Graduate students asked administrators to abolish Advanced Residency (AR) tuition Tuesday evening, pushing aside other scheduled agenda items.
The forum, in the Social Sciences building, was intended to review tuition and job opportunities for the first four years of graduate studies, but the attendees were most concerned about the AR tuition doctoral students above their fourth year must pay to continue their education.
The fee is almost $800 a quarter, a hefty increase for students who, until their fifth year, are paid to attend and teach at the University.
“[At the] last meeting, the preferred option was to abolish AR. There is no doubt we heard that loud and clear,” said Deputy Provost for Graduate Education Cathy Cohen, who presided over the meeting.
Nonetheless, Cohen called for a discussion of other issues. “We want to hear about the other recommendations of the report.” The report was released by the Provost’s Committee on Advanced Residence and Time to Degree in May.
The committee’s report included recommendations that AR tuition be adjusted but not eliminated, but the meeting was intended to discuss other critiques, including spreading teaching opportunities and aid out more evenly among students.
Many of the students were insistent on discussing the problems AR represents for graduate students, even after the meeting was scheduled to end.
One audience member representing the Graduate Student Union (GSU) said the University should divert funds from other projects to better fund graduate students. “The only solution is for the school to take money from redoing the GSB or a new medical building, to giving the money to its neediest group,” he said. Another GSU member added, “They repaved the road three times in my seven years here.”
The graduate students gathered for the forum were mainly from the Humanities and Social Sciences division, and the Divinity School. The students in the Physical and Biological Science Division receive grants that pay their AR.
Cohen empathized with the graduate students, and said the University lags behind its peers in graduate support.
“In certain departments, we have time to [finish] degrees that are longer than our peers,” Cohen said. “We want to figure out how to improve our system so grad students can get the best education possible. No other peer has students in AR collecting tuition as long as we do.” The University pays some graduate students past their sixth or seventh year, sometimes into their 10th or 12th years.
Under the Graduate Student Initiative, a program started in 2007 for incoming students, graduate students receive almost $20,000 in funding and health care for five years.
“I feel like people should be able to finish in five years or take out loans in their sixth year,” Cohen said.
However, some GAI students complained about how difficult it is to live off of that stipend, even though most AR students live off of thousands less.
“$19,500 is not enough. I’m pregnant and going to have a kid someday,” one AR student said. “That puts you in a different situation.”
There is currently no system through which graduate students can take leaves of absence without paying tuition to the school. Students researching off-campus are also subject to AR tuition, but use less of the University’s resources.
Though fewer graduate students were accepted last year in an attempt to find funding for current students, Cohen conceded that administrators “haven’t quite figured out how to support students who are already here.”
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Discussion
MORGAN
October 16th 2009 at 10:42 AM
I really want to support the grad students but you knew what you were getting into when you joined this University. I’m assuming if you got in here, you got into other competitive places like Harvard, Satanford, etc. Why would you choose to come here when the reputation is as horrible as it is here? I can’t really sympathize (and I really want to considering that I’m a 3rd year history major and easily 80% of my classes have been taught by grad students) because it vaguely reminiscent of those athletes that sing a contract for six years then complain in the 2nd year about how unfair said contract is. You agreed!!
JOE G. F.
October 18th 2009 at 02:37 PM
If only it were true that all contracts were fair...but there are hundreds of reasons why someone might agree to something that is still unfair. All the more so when, as in our case, we were never even told about AR tuition when we started school! And on top of that there is the fact that we don't actually have a contract. We simply agreed to study here and the University agreed to let us study here, leaving everything else open for change. One of the reasons we're organizing is so that we can get a contract in the first place, so that we'll be told up front what we're facing, and so that we'll be allowed to bargain collectively instead of as individuals who are clearly at a disadvantage when seeking a contract with a powerful institution that doesn't need any one of us, but which needs us collectively.
In my personal example, Chicago was the only city where both my wife and were accepted into grad school. I didn't have any wonderful alternative. But then, even most of the alternative schools treat grad students better primarily because students there have also organized and demanded to be treated better; and even schools without grad student unions are improving conditions because they want to compete with unionized schools, and because they don't want their own students to unionize. So for everyone's sake, it's better not just to shut up and accept injustice, even if we did know it was coming (which most of us didn't), but to try to make things better.