>newground
The Bloomington Campus Strategic Plan, newly released from Chancellor Sharon Brehm’s office, has called on the university to be more competitive in its effort to draw the best graduate students. The need to increase graduate student support was also identified as a critical issue at the close of the Bloomington Endowment Campaign in 2001. The outcome? With the help of private support, the Bloomington campus will add at least 250 graduate fellowships during the next seven to ten years.
The Need To Increase Graduate Student Support
Dean Kumble Subbaswamy of the College of Arts and Sciences underscores the importance of this initiative. “Graduate students are critical to the research, teaching, and scholarly mission of all first-rank public and private universities. IUB faces increasingly intense competition to attract the best applicants. To win that competition, the campus must be able to offer strong fellowship support for prospective graduate students who are already burdened with college loans. But in recent years, IUB’s fellowship funding has lagged behind the support packages offered by other top schools.
Many people underestimate the importance of graduate students on campus. Masters and doctoral students are in training to become the researchers and professors of the future. The quality and depth of their academic work and the learning they undertake establishes, in part, the prestige of their graduate program. In addition to their own work, they are essential in helping the faculty accomplish vital research projects. Finally, once established in the professional world, they refer future graduate students to IU, completing the “cycle of excellence.”
Strategies for Funding
In short, if Indiana University is to compete for the very best graduate students, it needs to offer them support comparable to other top institutions. Following the strategy of the Endowment Campaign, the university will establish an endowment with the money it raises for graduate fellowships. The income the endowment fund disburses, typically 5%, will increase as the general endowment grows. Chancellor Brehm has also announced that the upcoming Commitment-to-Excellence tuition plan will help fund a matching program for the initiative. This plan will charge all new students on the Bloomington campus a fee of $1,000, which will recur each year they enroll.
For all endowed gifts of $250,000 or more, the match will be 1 to 1 on interest made from the endowment. For example, a gift of $250,000 will generate an annual disbursement of $12,500 or 5%. The matching funds would raise that amount to $25,000 annually, which could be kept as a single fellowship or split into multiples ones, depending on how the donor and the particular school see it being best used. Gifts between $249,999 and $150,000 will be matched at a rate of 1 to 2, meaning that the 5% disbursement from a gift of $150,000 ($7,500) would be combined with a match of $3,750 for a total of $11,250.
Where This Will Take Us
The academic units eligible for this matching program are: Arts and Sciences, Business, Education, Law, Music, Informatics, Journalism, Optometry, SLIS, SPEA, and HPER. The very first fellowship in this program is the Myles and Peg Brand Graduate Fellowship in Philosophy, which will be awarded for the first time in the fall of 2003.
IU tackled the issue of endowed faculty positions with the Bloomington Endowment Campaign, going from last to first in the Big 10. Undergraduate scholarships are always an issue, especially when a large part of the university’s mission is to provide educational access to all state residents. Now that graduate fellowships are on the front burner, the job of raising awareness begins.
Once achieved, the change to the Bloomington campus will be tremendous. If the recent history of the Bloomington Endowment Campaign or the IUPUI Comprehensive Campaign provides any indication, the initiative will create significantly more than 250 fellowships. Over time, word will spread that IU has one of the best environments for graduate study.
It has been said that private support makes the difference between a good school and a great school. The initiative to increase graduate student support aims to keep it that way.
>Geoffrey Pollock
Read more about graduate student support and the strategic plan.
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