Offering proof that her commitment to financial aid goes beyond an abstract ideological declaration, University President Amy Gutmann introduced an initiative yesterday that will increase the stipends of doctoral candidates by 11 percent in five of the University's graduate programs beginning next September.
Graduate students in the schools of Arts and Sciences, Design, Education, Social Work and Nursing will now receive $17,500 -- compared to the $15,750 sum that they formerly were awarded. The change will affect currently enrolled students, as well as all incoming students in the academic years to come.
"It really is strengthening the core of the University," Gutmann said of the stipend increase. She said the added monetary incentive will aid in the recruitment of highly qualified graduate students, while simultaneously helping to attract and retain outstanding faculty members.
"Our ability to recruit the very best graduate students is directly connected to our ability to recruit the very best faculty," Interim Provost Peter Conn said, highlighting the connection between the quality of graduate students and the University's overall reputation.
"We know that we are already incredibly competitive at the undergraduate level -- where we haven't been as competitive as we'd like to [is] at the graduate level," Gutmann said.
And though the increase will "give the graduate students a somewhat higher standard of living," according to School of Arts and Sciences Dean Samuel Preston, there will be monetary consequences for the University.
"There will be a budgetary effect -- this is not an inexpensive initiative," Preston said, noting that the money used to fund the increase will come from the individual schools' budgets.
"Both the president and the provost have also made contributions," he said.
Many University officials also noted that the skills that graduate students bring to the University directly affect the undergraduate population.
"Graduate students play an important role in undergraduate education," Conn said, noting the trickle-down effect that the initiative could bring.
Though the decision to increase graduate student funding comes in the wake of the Graduate Employees Together-University of Pennsylvania's failed quest for unionization, Gutmann said that the recent ruling by the regional National Labor Relations Board has nothing to do with the initiative.
"From the deans to the graduate students to the Middle States [Commission on Higher Education] accreditation [report] to our strategic plan, everything pointed in the direction of doing this," she said, citing the major impetuses behind her decision.
The CHE report that Gutmann cited refers to an external study conducted from 2002 to the spring of this year, examining the state of Penn's graduate programs.
The review encouraged the University to "examine alternative tuition cost arrangements," according to an excerpt from the document.
"Our packages have improved dramatically over the past several years," Preston said, describing Gutmann's plan as "the final stride that really gets us up to the point where we're really competitive with everyone else."
The graduate student community reacted favorably to the increase, expressing support not only for the actual initiative but also for the message that it sends to the Penn community about the new administration.
"I think it's a really great indicator of where graduate education sits with [Gutmann's] administration," said Simi Wilhelm, chairwoman of the Graduate and Professional Student Assembly and a graduate student in education.
While acknowledging that she was pleased with Gutmann's proposal, Ann Tiao, vice president for student affairs for the Graduate Student Associations Council and a doctoral candidate in education, said that other issues of funding still remain.
We're focusing on "making packages more equitable for all graduate students" across all the schools, Tiao said.
Conn said that he was optimistic about the future of graduate student financial aid.
"We fully anticipate that this figure will continue to rise annually thereafter in probably smaller increments," he said.
