Grad students remain dissatisfied despite new post-enrollment option

Post-enrollment may be the biggest problem currently facing graduate students at the University, according to a report released by the Graduate Student Government earlier this year.

No longer officially students at the University, Ph.D. candidates who have exceeded their enrollment period are no longer given the stipend on which they had lived for several years.

In addition, they are not able to keep their student loans in deferment, they lose the free health coverage the University had provided them and, for nearly half the graduate school population who are foreign citizens, they face the possibility of deportation.

In September, the GSG dedicated nearly half their annual Graduate Student Life Initiative report to post-enrollment.

That same month, Provost Amy Gutmann led a committee that investigated the matter and issued a report on the topic.

The committee asked for the creation of a new status for those pursuing their degrees after their university funding has ended called Degree Candidacy Continuing. The status was designed to help ease the administrative headaches associated with the transition to post-enrollment.

The report has met with mixed reactions from graduate students, many of whom see it as a step in the right direction, but say there is more to be done.

While DCC status allows Ph.D. candidates to maintain certain privileges like library use and parking, it does little to solve the issues related to the term "student." Because DCC and other post-enrolled ex-graduate students are no longer classified as students by the University, their student loans come out of deferment, and they face deportation by the Immigration and Naturalization Service, graduate students said.

As the policy stands, students in a given department have a set amount of time during which they receive University funding — which includes tuition, healthcare and a stipend.

However, some students disagree with that sort of even treatment of research.

"I think that graduate work really is an individual sort of thing," said Leonard Pease, a third-year graduate student of chemical engineering. He did not think it fair that some people get "to the end of that fifth year, and they have made good progress all along, and they are told 'bye bye.' "

"Our system has been called tough love," President Tilghman said. "That's not a bad description of it.

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"We support students very generously for four or five years, through the fact that their [monetary] support is generous and their teaching load is light compared to other universities'. There is an expectation that you will complete your degree in the period you are funded," she added.

The duration of graduate enrollment is fixed and varies from four to six years depending on department.

"What is unlike other schools is that in those schools when you use up all your funding, you can't buy student status," said Meredith Safran, GSG press secretary.

At other schools, including Columbia and Harvard universities, graduate students can pay tuition to maintain their student affiliation for extended periods of time.

Instead, students at Princeton have other options to remain a part of the University community as they finish their dissertations.

In the sciences and engineering, there are outside grants and fellowships available, and humanities and social science students have the option to become lecturers, Tilghman said.

But graduate students said time spent lecturing is time taken away from writing a dissertation.

"There is a significant information barrier," GSG president Scott Miller said. "I don't think a lot of people know about [post-enrollment] when they come in here."

Both Tilghman and Graduate School Dean William Russel stress that it is important to keep time for graduate degrees short.

In the last 25 years, the time taken to earn a degree across the nation has increased by two years. While it has risen slightly at the University as well, time to degree at the University is second shortest in the nation, behind the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which owes its short degree times to the technical nature of its research, Tilghman said.

However, students have conflicting interests when it comes to deciding how long to work on their dissertations. Some students are told by their departments that they would be at a disadvantage for academic positions without more time behind their research, Miller said.

Because of the relative lack of structure in graduate compared to undergraduate programs, there is no data available on the fraction of students who complete their Ph.D.'s in the allotted time.

The GSG report did contain mean and median times to degree in several departments. According to this report, every department except molecular biology has a median time to degree that exceeds the time the University funds their students.

However, these data do not take into account that some students complete their degrees early in the academic year, enter the workforce and then graduate up to nine months later, Tilghman said.

Other than DCC students, there is no official tally kept of students still pursuing their degrees after funding ends.

The statistics that are compiled in the GSG report indicate that more than half of all graduate students will require some extra time to earn their degree. But about half those students will earn their degrees within one year of becoming post-enrolled. To help those students, the DCC status will extend certain student privileges like library access and housing eligibility for one year after enrollment ends.

Compared to the alternatives of decreasing funding to allow a longer term to degree and extending funding for an indefinite amount of time, Tilghman and Russel agree that the current method of providing a set time of full funding is preferable.

"I think we have the right system," Tilghman said. "Do I think it's working perfectly? No. Are we eager to work with GSG? Absolutely. But would I do a radical remake of our system? No."