GFC's Recommendations to AR Committee

Recommendations of the Graduate Council’s Graduate Funding Committee to the Provost’s Committee on Advanced Residence and Time to Degree

March 25, 2009

Introduction
In light of the significant progress that has been made on issues of graduate funding over the past two years, the Graduate Council’s Graduate Funding Committee (GFC) hopes that the Provost’s Committee on Advanced Residence and Time to Degree will take bold action to address graduate students’ concerns about the residency system, particularly Advanced Residence status. In recent years, administrators at many levels of the University have acknowledged that the residency system reflects priorities that are out of step with changes to the graduate funding policy at the University of Chicago. In short, the practice of charging AR students tuition penalizes graduate students in the most crucial years of their doctoral research, when the University should be aiding them toward completion of their degrees.

These students are often leaders in their departments; they serve as the most experienced core of graduate student teachers; and they will soon be the most prominent ambassadors of the university’s scholarly reputation. To this end, the GFC recommends that this committee take steps to ensure that AR status is no longer a burden for graduate students, but a position in which doctoral students can best succeed in their scholarly and professional pursuits. We are aware that some measures have already been taken to alleviate costs for graduate students in the 2009-2010 academic year, including a 2.5% stipend increase for students receiving stipends, and a temporary freeze of out-of-pocket AR tuition costs. The GFC wishes to urge this committee to take further steps to address the specific needs of AR students, who will not benefit from stipend increases. This document offers a detailed listing of the GFC’s concerns and recommendations about Advanced Residence and Time to Degree, as well as GFC', culled from students’ anecdotal experiences as well as the Graduate Council Open Forum held on March 9, 2009.

GFC’s Concerns:

AR Tuition:
AR tuition constitutes an unnecessary and unacceptable burden on graduate students attempting to complete their research and write their dissertations, and it remains unclear why it is one they must continue to bear. High out-of-pocket expenses for AR tuition (~$2350/yr), plus out-of-pocket costs for health care coverage (required for AR students in the Social Sciences, Humanities, and the Divinity School at ~$1800/yr), result in an average cost of ~$4150 per year that AR students must shoulder simply to remain enrolled. While more research is needed within the university to determine the impact of funding on time to degree, national studies have demonstrated a clear correlation between funding and time to degree. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the costs associated with AR status serve more to hinder student progress than enhance their scholarship or hasten time to degree.

AR Student Life:
In addition to the financial cost, the transition from scholastic residence to advanced residence marks a radical shift in a graduate students’ relationship to the university. Often, the intellectual and emotional framework that was successful during coursework and exams no longer works for a project the size of a dissertation. Traditionally, dissertation advisors provide support and help their students make the transition to independent academic work. For those students that finish quickly it is likely that they are getting the support they need. However, there are a number of systematic reasons that students do not receive the necessary support: (1)Many faculty advisors are overburdened and may not get back to their students with comments or advice for months at a time. (2) It has become common for faculty to leave the university for an appointment at another school. Distance often attenuates relationships. (3) Sometimes life simply intervenes and an advisor passes away at a critical time. Additionally, there are substantive reasons that students may want to look to someone other than their dissertation advisors for support. There is a power dynamic that comes into play where students may feel it is strategic not to reveal some of the difficulties they are having to the person who will be writing recommendation letters on their behalf. And, of course, some professors are more adept at others about giving advice on how to manage the challenges of a dissertation. Reducing time to completion requires ensuring that all students have access to a support structure, even if their advisors are not able to provide it.

Dissertation-year fellowships:
While a 2007 report (see “Background” below) found inconclusive evidence regarding the impact of funding on time to degree at the University of Chicago, it did find that large dissertation-completion grants are quite effective at improving time to degree. Yet the economic recession and its impact on endowments and center budgets have threatened many dissertation year fellowships. Meanwhile, outside funding opportunities are also becoming more difficult to obtain due to the impact of the recession on funding bodies. Additionally, some University center-based fellowships, as well as external funding (such as Mellon grants) have highly restrictive guidelines, hindering AR students who have completed these fellowships but find they need more time to finish their degree.

Departmental-level flexibility in determining time to degree:
As the effort to assess the effectiveness of current funding policies proceeds, GFC is concerned that the committee could do more to account for differences in departmental requirements (e.g. field research, language preparation) in determining time to degree. In particular, generalizations within a division as well as comparisons of University of Chicago departments and committees with similar programs at other institutions can be misleading unless a thorough comparison in difference in cohort size, departmental requirements and effectiveness (e.g. professional placement, awards, publication, research grants, etc.) is also included.

