UVa looks at tweaking graduate student fellowships

It will become tougher to get in as a graduate student at the University of Virginia, but those who make it will get better support from the school, according to a fellowship reform proposal that’s still being worked out.

The idea is to cut the number of fellowships — that is, financial packages — the university offers to students, but increase the average value of the packages and guarantee the money for a full five years, said Meredith Woo, dean of the College & Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

It’s a move that comes amid a climate of state funding cuts and a tight academic job market. Graduate student intake will drop about five percent, Woo said.

The existing system of fellowships is relatively haphazard, Woo said. UVa developed the ability to create a database of fellowships and then compared those numbers to the packages offered by academic competitors. The fellowships ranged from offerings of $22,000 annually in the English department to $13,000 annually in the religious studies department.

Wu said UVa’s numbers were lower than the competition’s.

“What the new proposal allows us to do is it allows us to be more competitive,” said David Leblang, chairman of the politics department. “Our fellowship offers have been on the lower side of our peer institutions and as a consequence we have lost some students that we really wanted.”

An anthropology department survey showed that the department’s offers were significantly lower than those of its peers, professor Ira Bashkow said.

The longer commitments made to incoming students will be one of the biggest changes for the department, he said.

Officials have worked out a plan to reformat fellowships in the humanities and social sciences. Details of the plan for graduate students in hard sciences are still being hashed out, Woo said.

The idea is to implement the changes simultaneously in fall 2012. Only incoming graduate students will be funded by the new system. Current students will continue under the existing structure.

Officials are hoping the new plan will help them increase the number of acceptances by students who are offered slots, increase the number of students who receive degrees, cut the time students take to earn degrees and improve the jobs students get after graduation.

Roughly half of all students who enter Ph.D. programs at UVa don’t receive one, Woo said. That’s a little bit higher than the national average, she said.

The initial plan called for “a rather drastic reduction” in incoming students, Woo said. After some pushback from the faculty, officials settled on the current plan. That means the packages won’t be as generous as Wu initially hoped, but she thinks the new plan — which offers fellowships of $18,000, $20,000 or $22,000 each year — still will be attractive to prospective students. They will have to make acceptable progress each year to keep the money.

Good graduate students help a university’s reputation and are a “magnet” for recruiting faculty, she said.

Because so many graduate students serve as teaching assistants, the move will have to be tied to a careful re-examination of the graduate and undergraduate curriculum, Woo said. She also said that, while teaching is an essential part of being a graduate student, she would like to see a reduced teaching load on UVa graduate students.

Professor Larry Bouchard of the religious studies department said that some professors worry that the number of graduate students they’ll be able to bring in under the new system will lead to a shortage of teaching assistants.

“Over a few years, we think that might happen, in which case we’ll have to rethink the way we teach,” he said.