When a senior high school student starts to select universities for his or her further education, the reputation of a school will play a very important role in listing his interested universities. RPI, as one of the top 50 research universities honored by the scholars and researchers across the nation, may be one of the first options for the high school senior. However, there are still a lot of universities that top the list over RPI. Why do they top RPI? Because RPI’s reputation mainly comes from its excellent undergraduate education, while other universities, such as Harvard, MIT and Stanford, have both an excellent reputation of under­graduate education and a leading-edge research program. It seems that if RPI still wants to be among the first choices of high school seniors for their further education, it needs to work hard on its research performance. Otherwise, many other peer universities will jump at the chance to push RPI off the list.
Graduate students are the key to improving RPI’s research performance, especially Ph.D. students. They are the ones who run experiments, sit up late in the library, and cooperate and carry out advisors’ creative ideas. But they also need to be supported, academically and financially. Graduate students need to pay tuition to take courses, which are the bridge carrying them through to obtain the necessary special knowledge in doing research. Being a TA may relieve graduate students’ financial burden, and it may also deepen graduate students’ understanding, but it definitely occupies a great amount of graduate students’ time and energy.
Meanwhile, graduate students must do research to get their degree. This is a case of “burning the candle at both ends.” Obviously, in this case, either the research work will be damaged or the graduate period has to be extended. RPI allows a nine-year period for Ph.D. degrees, but how could one imagine a student experiencing this double duty for such a long time period?
Freeing graduate students financially should be treated in a high level perspective. This is what the top universities have done before and are still doing now. Among top ranking schools, MIT and Stanford have research expenditures of $241.0 million and $120.1 million, respectively, according to U.S. News’ Graduate School Rankings of 2005. Among them, research expenditures per faculty member are $684,700 and $727,700, respectively. It should not be ignored that the research ranking and financial resource are closely related. How much are the total research expenditures and how much per faculty member here at RPI?
In conclusion, if RPI’s research reputation can be increased by financing graduate students focusing on research work, it may attract more research funding and more excellent high school seniors and graduate students, which, in turn, improves the research perform­ance of RPI. Isn’t this cycle good for the development of RPI in the long term? Professors and administrators: please hold your debate and do your best to solve the TA shortage. Surely you could make a difference together.
Xu Xu
GRAD
