GS Dean urges better funding

Correction appended

In his report to the Priorities Committee (PriCom), Dean of the Graduate School William Russel maintained that additional funding for graduate students is crucial for maintaining the competitiveness of the University’s graduate programs.

The proposal seeks an additional 3 percent increase in graduate student stipends on top of the normal 3 percent annual increase, for a total increase of $1.08 million.

The report found that the stipends Princeton pays to its graduate students in the humanities and social sciences are lower than those at Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Stanford and MIT but higher than those at Cornell, the University of Chicago, Brown, Penn and UC Berkeley.

In the report, Russel emphasized the competition from Harvard, describing it as “far and away the strongest competitor for departments in the humanities and the social sciences, as well as the most frequent destination for those who decline our offers.”

Increasing the stipend would “prevent our falling further behind [Harvard], a position that would likely handicap our admission yield,” he said in the report.

The fear is of deterring prospective students, not of losing current ones, Graduate Student Government (GSG) press secretary Anne Twitty GS said in an interview.

“The main concern is that Princeton will start to fall in attracting the best graduate students,” explained Twitty, a fifth-year graduate student in the history department. “I think it’s unlikely that graduate students would leave the programs we’re in.”

University Provost Christopher Eisgruber ’83 did not indicate that the request for additional stipend funding would be granted when graduate students brought up the issue at PriCom’s annual public meeting on Monday and at a meeting of the Council of the Princeton University Community (CPUC) last week.

At the PriCom meeting, Eisgruber did not respond to the urging of GSG Academic Affairs Committee co-chair Silvia Bulow GS, who said that graduate stipend increases should be prioritized over increases in pay to faculty members because graduate students do not have the savings or income levels of faculty members.

“The rainy day is here, and we don’t have a lot to fall back on,” she said.

Bulow added that Princeton graduate student stipends are about 5 percent lower than those paid to their counterparts at Harvard.

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In response to a graduate student inquiry at the CPUC meeting about the rise in the cost of living, Eisgruber said that though “graduate students are an indispensable part of what the University does,” there was no guarantee their needs could be met.

“There’s not much that the University can do to promise that we can keep everyone at the same standard of living,” Eisgruber said. “That’s part of what being in hard times means.”

Russel’s report does not mention a rise in the general cost of living, but it does cite the “demolishment of the Butler Apartments in three years” as a reason for additional funding. The report explains that Butler Apartments, currently the cheapest University housing option for graduate students, “helps those with the lower stipends make ends meet.”

GSG Facilities Committee chair Jeff Dwoskin GS told The Daily Princetonian in April that because Butler Apartments offers lower rates than other graduate housing units, “many students, especially international students with spouses, take advantage of that.”

The report acknowledged that the planned demolition of Butler “has caused reasonable angst among the graduate student population,” noting that the additional 3 percent “increment in stipends would help mitigate that concern.”

Some graduate students are also concerned about how much stipends can cover, especially for those who do not live in University housing.

Housing Department and Graduate School officials told the ‘Prince’ earlier this year that the campus residence rate is “higher than graduate student housing provided at peer institutions.”

Some graduate students are now worried that the effects of a potential budget reallocation will leave them even more shorthanded. “In the later years, once you leave University housing, housing is much more expensive, plus there is the added cost of commuting, and [the stipend] doesn’t account for that,” Michelle Garceau GS said.

Roughly 70 percent of Princeton’s graduate students live in University housing, but because the University is not obligated to provide housing for all of its graduate students as it is for its undergraduates, many students live off campus involuntarily.

Amir Goldberg GS, a sociology graduate student, approaches the issue of stipend increases with a different perspective. Though the need to cover living costs is one way of looking at the stipend, students’ work itself also merits better pay, he said.

“If you work for the government or if you work in one of those big corporations, you expect to get a pay raise every year. I don’t see how graduate students are inherently different,” he explained. “We’re contributing to the community and the production of knowledge and definitely in teaching undergraduates. I don’t think we should deserve anything different than what’s the standard in other industries.”

Other graduate students don’t see their current stipend income as much of a problem.

“A lot of us live close to campus or can commute using public transportation, so we’re not affected by gas costs, and of course we’re getting an education, so I feel like we’re not as affected by the economic crisis as a lot of people are. On the whole, I feel untouched,” Sarah Bush GS said. “There hasn’t been much buzz about it. It’s hard to feel really upset. I mean, we have it pretty good.”

The final budget recommendations will be presented by President Tilghman and PriCom to the finance committee of the University Board of Trustees on Jan. 23, 2009.

Correction:

A previous version of this article stated that the proposal sought a funding increase of $1.8 million. In fact, the report requested $1.08 million from PriCom.