UC Davis has put a high priority on attracting the best and brightest graduate students to campus -- and then improving their lives once they get here.

Campus leaders say a sharper focus is needed because the competition for top grad students is growing fierce. Institutions across the country recognize that today's graduate students are tomorrow's leaders in science, engineering, the arts, humanities, business and other professions.

"Graduate students and postdoctoral scholars are critical links in the academic environment of a research university, enhancing its academic quality by contributing to the dual missions of faculty research and teaching," said Jeffery Gibeling, dean of Graduate Studies.

Added Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor Virginia Hinshaw, "Graduate students are the future of research. Their research, now and in the future, improves the health and well-being of us all and also drives the state's economic engine. Investing in graduate education is critical to ensuring a vibrant healthy future for California and beyond."

Today, about 4,000 students are enrolled in master's and doctoral programs at Davis, not counting professional school students. The goal is to raise that number closer to 5,000 by 2009.

To get there, Graduate Studies is working on several new initiatives, including a five-year graduate student support plan to expand the amount of financial resources available to graduate students and programs.

The need is clear.

In a Jan. 18 report prepared for the Academic Senate Executive Council, Gibeling noted that graduate students have faced numerous financial obstacles, including a 114 percent increase in the total fees for resident graduate students between 1999-00 and 2005-06, up from $4,314 to a projected $9,242, and a 69 percent increase in the total fees and tuition for non-resident students in the same period, up from $14,308 to a proposed $24,203.

For teaching assistants and graduate student researchers, these substantial increases directly impact the campus and faculty research funds that provide fee and tuition remissions, or reimbursements.

Closing the gap

And despite recent gains, UC Davis ranks below the UC system average in per capita net stipends given to academic graduate students -- $11,573 at Davis, compared with a systemwide average of $12,660 in 2002-03.

Closing the gap in graduate support with the other UC campuses, Gibeling said, will require a number of key measures. One is to maintain the purchasing power of the existing fellowship dollars to adjust for increases in fees, enrollment numbers, non-resident tuition and the cost of living. He anticipates this costing about $1 million annually. But not coming up with that money could carry an even higher price -- for graduate and undergraduate students alike.

Graduate students typically serve as teaching assistants in undergraduate classes or as research assistants. Adequate financial aid and a stimulating environment go a long way to attracting those top graduate students.

Just how significant is graduate education at UC Davis? The university ranks 28th among institutions nationwide producing doctorates -- 374 in 2003, according to the 2003 National Science Foundation Survey of Doctorate Recipients conducted by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago. UC Berkeley was number one. However, UC Davis was the top producer of biological sciences doctoral degrees in the country.

On a different level, the campus was the 13th-ranked university nationwide preparing undergraduate students who go on to earn their doctorates in the United States, according to the same survey. To Gibeling and others here, those numbers are no surprise.

UC Davis provides a "unique interdisciplinary environment" for teaching and research, Gibeling said, "as exemplified in the campus's diverse graduate group programs and broad array of academic and professional programs.

"This breadth -- coupled with our culture of engagement and opportunities for collaboration -- enables our graduate students and postdoctoral scholars to conduct research that addresses some of California's and our broader society's most pressing problems," he added.

Funding an issue

Progress in financial support is being made. In 2004-05, for example, the graduate block grant, which provides each program with flexible fellowship dollars, increased 40 percent over the prior year. In addition, the campus continued to fund fee remission for teaching assistants and state-funded graduate student researchers, a cost that has increased from $4.7 million in 2000-01 to $12 million in 2004-05.

For 2004-05, Graduate Studies and Hinshaw's office joined together to provide $2 million to mitigate the uncertainty of fee and tuition increases in the last state budget cycle and to ease the transition to a new non-resident tuition remission program for graduate student researchers.

Campus investments, coupled with the commitment of faculty in supporting graduate students on research grants, have had an impact. From 2001-02 to 2002-03, UC Davis moved from ninth to sixth place in the UC system in terms of per capita net stipends awarded to academic graduate students. Similarly, the campus improved from ninth in fall 2001 to fifth in fall 2004 with regard to the competitiveness of its offers to new doctoral students.