Health care coverage:
Health insurance as a required out-of-pocket expense for AR students is objectionable. Yet, even though graduate students have consistently indicated that health care is a key concern, university-paid health insurance for AR students is again being overlooked in committee recommendations and action steps from the Provost’s Office. It is unfortunate that neither the Provost’s Committee on Advanced Residency and Time to Degree nor the Vice President and Dean of Students Committee on Health Insurance and Costs has addressed this issue, in spite of the individual suggestions, survey results, and graduate student committee reports and petitions that have raised concerns, leaving the GFC wondering whether this issue will only continue to fall by the wayside.

Information about the AR system:
GFC would like to ensure that in addition to current AR students, incoming graduate students are fully informed about changes to the AR system. It is striking that while departments and divisions provide graduate students with information on their first five years of study, there often little mention of what students face after their fourth or fifth year, a silence which only contributes to the confusion associated with AR status. Often departments believe that students’ experiences at these later stages are highly individualized, while much of the evidence indicates that many stumbling blocks—finances, dissertation progress, health care, graduate student parenting—are shared.

Student Participation:
The lack of student participation in graduate funding decision-making initially sparked the development of the “Proposal for Changes to Current Doctoral Funding” (2007) and the work of the GFC, an oversight that was reflected in the 2008 Working Group for Graduate Student Life’s identification of “a clear desire from graduate students, one shared by many faculty and administrators, for greater student representation on committees at several levels.” Over the past year, administrators and faculty have been consistent in their efforts to include graduate students on university committees. In particular, the GFC applauds the length to which to the Provost’s Office has gone to include student representatives on committees regarding issues of graduate funding.

At the same time, the GFC is concerned that in addition to participation, graduate students could also benefit from greater transparency and engagement with committee members. Not only would it benefit graduate students to have a better sense of the issues being discussed, but it would also enrich the committee’s information gathering and decision-making process to hear from a variety of student voices. In particular, GFC has been concerned that the Provost’s Committee on Advanced Residence has not yet met publicly with graduate students.

GFC’s Recommendations:

AR Tuition:
For more than two years, graduate students have consistently recommended that university officials strive to reduce or eliminate out-of-pocket AR tuition because of the obstacles it creates. In line with these concerns, expressed in various surveys, proposals, town hall discussions, and online surveys, the GFC reiterates its call for a waiver of out-of-pocket AR tuition. To practically implement this recommendation, GFC suggests that the Provost’s Office implement an immediate waiver of out-of-pocket tuition for all AR students in academic year ’09-10 and work with divisional deans to develop and implement a long-term plan to eliminate out-of-pocket costs for students in a manner that accounts for the budgetary needs of divisions that have come to rely on revenue from Advanced Residence tuition.

If an immediate waiver is not possible within the short window remaining in the current budgetary cycle, the GFC recommends that the committee do all that it can to implement a reduction in out-of-pocket AR tuition for the 2009-10 academic year in an effort to decrease this burden on AR students as much as possible, particularly given the current economic recession.

AR Student Life:
The GFC recommends that the University provide more extensive supportive programming for students in their dissertation years. We call on departments to institute more administrative support structure for students, and on the University to provide the services of dissertation coaches, perhaps through the Student Counseling and Resource Service. Many of our peer institutions offer such services, and anecdotally we understand that such one-on-one coaching has been effective in assisting the progress of dissertation writers and reducing time to degree.

Dissertation-year fellowships:
GFC recommends that the university increase the number of divisional and university-wide dissertation-year fellowships in an effort to ensure that the total number of these fellowships available in academic year ’09-10 does not fall substantially below the number available during the previous academic year. Not only would this allow the Provost’s Office to sustain its commitment to maintaining current levels of graduate support, but it would also represent a direct investment in facilitating an improvement in graduate student time-to-degree.

In an effort to address the impact of ongoing budget cuts on time to degree, the GFC recommends that this committee conduct a review of academic center-based fellowships and department endowment-based fellowships that will be reduced. In late February and early March, this committee learned directly from the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture and the Scherer Study for American Cultures that their dissertation funding was in jeopardy. While both centers have now announced fellowships for 2009-2010, the GFC nevertheless maintains that a review should address the possibility that a delay in economic recovery will significantly impact the availability of dissertation year fellowships.

Departmental-level flexibility in determining time to degree:
The GFC recommends that this committee charge departmental faculty and departmental student associations with jointly developing department-specific expectations for time-to-degree that address the concerns of both faculty and student representatives. More broadly, the GFC hopes that this committee can address AR status in a manner that is attuned to the particular research demands and scholarly needs of each academic program. Just as the Provost’s Action Steps provided departments with the option to adopt or reject a decrease in enrollment in exchange for universal graduate student funding (the option known as “slots for cash”), it should also allow departments with flexibility in determining time-to-degree, only this time through a process that includes graduate student representatives.

