Dan DiTursi

Senior Reporter

In a move that has some faculty members worried for the Institute’s future, Rensselaer administrators are preparing to make sweeping changes to the school’s graduate tuition policy.

According to Tom Apple, dean of graduate education, the administration is working on a plan to eliminate the ability to register for zero credits—known as degree completion—and charge all full-time graduate students the same price for tuition, regardless of the number of credits being taken.

The goal of the changes, said Apple, is to help students earn their degrees more quickly.

A recent study commissioned by the school shows that Ph.D. students at RPI take, on average, 1.5 years longer than students at other institutions in our “peer and aspirant group,” which includes schools such as MIT, Carnegie Mellon, and Stanford. Master’s students finish one year later than the average.

The administration contends that a major reason for this delay is that senior students are cheaper for professors to fund than new students, since they generally take fewer credits. Apple said that the school wants to try to increase students’ focus on graduation.

To that end, along with the pricing changes, the plan includes ensuring that all full-time graduate students are adequately funded for a length of time sufficient to attain their degree. The number of semesters a student would need to work as a teaching assistant would also be reduced so that a greater portion of his graduate career could be spent on research.

Current students will be covered by an extensive transition policy, which will address students currently on degree completion, students just beginning their degree programs, and those in between.

“We can’t have 200-300 people fall through the cracks,” Apple said.

Several faculty members, however, are asking where the extra money is going to come from. According to one professor who requested anonymity, “What this posturing will do is destroy little programs,” by making those projects significantly less competitive for external funding sources.

Researchers asking for grant money must include the cost of their students’ tuition in their proposals—a jump in tuition means that funding agencies will need to provide more money for the same amount of research.

Apple said that the administration’s goal was to increase research at the school, and that the Institute was going to be very careful to avoid hurting grant competitiveness. He added that some grants specifically include money for tuition and that RPI was “leaving that money on the table” under the current system. That money, he said, would help the Institute improve its infrastructure, which in turn will attract more graduate students.

One professor was skeptical about the idea of charging more money to bring in more money. “My first question is ‘Will we really?’” he said.

Members of the faculty also maintain that the policy changes run counter to the goal set forth in The Rensselaer Plan of doubling the graduate population.

Joel Plawsky, a professor in the chemical engineering department, said that an increase in the number of post-docs and a corresponding decrease in the number of graduate students would be the ultimate result. He also projected that departments with a large ratio of RAs to TAs—mostly the engineering departments—would be hardest hit.

“It’s a disaster in the making,” he said.

Chemistry Professor Curtis Breneman serves on the committee chaired by Apple that was commissioned to recommend how to implement the pricing changes. He characterized the plan as high-risk, but potentially high reward.

“There will be a lot of bumps in the road,” he said, but slow changes will not attain the goals outlined in The Plan, and students will benefit in the long run.

Apple dismissed some of the faculty complaints as being mercenary in nature.

“It was nice having graduate students who were cheap,” he said.

Professors, however, have raised other concerns. One faculty member noted that scientific integrity could suffer if students have to rush to finish their theses.

Others worried about what would happen to students who ran past their guaranteed funding.

Apple said that those students’ advisors would have to continue paying their tuition, which one long-time professor believed would result in students being unable to complete their degrees.

Faculty members are also concerned about the decision-making process and their ability to provide input.

Despite assurances from the administration that this plan is in the formative stages, every professor interviewed that had prior knowledge of the impending changes was certain that the changes to the tuition policy were inevitable.

Breneman noted that the Faculty Senate was made aware of the changes before the Board of Trustees, which he said was a positive change from previous planning processes. He acknowledged, however, that the committee was “only given a small amount of latitude” in suggesting changes to the initial plan.

One professor said that he and some of his colleagues felt they were unable to present their honest opinion about this issue for fear of “presidential backlash.”

Not every faculty member is concerned, though. One professor said that he didn’t believe that his Ph.D. students would cost any more money, since they typically graduate in four to five years. At the current cost of $700 per credit, a 90-credit doctoral degree costs $63,000 in tuition.

The specific cost of annual tuition under the new plan has not yet been released by the administration; Breneman said that the committee was asked to not give those numbers out until the plan is closer to being finalized.

The Board of Trustees is having a retreat in Florida later this month to discuss the Institute budget, and the tuition policy changes will be considered, and possibly approved, at that meeting.

If that happens, Apple said, “It’s not going to make the faculty happy, but it should make the students happy.”