Stipends Are Key in Competition to Land Top Graduate Students

But a Chronicle survey of top research institutions finds a widening gap between public and private universities

By SCOTT SMALLWOOD

In this day of exhaustive college rankings and Web sites loaded with campus statistics,

ALSO SEE: Megan Hall Joe Pirone Dara Seybold Stipends for Graduate Assistants This Year Stipends for Teaching Assistants and Stipends for Research Assistants Colloquy: Join an online discussion on whether universities are providing graduate students with adequate levels of support.

we swim in a sea of data. We can find out the size of a university's endowment, the salary of a typical associate professor of zoology, and the average GPA of entering graduate students. But figures on what stipend a teaching assistant in your average English department receives are surprisingly obscure.

That's because every institution administers its financial packages for graduate students in a different way. Even savvy students can have a hard time comparing offers. Last spring, a professor in the English department at the University of Wisconsin at Madison got an e-mail message from a student who was weighing offers from the University of Colorado at Boulder, the University of Washington at Seattle, and Wisconsin. The student detailed the amounts of the stipends and the relative teaching loads. "The system for determining the stipend [at Wisconsin] seems far more complicated from the other offers I have received, and I don't know how to go about comparing them," she wrote. "I would appreciate any light you might be able to shed on this."

Sherry Reames, the Wisconsin professor who got that message, answered the student's questions as best she could. But Ms. Reames acknowledges that many variables -- health insurance, teaching loads, tuition waivers -- can make it hard for students to compare offers. "We need that price-per-ounce labeling they have in grocery stores," she says.

That kind of unit-to-unit accuracy may be a long way off. But some comparisons can still be made. For the first time, The Chronicle has surveyed the top research universities in the United States about the pay and benefits they offer teaching and research assistants. The data provide a snapshot of what graduate assistants earn at a time when increasing union activity underscores their role as workers. This is not a comprehensive look at every graduate student or every graduate institution. Instead, the 61 American institutions in the Association of American Universities were asked about stipends in six fields. More than 70 percent of the institutions responded.

Here, broadly, is what you can expect if you're awarded an assistantship. At many places, you will be on a fellowship the first year, getting a check but not teaching. Your tuition costs will be covered, and maybe some other fees. In the humanities and social sciences, you can expect a stipend of $11,000 or $12,000 for the academic year. Plan on finding additional summer support or getting a job when school's out. If you are in the sciences, you can breathe easier about making ends meet. You are more likely to get support for 12 months, and at many places it will be close to or even above $20,000. In any discipline, you'll probably get some health-insurance coverage, but you can expect to pick up the tab for insuring your family.

Still, there are significant differences, depending on the institution. Major increases in the past year at several Ivy League universities have widened the gap between stipends at elite private institutions and most public universities. In the last year, Columbia University increased its basic stipends by 15 percent, to $15,000, while Yale University announced an increase of nearly 20 percent, to $13,700. Princeton University, which already paid more than most of its peers, increased its basic stipends by 12 percent. That means a typical student in Princeton's history Ph.D. program (ranked No. 3 by the National Research Council) gets $17,500 -- about $7,000 more than a history graduate student at Wisconsin-Madison, whose program the NRC ranked at No. 10.

Those increases were not the norm. Of the 28 universities that reported history teaching-assistant stipends for both last academic year and this one, just four (Princeton, Columbia, the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, and Duke University) reported increases of more than 5 percent. Eleven reported either no change or increases of 1 or 2 percent.

Columbia has increased its stipends several times in the past seven years, according to Margaret Edsall, an assistant dean at the graduate school. Since 1994, Columbia's stipends in the humanities and social sciences have jumped 45 percent, an increase that swamps the 18-percent rise in inflation over that period.

Ms. Edsall hopes the increase gives Columbia an edge in competing for outstanding students. In a strictly numerical sense, it certainly does; only a few institutions have higher basic stipends in the humanities and social sciences. But she's realistic, noting that "living in New York, maybe the increase won't make that much of a difference."

In Austin, Tex., living is cheaper. But University of Texas administrators remain concerned about being competitive. The university has raised stipends 10 percent twice in the past four years, though they remain less than $11,000 a year in most cases.

John Dollard, an associate dean of graduate studies and a mathematics professor, says the university wants to be competitive with other large public universities like the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, and Chapel Hill. But he says meaningful comparisons are difficult. "Everything is quite confused by the cost of living," Mr. Dollard says. "The primary thing is for the students to make ends meet. That's our goal."

While some departments have been able to raise stipends through institutional largess, others have had to rely on their own resources.

At Wisconsin, John C. Wright, the chemistry-department chairman, says his university's minimum stipend -- controlled by a union contract and now less than $11,000 -- "is not particularly competitive." His program, like several others at the university, uses department money to supplement the minimum stipends.

Mr. Wright doesn't think being competitive means that Wisconsin must pay top dollar, but he does believe that the department has to stay in the ballpark. "If the stipend is too low, you'll lose the student," he says. "You've got to get it up in the range where the student feels like they will be able to function."

The stipend is just one of several factors students consider in making their decisions. After applying to 11 sociology graduate programs, Sara Rab ended up weighing several offers. New York University promised an $18,000 stipend, while the University of Pennsylvania, the program she selected, offered $11,500. "It was tempting to take the highest number, but I was smart enough to realize that in New York City, $18,000 might not go very far," she says.