Health care coverage:
As it has over the past two years, the GFC recommends that the University of Chicago reduce the burden of AR status by providing health insurance to AR students. Many graduate students have suggested that the university do this by following the example of many of its peer institutions that offer health coverage to teaching assistants. An initial step towards meeting these concerns would be for this committee to detail in its final report which university officials are understood to be directly responsible for addressing these concerns, as neither the Provost’s Office nor the Vice President Dean of Students office has adequately addressed them.

Information about the AR system:
The GFC recommends that the AR committee work with Graduate Council to produce a document or presentation for incoming graduate students to help them plan for addressing the funding needs of AR status. For instance, David Mihalyfy’s presentation to the Graduate Council Open Forum on March 9th could serve as the foundation of such a document. In addition to communicating information on AR status to incoming students, the GFC recommends that we work with the AR committee to create a workshop on long-term budgeting and financial planning for both incoming and current students.

Student Participation:
The GFC recommends that this current committee, as well as future committees convened around student life, schedule brown-bag discussions, open forums, or town-hall discussions at the outset of their efforts, so as to hear student questions and concerns before they begin to develop action steps. Afterwards, these committees should convene regular public meetings to update students on their progress and solicit feedback. The GFC also recommends that committees invite graduate students to come before the committee at the same intervals at which administrators and faculty members are invited to discuss matters before committees.

Background:
This section is intended to provide further background regarding recent changes in funding and academic programs for graduate students at the University of Chicago.

Over the past two years, the University of Chicago has made substantial institutional and budgetary commitments to improving the education and experience of its graduate students. Beginning with President Robert Zimmer’s announcement of the Graduate Aid Initiative (GAI) on February 7, 2007, incoming graduate students have benefitted from increased stipend and summer research support, and both incoming and current students have had access to University-paid and provided health insurance up to their fifth year. Other commitments have included:

- the convening of a Working Group for Graduate Student Life in the Humanities, Social Sciences, and the Divinity School in May 2007;

- the appointment of Cathy Cohen, the David and Mary Winton Green Professor in Political Science and the College, to the position of Deputy Provost for Graduate Education on January 1, 2008;

- the announcement of “Action Steps to Improve the Experience of Graduate Students in the Humanities, Social Sciences and the Divinity School” on February 25, 2008, which included an increased number of summer and dissertation year fellowships, the implementation of a minimum stipend in some departments and committees (in exchange for a decrease in enrollment) and inclusion of Divinity School graduate students in the GAI;

- the development of a Graduate Student Parent policy, which allows graduate students who are new parents greater flexibility in meeting their requirements;

- the announcement of an update to these Action Steps on April 18, 2008, which suspended the annual five percent increase in Advanced Residence tuition for the 2008-09 academic year;

- and the announcement of an “Increase in Remuneration for Graduate Student Teachers” on August 25, 2008, which raised the pay of graduate student teachers across a number of designated positions and maintained the same level of stipend reduction for the 2008-09 academic year.

Taken together, these initiatives reflect a radical shift in both the priorities and philosophy behind graduate student funding at the University of Chicago. Moreover, each new initiative has served to strengthen the lines of communication between graduate students and the administration. But while each new initiative has made a positive impact on various aspects of graduate- student life, a significant aspect of graduate student education has gone largely unaffected by these bold policy changes. This is all the more surprising considering the repeated references to the flawed priorities of the Advanced Residence (AR) system in various working group and committee reports, but, to date, no action has been taken to fix it.

The GFC has consistently called attention to the problems faced by graduate students in AR. In early Spring 2007, the ad hoc group that would become GFC prepared a “Proposal for Change to Current Doctoral Funding,” identifying AR tuition as one of six areas in which inadequate funding support proved burdensome to students. Produced over a three-month process of deliberations that included the participation of student representatives from 32 departments and committees across the three divisions, the proposal was refined and ratified according to input received from town hall meetings attended by over 100 students and responses from 581 students in an online survey. Given such widespread participation, this proposal has been perhaps the single most concise and articulate expression of graduate student concerns prepared by graduate students at the University of Chicago. It remains the logical starting point for any analysis of graduate student opinion on the issues of graduate student funding.

