Graduate School to offer sixth-year funding through Dean's Completion Fellowship

The Graduate School announced a sixth-year funding program called the Dean’s Completion Fellowship on Oct. 13. The fund would cover tuition, fees, and a full stipend for forty graduate students pursuing degrees in the humanities and social sciences.

The program is intended to incentivize degree completion by allowing selected sixth-year students to focus more on their dissertation.

According to University Media Relations Specialist Min Pullan, the program was created after the University's strategic planning process increased funding pressures on Ph.D. students in all disciplines.

Pullan said that students would be chosen for the program by department faculty and the Graduate School and explained that the new initiative will use funds set aside for “strategic priorities” in the University’s framework plan.

Many graduate students expressed concerns about the small number of graduate students who would be selected for additional funding through the new program.

“Forty spots is really not crazy much, especially in economics. We have a trend that more and more people are doing a six-year Ph.D. We would need almost half those spots, so forty is not crazy much,” said Simon Schmickler GS, a second-year graduate student in the economics department.

He added that he thought the program would be a great help to those selected for it. “Even if it’s not crazy much, it’s still super helpful because right now we have to do an enormous amount of teaching in sixth year. So there are quite a few people who worry about this,” he said.

He added that he thinks the fund is also generally helpful for University graduate students as it allows them to finish their dissertations more efficiently. In turn, this increases the students’ competitiveness in the job market.

Similarly, Vivian Chang GS, a second-year graduate student at the Woodrow Wilson School, said she thought the program was a good idea, but was concerned that it wouldn’t have a significant impact because of how few students would be selected for it.

“I think it shouldn’t just be a flat number, I think it should be based on how many students need this, how many students are continuing into their sixth year and still finishing up their Ph.D.s.”

According to Chang, the graduate school’s task force recently released a report that showed that University graduate students generally do have a longer program completion time.

“You don’t want to be struggling while finishing your Ph.D., especially at a really great institution at Princeton. If we want people to be able to really succeed academically and professionally we should give them more funding,” she said.

When asked how this new initiative would affect graduate students’ recent unionization efforts, David Walsh GS, a third-year graduate student in the history department, said that while competitive sixth-year funding was “a step in the right direction, … it does not go far enough.”

Like other graduate students, Walsh explained that there was only a small number of students who would benefit from the program. He added that many of the University’s peer institutions have created more generous programs, particularly Yale’s sixth-year funding initiative, which provides increased funding to all sixth-year students in good standing.

“That is a much broader commitment than Princeton, and is in no small part due to the activist work done by Local 33–UNITE HERE, the graduate student union at Yale,” he said.