Since the implementation of the Graduate Tuition and Student Support Policy, which, among other things, brought graduate tuition into sync with undergraduate tuition, the cost of supporting graduate students has grown significantly. This has led to the increasing need to reallocate graduate-tuition related funds across several departments. In the Electrical, Computer, and Systems Engineering department particularly, prospective graduate students have been told that the available funding has been greatly reduced and not as many students will be able to be funded as in years past.
Dr. Kenneth Connor, chairman of ECSE, said that “teaching and research assistantships in our department are down a little, but not because of the [Institute] budget cuts … only our operating budget was cut, not personnel.” He also indicated that aside from the variability of grants, fellowships, and other external funding sources, dramatic enrollment increases in other departments were responsible for the decrease. He pointed to the graduate biomedical engineering program, which went from 25 admissions per year to 85.
As to further causes for the slight decline and re-allocations in enrollments, Connor said “what we’ve really lost are the master’s students, particularly the part time ones that a lot of companies in the area used to send.” The number of doctoral students in ECSE, 139 out of 172 total enrolled graduate students for Spring 2006, clearly underscores this change in enrollment. Prior to the implementation of the graduate tuition policy, students could get a master’s degree for about $18,000 a year, whereas it now costs about $31,000 plus room, board, and other expenses. Connor indicated, however, that “we were undercharging before, but the change [in tuition] basically put us out of the master’s business. We particularly miss them in our classes—they added a lot of really life experience and we’d like to see that [back] again.”
The loss of master’s students, however, according to both Connor and Lester Gerhardt, dean of Graduate Education, is just a fluctuation occurring in the course of RPI putting new emphasis on research. RPI intends to correct this through its Education for Working Professionals Program (on the Hartford campus) as well as a new master’s program between Engineering and Management. This emphasis, which manifests itself as a $100 million research goal in The Rensselaer Plan, has shifted the focus particularly on the Troy campus towards Ph.D. track students for the time being.
With reference to the proposed joint master’s program between Management and Engineering, Connor said, “The University wants to create something that doesn’t exist anywhere else. The School of Engineering performance plan calls for more master’s students, and this is one of the ways we’re going about increasing enrollment.”
With reference to wider-reaching goals of graduate enrollment, Gerhardt reviewed the current enrollment of RPI’s graduate program: “We have 1,100 full-time students, and 100 part-time students. [As per the performance plan], our goal is 1,600 graduates, 1,250 of them Ph.D. students.” To achieve this one-third increase in overall graduate enrollment, Gerhardt has been carrying on faculty recruiting trips and has also formed a committee to evaluate the Ph.D. credit-requirement structure. Gerhardt though, emphasized that “students expect to be supported, and about half of them are supported with Institute money.”
In graduate admissions for this year and coming years, students in different departments can expect to see variations in the amount of graduate students admitted and the amount of money disbursed, but Gerhardt assures that overall funding for research is going up, and expects that the graduate school will continue to grow both in the amount of students and support provided.