Committee members presented this proposal to President Zimmer on May 7, 2007. While calling attention to six core concerns, the two-page document highlighted the degree to which the lack of support and high level of tuition significantly altered the relationship of graduate students in AR to the university, such that AR tuition presented “an unnecessary and frequently crushing financial burden to students, slowing their progress toward degree and forcing them to focus on subsistence rather than scholarship.” It also argued that “there is no compelling reason why [health care] coverage should be limited to students in their first five years of doctoral study.” With the lack of University-paid stipend support or health care coverage and the increased tuition and health care cost, AR status has become not a privilege, but a staggering disadvantage. As a result, the proposal called for the elimination of this disadvantaged status, calling on the University to waive all out-of-pocket tuition for students and provide university-paid health care for students during their first twelve years.

The GFC has not been alone in raising these concerns. During the 2007-08 academic year, Graduate Students United (GSU), an organization of graduate student employees at the university, circulated a petition among graduate students in the Humanities, Social Sciences, and the Divinity School. Noting that the University of Chicago is part of a minority of schools that does not pay their student employees’ health insurance and that the AR out-of-pocket tuition compels graduate students who can qualify for a teaching position to structure their teaching to the demands of the university’s billing service, rather than academic and professional needs, the petition called for the provision of health insurance for all graduate student employees and fee remission for all students in advanced residence. GSU members collected 541 signatures and submitted them to Deputy Provost Cohen on May 2, 2008.

Following the efforts of the GFC and GSU, various committee reports have also called attention to the obstacles students in Advanced Residence face. In its February 25, 2008 report, the Working Group for Graduate Student Life proposed “an urgent review of the level of Advanced Residence out-of-pocket tuition, and of the procedure by which annual increases are reckoned” as the level of tuition has annually increased at a level (~5%) markedly higher than the rate of inflation and “this is an area of significant anxiety among graduate students.” In addition to concerns regarding these large automatic increases, the Working Group also noted that these charges seem disproportionately large in contrast to the minimal resources these students use. Moreover, the Working Group noted that these tuition charges are levied at the very moment when most students lose institutional support, while these same students are most in need of avoiding distractions from their dissertations.

In their discussions with graduate students, members of the Working Group found that in the three divisional units under consideration the average times to degree were well over six years and that AR tuition “represented a significant financial burden that was being laid on students well in advance of the time when even the speediest students might be expected to finish their doctoral work.” In contrast to the GFC and GSU recommendations for a complete tuition waiver, the Working Group expressed its desire “to see a reduction in this charge, and, ideally, a new formula for calculating future increases” as “the level of tuition has risen too quickly.” It also recommended a waiver of tuition for the fifth (or sixth) year of doctoral research (AR1), concluding, “AR tuition makes a very small contribution to the university’s budget, but is a significant burden on students’ individual budgets, and at a time when that sum is particularly hard for students to find.” The Working Group also noted that in the Spring 2007 online survey that informed the proposal to President Zimmer, graduate students reported improvements in health insurance coverage and care were their top priority. However, the Working Group did not make recommendations in regards to health care and acknowledged that this was the one area where student feedback was unanimous in its disappointment.

Rather than taking action on the Working Group’s modest recommendations in regards to AR tuition, the Provost’s “Action Steps,” released on February 25, 2008, tasked Deputy Provost Cohen with convening another committee of faculty, students, and staff on Advanced Residency and Time to Degree to review the AR system, “focusing in particular on the out-of-pocket tuition paid under advanced residency and its yearly increase.” The Action Steps also made brief reference to graduate student concerns regarding health care costs and services, but no mention of health insurance for students in AR. The failure to take action on AR recommendations and omission of health care coverage largely shaped graduate student responses to the Action Steps. A GFC survey released on February 26, 2008 found that among 455 respondents, four of the top five most important issues to graduate students (out of seven options given) were, in order, access to health care, teaching pay, dissertation year fellowships, and AR tuition. Reflecting in part the expectation of graduate students for substantial progress on these issues, survey participants gave the University response to their concerns about AR tuition and health insurance the lowest and fourth lowest ratings, respectively.

Deputy Provost Cohen’s “Memo to Graduate Students Updating Action Steps,” issued on April 18, 2008, was the first announcement to address potential changes to the AR system. In it, Deputy Provost Cohen announced a temporary suspension of the annual five percent increase in AR tuition for the 2008-09 academic year while a Committee on Advanced Residency convened to “explore how the AR system might be restructured to lessen the financial burden confronted by graduate students entering AR status” and “investigate the link between the AR system and the time to degree among our students.” Issued a little more than a year after the “Report of the Working Group for Graduate Student Life in the Humanities, Social Sciences, and the Divinity School,” the memo made no reference to recommendations from the GFC, GSU, or previous committees. Unfortunately, this memo made no mention of examining access to university-paid health care coverage for AR students.