At the time, Ms. Rab didn't know that some of her classmates had negotiated better deals, getting fellowships instead of assistantships, for instance. Now, she scoffs when universities say there aren't disparities among graduate students. Minimum stipends may be set across the board, she says, but "if you work for a wealthy professor who has a lot of grants, you're given a lot of things: a better office, a better computer, and possibly, a padded stipend."

To remain competitive, some departments have considered cutting the number of students they admit. At Texas, the mathematics department recently slashed its graduate enrollment by about 20 percent. Mr. Dollard says part of the idea was to increase the financial support for each student.

That same thinking led Washington University to make across-the-board cuts in the early 1990s, and start providing full financial support to every student. In 1993, when Robert Thach became dean of the graduate school at the St. Louis institution, he was concerned about the overproduction of Ph.D.'s and the sluggish job market.

"It became clear that graduate students in some departments were very unhappy," he says. "They were talking about unionization, and I didn't think that was the way we wanted to do business."

Mr. Thach says the change has been wildly successful. Washington gets better students who are happier to be there and who receive more attention from their departments. "Because they're not swamped with as many students, faculty have more time to devote per student," he says.

The switch, including the guaranteed stipends, didn't cost the university anything extra. "This was not for the purpose of saving money," Mr. Thach says. "This was for the purpose of doing a better job."

While stipends are important for students looking to pay rent and buy groceries, other benefits are getting more attention, too. Health insurance tops the list, especially for older students who might have families. And it has galvanized union efforts on some campuses. "You shouldn't have to have a spouse who supports you to get through graduate school," says Kimberly Suedkamp Wells, president of the National Association of Graduate and Professional Students.

Almost all the institutions surveyed said they provide some health-insurance benefit for graduate assistants. A few, including Emory University, Tulane University, and the University of Rochester, reported that they don't offer such coverage. Of the institutions that do provide health-insurance benefits, about half cover the entire cost. Most others pay a substantial portion, usually from 50 to 90 percent.

The Chronicle survey turned up several institutions that are planning to broaden their health-insurance benefits. At Pennsylvania State University at University Park, administrators anticipate expanding the health insurance for graduate assistants to provide coverage comparable to that given to the university's faculty and staff members. Next year, the university plans to begin paying a substantial portion of the premium for spouses and children.

The American Federation of Teachers is in the midst of a union drive among teaching assistants at Penn State, and Eva Pell, vice president for research and dean of the graduate school, imagines the union will crow about that change. But, she says, the expansion of benefits stems from a recommendation by a longstanding advisory committee of graduate students, and reflects the rising cost of health insurance.

"We want to be successful, and we believe that this will make us more competitive," she says. "And that has nothing to do with the union."

Relatively few of the institutions surveyed by The Chronicle have unionized graduate students. Some that have unions also have high stipends, including the University of California system. But at the same time, others with unions, like Wisconsin, have stipends closer to the bottom of those surveyed. Nevertheless, the growing labor movement among graduate students is changing how universities think about stipends and health-insurance benefits. "Unionization, if anything, is making them more inclined to listen," Ms. Wells, of the graduate-student association, says of administrators. "I think [students] wave the union stick, and it scares people so badly."

If Columbia is racing to keep up with Princeton, and Yale doesn't want to be left behind, the assumption is that students care about the money. But how much does a financial package really factor into a student's graduate-school selection? Ms. Wells says students are getting smarter, asking more questions about their packages beforehand. But many still don't care about the details. "Most students are like: You've accepted me? Great. I'm getting a check? Great," she says.

Even Ms. Wells didn't ask as many questions as she should have when she was accepted into a master's program in ecology at Oklahoma State University, in 1998. She was told that tuition would be waived. Fabulous, she thought. But as an out-of-state student, she found, not all of her tuition was waived after all. "I stupidly arrived thinking I was making $10,000 or $11,000, and then I end up paying $5,000 back in tuition," she says. Later, for her Ph.D. program, the much stronger financial package offered by the University of Missouri at Columbia helped convince her to choose it over New Mexico State University.

But small differences in financial packages may not matter, graduate-school deans say. They believe students look first at faculty members, then at a program's reputation, at its location, and finally, at the money. "I find it hard to believe that if someone really wanted to go to Harvard's program, that a $2,000 difference in the stipend would make someone go someplace else," says Columbia's Ms. Edsall.

Ms. Pell, at Penn State, agrees, saying that students consider a host of factors in making their decisions.

"I hope that a student wouldn't select a lesser school just because they would make $2,000 more," she says. "That's the old penny-wise, pound-foolish thinking."

Still, for some students, watching pennies is the wise choice. Christopher Gardner was a Ph.D. student in medieval history at Yale when one professor's death and another's departure left him without an adviser. He applied to other programs and got in at both Harvard and the Johns Hopkins University. Harvard offered no financial support for the first year, but said he could compete the second year for money. Hopkins promised a full financial package.

Six years later, he is married, has two sons, and is about to get his Ph.D. -- from Johns Hopkins. "They gave me a full ride," he says. "So in that sense, it was almost totally mercenary."

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