Graduate plan focuses on increasing stipends

Increasing financial support for Ph.D. students in the next few years is the main focus of the new Graduate School strategic plan.

"We recognize that in this era of financial constraints, our first obligation is to support the students that we have and that we want to take in," said Lewis Siegel, outgoing dean of the Graduate School, who spearheaded the plan's development.

Raising stipends for Ph.D. students to the median level of peer institutions' offerings is "the biggest, most concrete goal in the plan," Siegel said.

Currently, stipends range from $1,000 below the national median in biological sciences to $1,800 below in the humanities. "It is quite an enormous gap," he said.

The school could raise the stipends for all current students as well as those matriculating or take a more fiscally conservative approach and offer the higher stipends only to incoming students, Siegel explained.

Either way, he estimated the overall cost to the University would eventually approach $1.6 million.

The plan also calls for the Graduate School to double the number of James B. Duke fellowships, which are currently offered to the top 10 percent of admitted students based on academic merit.

Other schools offer similar awards to the top 20 percent.

Possible sources of funding include raising endowments-including a naming opportunity for the Graduate School-increasing registration fees and cutting class sizes of institutionally supported students. But none of the options are totally feasible, Siegel said.

In response to funding pressures-complicated by caps on external grants provided in large part by the National Institutes of Health-the plan proposes that all revenue from tuition or fees for graduate students go to the Graduate School, which will then recycle it into student support or programs.

Siegel said the proposal would formalize a tacit agreement the Pratt School of Engineering had broken by charging its graduate students extra and keeping the revenue for its own purposes.

Last year, the Graduate School used registration fees from Pratt students to fund general fellowships to allow them to explore their academic interests before settling into a funded lab position; the strategic plan calls to expand this program and potentially instigate lab rotations for first-year students.

The Graduate School will also look into restructuring its formal financial processes.

Siegel said one goal would be to reduce the tax burdens on international students in the current system.

At Duke, any financial support a student receives is considered taxable income, "so it's all directly taxable for the students who can probably least afford it," Siegel said.

The Graduate School also intends to explore options in creating a graduate student center, improving career and professional development services specifically for graduate students and enhancing mentoring.

Other initiatives in the plan include establishing a written maternal or parental leave policy and expanding childcare options.

In academics, the strategic plan lists ideas for a number of new programs, including a certificate in Latino and Hispanic studies, and expansions of others, such as the M.D./Ph.D. program.

Programs in the biological sciences will potentially be placed into broader categories for admissions purposes in order to restrict applicants less.

"The idea is that you might have an admitting program in neuroscience rather than in neurobiology, in cognitive neuroscience and in psychology," Siegel said. "The idea is to give them choice."

The school will also attempt to foster increased graduate student activity in already-established interdisciplinary institutes-such as the John Hope Franklin Center for Interdisciplinary and International Studies and the Social Science Research Institute-that Siegel called "an inferno of intellectual ferment."

The Executive Committee of the Graduate Faculty and Dean-elect Jo Rae Wright endorsed the strategic plan once Siegel had drafted it.

"I support Dean Siegel's agenda to recruit and retain the best graduate students and prepare them for the future," Wright wrote in an e-mail. "These are also my top agenda items."

Wright will take the helm July 1. She said she intends to spend the start of her term establishing relationships with the deans of the other schools, campus leaders and the Graduate and Professional Student council "to understand further their priorities."