The University gives academic programs considerable leeway in setting stipend levels by allocating a certain number of dollars to a program rather than a certain number of assistantships. In practice, though, this flexibility is highly constrained by the insufficiency of the funds that are allocated to the programs, in combination with the needs to staff undergraduate courses and to support an appropriate number of graduate students. In many programs, including some of the most prominent ones in the University, graduate stipends fall several thousand dollars below those offered by competing institutions. To try to maintain their graduate student numbers, some programs split assistantships, and the normal practice is to fund students for no more than three or four years, if that. The consequences are both obvious and deleterious.
Programs consistently find themselves unable to compete successfully for top applicants.
Graduate students suffer, and so does programmatic quality. To maintain the national and international prominence of its leading graduate programs and the viability of the rest, and to foster a better teaching and learning environment for both undergraduate and graduate students, the Team recommends that the University provide substantial enhancement to the graduate student support budget.