More funds coming for grad students

By Judy Lin

World-class graduate students are the lifeblood of any great research university, serving as collaborators with renowned faculty. So the competition among top-ranked universities for the best and the brightest is fierce — and expensive, with top students basing their decision on where to study not only on academic, but economic factors.

Fortunately, UCLA's ability to compete has grown stronger with the recent announcement by Acting Vice Chancellor and Provost Scott Waugh that UCLA is slated to receive $1.9 million from the UC Office of the President toward support of 160 new graduate student scholarships in the current academic year. UCOP expects to continue the program over five years, for a total of $10 million. And there have been other promising developments: a $6-million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to the College’s Division of the Humanities and the continuing success of the Ensuring Academic Excellence Initiative, which has raised $150 million for grad students.

The UCOP funds, Waugh noted, will help support non-resident students.

Photos by Mary Watkins.

"We want to recruit the best talent from the nation and around the world, but our high non-resident fees make it very difficult," Waugh said.

Current non-resident tuition is approximately $15,000 per year, an amount many departments are hard-pressed to compensate for with fellowships and stipends. The new funds, Waugh said, "will greatly enhance our ability to compete for the best graduate students — which deans across the campus agree is their No. 1 priority."

In the humanities, more than 25 new and continuing Ph.D. students will benefit from the Mellon Foundation gift. "This is a significant grant," said Tim Stowell, dean of the division. "Graduate support is instrumental to ensuring excellence throughout the humanistic disciplines."

UCLA's competitor institutions — many of them private colleges — often have hefty endowments built up over the course of several hundred years and can more easily offer larger fellowships, stipends and multi-year funding. At UCLA, which has ascended to the ranks of the nation's best universities in only 88 years, funding packages have lagged as much as $10,000 a year behind those offered by its competitors — a problem exacerbated by the high cost of living in Los Angeles. Last year, the situation became so dire that the College redirected $4.5 million earmarked for teaching positions to graduate student recruitment.

"The Mellon funds will improve the university's ability to attract top talent, speeding the rate at which students complete graduate degrees and decreasing the amount of debt they incur in the process," Stowell said.

Campuswide, the Ensuring Academic Excellence Initiative, launched in 2004 by Chancellor Emeritus Albert Carnesale, has now raised $150 million to fund fellowships and scholarships in the College and in the campus' professional schools.

The initiative has garnered support from donors who recognize the importance of graduate students to the quality and integrity of a program — donors like Lloyd Cotsen, who contributed $10 million to UCLA archaeology. This includes $2 million for the Cotsen Graduate Fellowship Program, supporting graduate students doing research in such far-flung sites as Albania, China, Egypt, India and Israel.

Said Charles Stanish, Cotsen Institute director and anthropology professor: "The Cotsen Graduate Fellowship Program assists in recruiting top students and enabling them to embark upon projects and digs around the globe, facilitating the institute's involvement in the latest and most significant finds of the coming decades."