The Coming Decline in UC Graduate Education

By Joel Norris, UCSD

If UC is to continue to be a system of research universities, it is essential to maintain robust graduate programs. Sadly, the Regents and UCOP are making choices that undermine Ph.D. education, often with little financial benefit to UC. One particularly detrimental factor is the practice of raising graduate tuition in tandem with undergraduate tuition.

Very few Ph.D. students pay tuition out of their own resources. Some have their tuition paid out of departmental block grants, and more have their tuition remitted because they work as teaching assistants. In these cases, increased graduate tuition simply means UC is picking its own pocket. All is not equal, though, because the total number of students who can be supported by institutional funding necessarily declines as per student costs rise.


High tuition also hurts accomplished students who obtain prestigious outside fellowships. Some UC departments (though not my own) have refused to allow students to receive fellowships because they did not include sufficient funding to cover the high UC tuition.

Extramural funding pays tuition for the large number of Ph.D. students who work as research assistants. Since this money comes from outside the university, it might appear that UC gains revenue by raising tuition. This is not the case in the short term, however, because principal investigators cannot go back to funding agencies to top up grants when UC raises tuition midcycle. Neither is it the case in the long term, because flat budgets at federal agencies make it increasingly difficult for UC faculty to gain additional extramural funding, let alone maintain present levels. As per student costs rise, the number of research assistants must go down.

While it is possible that PIs could cut postdoctoral positions rather than graduate research assistantships, that is less likely to happen. Unlike graduate students, postdoctoral researchers are already trained and work full time. The relative lack of productivity of graduate students would not be a problem if they were a smaller financial burden, but UC tuition rates have already risen so high that postdocs are now cheaper than students.

Another factor favoring postdocs over graduate students is the recent tendency for some federal agencies to provide only two years of funding at a time rather than the standard three years. Since it takes about six years to complete a science Ph.D., three rather than two grants are needed to sustain a student from beginning to end. With proposal success rates declining to 20% or less, this means more grant-writing to get a graduate student through from start to finish.

Postdocs can help put together a new grant proposal, whereas graduate students have not yet gained the experience and knowledge to do so. Moreover, postdocs only expect to be around for two years and will have already gotten some publications out, so it is not a disaster if no continuing funding is obtained. Being forced to moving onto a new project is a much bigger disruption for a second or third year graduate student.

As UC raises graduate tuition to make up for declining state funding, this in turn creates the incentive to reduce the number of fellowship-funded students, teaching assistants, and research assistants. Individual faculty may benefit from supporting fewer graduate students, but UC will collectively suffer if the number of Ph.D. students declines. A research university cannot be sustained with undergraduates and professional students alone, and UC may soon find itself in a downward spiral.