Challenges ahead

There are still challenges, however.

"The campus could also calculate the competitive gap in per capita graduate student support between UC Davis and other benchmark UC campuses. One option is to then phase in funding over a five-year period to close this gap," said Gibeling, estimating that this could require an additional $5 to $9 million.

Funds to close the gap would be drawn mainly from campus support and gift funds, he says. The campus would use these funds to offer more support in the way of stipends, fellowships, block grants and other forms of assistance. Also, he would like to build a funding model that encourages program excellence using measures such as time-to-degree, persistence and completion rates.

Gibeling also suggests expanding the amount of extramural fellowship support that students receive through individual fellowships and training grants. Toward this goal, the Office of Graduate Studies has launched a new initiative to assist faculty in preparing training grant proposals submitted to the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Education -- and this effort has already enjoyed early success.

Responding to the concerns over finances, the campus last year introduced a plan to cover the full cost of tuition for out-of-state graduate students who are graduate student researchers, joining other UC campuses already doing so. The new policy, known as "non-resident tuition remission," states that the funding source -- typically a federal grant or contract -- that provides student stipends will also provide non-resident tuition as a benefit of their appointment.

Gibeling said the Office of Graduate Studies continues to develop new technologies to manage increased numbers of applications and has significantly increased its outreach and recruiting efforts by faculty to attract graduate students.

At the same time, though, Dan Simmons, chair of the Academic Senate, is concerned about graduate student support. "The university's competitiveness as a research campus could be undermined by shortfalls in the level of graduate student support, which are exacerbated by increases in non-resident tuition that restrict our ability to attract graduate students from around the world."

UC focus

Graduate student support is an emerging issue across the entire UC system.

UC President Robert Dynes has identified graduate education as one of the areas to focus on in the years ahead. He noted that UC's academic and professional graduate students represent only about 23 percent of UC's total enrollment, a lower figure than found at most other research universities.

On the statewide front, the UC Academic Senate unanimously approved a proposal at its December 2004 meeting to introduce this year in the state Legislature a resolution supporting the role of graduate education in California and the UC system.

In January, the UC Board of Regents discussed the importance of graduate education in driving innovation and economic development in California. For example, new industries often emerge from the research conducted at universities like UC.

M.R.C. Greenwood, provost and senior vice president of UC Academic Affairs, told the regents at that meeting that "graduate education provides the highly educated work force that will help California retain its position as a leading economic force in the world. California's competitiveness requires UC quality."

Back in Davis, Gibeling notes that graduate student support is expected to be a featured objective of the campus's upcoming comprehensive campaign, which aims to raise as much as $900 million in the next decade. He also pointed out that on Jan. 18 the Executive Council of the UC Davis Academic Senate passed a resolution stating that financial support for graduate students should be a campus priority.

Student perspective

Arguably, graduate students are the ones most affected by any changes.

Jonathan Karpel, a graduate student in biochemistry and molecular biology, is the chairman of the Graduate Student Association on campus. He said graduate students are an "integral part of the UC system" and key to the big picture of higher education.

"We are a research institution that depends on quality grad students," Karpel said. "So by supporting grad students and, therefore faculty, we can continue the cycle of producing excellent graduates that become faculty that teach the students, thereby supporting the idea that the UC is a major contributor to California's economy."

Karpel acknowledges that both the dean of Graduate Studies and the provost have supported better funding for graduate students.

However, he is concerned about the "divide" between graduate student financing for the sciences and the humanities. "Students in the sciences, in general, are better off when it comes to getting support through faculty grants to pay for their education."

Other issues that could be improved for graduate students include career planning, work-life balance and affordable child care. "There is no longer any dependent care available through the Student Health Insurance Plan, which stretches the budgets of many families," said Karpel.

"These are all important and expensive issues for the university to deal with," said Karpel, "but they promote the mental and physical health of students in general, and this helps to produce the best graduates."