of the best graduate students," he added, citing an increase in yield among admitted political science graduate students in recent years.
Joseph Bush GS, a doctoral candidate in chemistry and president of the Graduate Student Council, said the move to five-year guaranteed funding is "a healthy thing for the University," despite the strain it put on the budget this year.
"There are some people who certainly will get the short end of the stick on this, and it may stifle some works that are very hard to fund otherwise, but I think there's a broader picture than just the shortfall," Bush said. Though fewer graduate students are enrolling in chemistry this fall than in some previous years, Bush said "taking on fewer students ... means you have more faculty attention on those students."
Hopmann also expressed concern over potential repercussions that the shortfall may have in other spheres of the University, including undergraduate education.
"Even cutting back one additional graduate student ... carried out over three, four or five years has an impact on the number of TAs that we have available," Hopmann said. "This year we had to put some enrollment limits on courses that have previously not had enrollment limits."
But Bonde told The Herald that the University has "exactly the same number of TAs that we've had in the past and, in some cases, slightly more."
"There was a separate process of capping the courses in response to predicted enrollment, available faculty and available TA resources," Bond said. "So it's a much larger, systemic thing."
While Bonde acknowledged that "certain concentrations have historically experienced pressures in enrollments," she said she did not observe any unusual patterns this year.
"It's not so much available funding for TAs as it is available students to TA," Bonde said, adding that some graduate programs - including international relations and chemistry - are particularly small in relationship to the size of undergraduate concentration.
Though Bonde said the Task Force on Undergraduate Education and her own working group on graduate education will continue to examine "staffing challenges ... and the graduate student contribution to undergraduate education," she emphasized that University officials evaluate the size of the Grad School population with a long-term perspective. "So if a particular class is small, we try to compensate the next year and have a larger class, and vice-versa," she explained.
For his part, Bush suggested that placing more responsibilities on the shoulders of existing graduate students is not necessarily negative.
"Learning how to teach is one of the skills that you are supposed to gain in graduate school. ... To learn to teach is probably one of the greatest things you could learn how to do," Bush said. "So if it creates more TA shifts, and more people have to TA, is that a bad thing? I don't think so."
"If it forces people to finish their dissertations in shorter amounts of time, I also don't think that's a bad idea," Bush continued. "Whether or not it will squeeze some people who are stuck in a bind ... maybe. But in the end it's still up to the departments to decide who to fund and who not to fund."
And the five-year funding guarantee will not necessarily exclude students who take longer to finish their doctoral research, according to Bonde.
"We recognize that some programs take longer ... and there's no expectation that everyone will (complete a doctorate) at the end of five years," Bonde said.
"Last spring ... we asked departments to identify any students who were going to be entering their sixth or seventh year (whom) they felt were meritorious for support ... and we funded all of those students," she said.
