The dominant concern voiced about the ability of the campus to achieve its graduate enrollment goals has centered on the projected levels of funding needed to support the planned number of graduate students. The campus's current emphasis on academic (versus professional) Ph.D. programs of various kinds, its heavy reliance on teaching assistantships to fund graduate students and support undergraduate education, the expectation in many programs that all students will receive three quarters of support for four years or more, and the plans for new graduate programs (predominantly Ph.D.) all suggest that previous per capita funding levels will be difficult or impossible to maintain.
Table B.3 shows the level of per capita financial support received by UCSC graduate students in 1991-92. Within each category, UCSC graduate students receive more financial support than is typical within the UC system.
Per capita support varies widely across boards within each division. For example, in Social Sciences, Anthropology graduate students received an average of $16,378, while Education and Economics averaged less than $12,000, reflecting in part the differing mix of Ph.D., master's, and certificate students. In Natural Sciences, average support ranged from over $18,000 in Astronomy to $12,000 in Computer Science.
The high average level of support reflects two factors. First, UCSC has few professional degree or certificate programs in which students are largely self-financing. (The current program that comes closest to a professional-type program is the Science Communications certificate.) Second, with a high ratio of undergraduate students per graduate student, the campus has been relatively richly endowed in TAships. For UC as a whole, for example, 49 percent of merit support for social science graduate students comes from TAships; at UCSC, the comparable figure is 60 percent. For Natural Sciences (excluding CIS), the respective figures are 29 percent systemwide and 42 percent at UCSC.
As the graduate student population grows relative to the number of undergraduates, and budget cuts increase, per capita TA funds will shrink, making the current level of financial support provided to graduate students unsustainable, since it relies heavily on TAships. The impact of this development will be felt differentially, since the reliance on TA funds to support graduate students varies across the divisions.
The sources and amounts of financial support (teaching appointments, graduate research assistantships, fellowships, and others) are shown in Figure B.3. The majority of graduate students earn their support from teaching appointments. Only the Natural Sciences Division generates more student support from graduate student researcher (GSR) positions than from teaching sources (TAs, Teaching Fellows, and Associates). In Humanities, graduate students earned $12 from teaching for every $1 as GSRs, while in Social Sciences the figures were $4 from teaching for every $1 of GSR support.
Figure B.4, based on data from 1991-92, shows how total campus support dollars are distributed across categories of graduate students. The bulk of the support budget goes to students in Ph.D. programs who have not yet advanced to candidacy (Graduate 1). Fellowship dollars go predominantly to students in their first year of Ph.D. studies (Graduate 1). Students advanced to candidacy receive almost as much support from serving as research assistants as from teaching (Advanced Graduate). Once students have advanced to candidacy and remained at that status for more than nine quarters (GDD), they no longer generate state resources for the campus. Their primary source of support is from research.
If it is to achieve its long-range goals once growth resumes, the campus will need to ensure adequate support for graduate students. Only in this way will it be able to attract and retain the type of students consistent with first-rate graduate programs. Adjustments are likely to include decreasing reliance on TAships, increasing the number of self-financing students in professional programs, and securing additional external GSRs and fellowship dollars. Some of these adjustments will make the longer-range enrollment goals more difficult to achieve.
Graduate students at UCSC generally support themselves in one of two ways: they assist a faculty member with research or they teach undergraduates. Teaching positions take on many forms depending on the qualifications of the graduate student and the instructional needs of the individual boards of studies.
The total length of service rendered in any combination of the previous titles may not normally exceed four years. Under special circumstances, the Chancellor or his delegate, upon recommendation of the board chair and the dean of the division, may authorize a longer period, but in no case may this exceed six years.
In offering TA positions, boards must balance their need to use TAships as acceptance incentives to continually recruit the best-qualified new students with the need to provide jobs to retain already admitted students. Criteria for appointment vary across boards. In the Natural Sciences Division, decisions regarding TA appointments are handled at the board level. When assigning TAships to continuing students, financial need, teaching excellence, favorable academic progress, and subject suitability are the main criteria used. Preference is often given to Ph.D. students over M.S. or M.A. students. In the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences divisions, the TA appointment process is more formal. Lists of all available TAships for the subsequent year are provided by the boards (with the exception of Economics and Linguistics) to the Division of Graduate Studies and Research which, in turn, distributes this list to students. Students complete an application for each course in which they are interested. These applications are reviewed by the board and the instructor offering the particular course. Assignments are then made by matching faculty wishes with student preferences. The ultimate authority to appoint TAships in all divisions lies with the Graduate Dean.
