I am in what is a fairly large department; or, it used to be large (about 50 faculty members), and now is smaller due to budget cuts (about 30). But in terms of graduate students, we are very large. We have a couple hundred grad students.
The international students in our department asked me to come to a meeting and share with them the things we are doing in our sub-area for our students. Our department doesn't function like a coherent group so much as a larger structure that houses many sub areas. Each sub area may have its own unique rules, traditions, and practices. So my sub area is actually quite different from most of the others in the department. We make up our own rules about things like prelim / comprehensive exams, requirements towards graduation, etc.
This is nice because it allows us a ton of autonomy. We are just a group of 4 full-time faculty when it comes to making decisions about our graduate program. Mentor is the head of this group and these days he defers to me as often as not, so we pretty much do what we want.
In my area we have the luxury of mostly being able to fully fund all of our grad students. I say mostly because there might be an occasional situation in which something goes wrong, and much of our funding ability is precarious because it is grant-based, but we always keep funding in mind when we accept students. Typically we do not accept anybody we cannot fund. This isn't to say that a grad student's salary is decent or easy to live on. It's too low, and I wish we individual professors had some control over that (but we don't). But at least having a funded position means that a student's tuition is fully covered, and the student gets health insurance.
In our area we've recently instituted research practica and teaching practica to help students gain experience in areas they lack. This wasn't developed with funding issues in mind, since our students are funded, but it was developed with the idea of helping students gain experience in areas in which they may be weak because their funding comes from somewhere else. So a student who TAs for funding can do a research practicum to get experience on a research project. A student who is funded only through research projects can gain experience with helping to teach an undergraduate course, and so forth.
The international students were interested in this model because they see it as a way to get experience that is in itself valuable, but also experience that they could maybe leverage into a paid position down the road. The meeting was a real eye opener for me in terms of the plight of many of the graduate students in areas not my own within our department. I mean, I know there are a lot of unfunded students in our department. Most other areas are not grant-getting areas, so they have far fewer resources for funding students. They must rely on departmental money for TA lines and that money has shrunk year after year.
I guess I hadn't had enough up close and personal experiences with what these students are enduring, though. It is very difficult. One student broke down into tears as she explained the dozen and dozens of applications she's sent out across the university and her bewilderment at what is wrong with her background / experience that she is not getting hired. (The sad answer - nothing is wrong. The numbers are what's wrong. When I have an available position and post it, I now get hundreds of applications from grad students across the university. I get applications from law students. From business school students. All of the students are suffering because all of the departments have had budget cuts. Eight years ago, I would have gotten maybe 20 applications. So it's just a bad, bad time.)
One student explained a situation that is actually pretty common. Her parents mortgaged their house and spent their life savings for ONE year of tuition here. In her home country, that's what her parents' entire life savings and house amounted to: one year of tuition. One can only imagine the pressure she was under to find funding before her first year was up.
We're between a rock and a hard place because we keep receiving funding cuts from the state year after year. This past year we took a greater than 20% funding cut from the state, but we are simultaneously being required to educate more students every year and reduce time to graduation. The faculty have only had one cost of living raise in the past 8 years, and in the past 3 years we've had pay cuts. In our department, the money we get to fund TAs shrinks every year, so this means fewer paid positions, fewer TAs, and fewer sections with larger enrollments in each section. It means waiting lists for every course and students who can't finish their requirements in a timely manner because they keep getting shut out of needed courses. It's basically a mess and it's not getting any better.
How ethical is it to accept doctoral students you can't fund?
I'm not sure it's so ethical. I think most professors in my department would argue that it should be left up to the potential student to decide to come, even if they're not funded. But I think this obscures the fact that we aren't always being brutally honest about the funding situation. Attending this meeting with me was another extremely senior professor. (He has been a professor here since the year I was born.) He sat there, in the meeting, and said look, you might have to be willing to come here and eat salad for your 1st semester. But then you'll get funding after that if you beat the bushes, knock on people's doors, and make yourself known to professors by chatting with them in the elevator.
What the students' stories revealed is that this is total bullshit. These students have been beating every bush from here to Canada and they've been doing it for 2, 3 years in a row, with no funding to show for it. They're volunteering. They're attending meetings and talks and lectures and participating in research groups. Professor Senior's advice used to be true 10 years ago, but it just isn't now. (Not to mention, I don't think "eating salad" really conveys the gravity of this situation. Tuition has gone up, especially for out-of-state students. What we may think of as one year of tuition and living costs could mean an entire life savings for students from some countries.)
Tomorrow I'm proposing a change to our admission letters in the case of unfunded students so that we communicate the funding situation clearly, along with perhaps some facts about funding likelihood. I know that this will anger a lot of faculty, but that's what tenure is for.
In the afternoon it was shorts weather. I was sitting outside on the stoop and I looked at my calf and thought, what's the weird indentation and bulge on my leg? And then I realized, oh. That's a muscle. It's a clearly defined muscle that just never stood out like that before. I love my gym class so much because strength training has such noticeable results in terms of muscle definition.