The performance of teaching assistants is evaluated formally by both their students and the faculty member for whom they teach. Generally, this assessment occurs at the end of the period of instruction through end-of-the-quarter student evaluations and a course evaluation which is completed by the instructor. Student evaluation forms become part of the TA's academic file. These evaluations are used in making TA award nominations and decisions concerning future employment as a TA or teaching fellow. In some classes, faculty and students are asked to evaluate TAs mid-quarter.
Increased efforts have been made to provide training for graduate students who are actively employed as TAs. This has occurred at several levels. For the past several years, a campuswide TA training conference has been mandatory for new students. Until this year, the training conference was administered by the Graduate Division with assistance from the academic divisions (discussions on a new sponsor for the conference are ongoing.) The Humanities Division will launch its own divisional TA training program in 1993-94. Additional TA training programs, often in the form of quarter-long courses, are offered by many boards of studies for their own students.
Increases in undergraduate enrollments since the last WASC review have heightened some of the problems associated with the use of TAs. One such issue is the role of graduate student TAs in the narrative evaluation system. As class sizes grow, the input of TAs becomes more and more indispensable if narratives are to reflect more than just exam scores and problem set performances. Student-to-TA ratios in most boards range between 40 and 60 to 1 for sections accompanying a lecture course and between 15 and 30 to 1 for laboratory sections or writing-intensive courses. In many classes, TAs have been asked to draft narrative evaluations; this practice is likely to become more common, as course size and faculty courseload increase.
A second problem is the mismatch in allotted resources that can occur between boards which need TAs and those which need positions to support their graduate students. Some boards, such as Politics or Women's Studies, have large numbers of undergraduates who enroll in large lecture courses requiring TAs, but no graduate program of their own from which to draw qualified TAs. An extreme example of the opposite case is History of Consciousness (HisCon), which has a large graduate program but no undergraduate program that would generate TAships. As a result, HisCon graduate students often find themselves serving as TAs outside their principal fields of training. In some instances, using TAs from other boards has led to dissatisfaction on the part of the faculty forced to employ graduate students from other disciplines, as well as on the part of graduate students who find themselves teaching in areas not directly relevant to their own studies.
A third problem often cited is the effect that the campus's heavy reliance on TAships has on the rate at which graduate students are able to progress towards their degrees. TAships are time-intensive and not always directly relevant to the student's substantive research. Fellowship support allows the recipient more time for course work or for research that might be expected to contribute directly towards the completion of a degree. A study on the effect of graduate student support on time-to-degree has been conducted for the University of California campuses as a whole, but it contains no specific information about UCSC.
Approximately 25 percent of all graduate student financial support takes the form of GSR positions. As Figure B.4 indicated, GSR support is most prevalent among Ph.D. students. In 1991-92, students enrolled in Ph.D. programs received $2.4 million of the $2.9 million of GSR funds.
At UCSC, almost 90 percent of the campus GSR funds were concentrated in the Natural Sciences Division. There exists an inherent tension between the campus's need to increase GSR support and its plans to hold Natural Sciences (including the planned Engineering School) to 50 percent of the planned graduate student population.
Fellowships will also need to play an increasingly important role in graduate student support as TA dollars per graduate student shrink. According to one estimate, the campus will need to increase funds for graduate fellowships from a level of $1.84 million in 1990-91 to $25.93 million in 2005 if the planned 3,000 graduate students are to be supported at the 1990-91 level. This figure assumes that GSR funds will rise with faculty growth in Natural Sciences and reflects the drop in per capita TA support that will occur as the ratio of graduate students to undergraduates rises. The need for fellowship support drops dramatically if one assumes that a sizable share of graduate growth will take the form of professional degree programs in which most students are self-supporting.
During the past two years, fellowship funds have been allocated to boards on the basis of the projected level of per capita support available in each board from non-fellowship sources, a change designed to give a more stable basis to board recruitment strategies. Boards are ranked according to expected support dollars per graduate student (including TA, associate and teaching fellow, GSR, tuition remission, reader, and tutor dollars). Fellowship funding is then allocated by the Division of Graduate Studies and Research according to a formula that gives the boards with the lowest per capita support proportionately more than boards with the highest level of per capita support. This has the effect of somewhat narrowing the gap between the boards with the most per capita support and those with the least.
Boards now control the allocation of the fellowship dollars they receive from the Graduate Division. According to a survey of graduate program representatives, most programs concentrate fellowship support on entering students, as reflected in Figure B.4. Fellowships are thus used as a recruitment tool and as a means of supporting students in their first year when they may not yet be prepared to serve as a TA or GSR, or when they may have particularly heavy course loads. In some boards, a portion of fellowship funds are also directed to students preparing for qualifying exams or doing dissertation work.