South Dakota’s fiscal disrespect for teaching evidently extends beyond K-12 into our Regental system.
The Board of Regents considered a proposal “to set tuition at zero and to waive university support fees and program fees for graduate assistants.” The proposal would keep research assistants’ stipends at their current level ($22,925.04 for a twelve-month plant science research assistant at SDSU); thus, zeroing tuition and reducing fees would leave an additional $2,700 in research assistants’ pockets. The Regents say they need to offer that additional net to compete for top research talent.
However, the Regents apparently don’t apply the same recruit-talent-with-cash logic to teaching assistants. The proposal appears to reduce nine-month teaching assistants’ tuition and fees by $4,561.80 but whacks their comparatively paltry $9,824.70 stipend by the same amount. Teaching assistants thus would see no change in their net finances under this proposal.
When I was a graduate assistant at Dakota State University, I added more value to Regental operations in the hours I spent teaching speech, Excel, and business (!) than in the rest of the time I spent carrying out the research assigned by my supervisors. But when research assistants can bring in federal dollars (do we see a recurring pattern here, DOE, MCEC?), South Dakota forgets the value of good teaching.
If we should compete for good researchers, we should compete for good teachers. Both are essential to the mission of our public universities. Both deserve equal budgetary consideration.
Hi CH..
You my friend were an anomaly as the majority of masters prepared graduate students are not native English speaking, and thusly have a more challenging time in the classroom. Great young people with excellent minds but communication is an issue. Does that mean they are worth less ift they are in the classroom? Absolutely not to those of us “in the classroom”, wonder what they are thinking? Currently, a doctoral student on our campus gets the same GA stipend whether they are a RA or a TA. Maybe it is changing? Good discussion point on Wednesday when we have a graduate faculty meeting.
Majority of grad students not native English speakers? Interesting—is the global nature of the labor pool part of why we have to compete more for research assistants?
Even if research takes priority, teaching assistants make it possible for professors to spend more time researching. I could argue that teaching assistants are thus facilitating more, better research (because profs do better research than research assistants, right?). I’m glad DSU is paying the same stipend for RAs and TAs. Other campuses should follow suit.
Is that assuming a 10 hour work week or 20 hour work week?
The only advantage about RAs is they are generally funded by research grants and are paid at a set rate, thus, increasing the set rate might result in more grant dollars.
UND pays $14,400 for a 9 month, 20 hour a week graduate assistantship (They don’t discern between TA and RA). The amount gained off of these assistantships generally outweighs their costs, its cheap labor, and for the assistants, its extremely valuable experience.
It would be interesting to know what the thinking process was when writing that pay change for TAs. I’m assuming there was thinking and there was process.
20 hours a week at DSU for the G or T / A. We pay over $2000 per month for a 12 month appointment. Renewable for 3 years with advances toward the terminal degree.
I think that distance delivery of academic programs has skewed the on-campus population makeup. International students feel lucky if they can get a visa and a GA appointment in the USA. Most of them work hard. I have a young lady from Shanghai this year. She is teaching and doing a very good job. She is so happy to be in Madison.
Wayne, you lead me down a different track: does distance learning mean a net loss for the local economy by decreasing the on-campus/in-town population? Or does distance education draw students who wouldn’t come here otherwise and provide a net economic gain in tuition dollars and local instructor employment?
Hi, I’ve been following this issue for a while now. First, does anyone know if the Board made a decision on this matter?? Or does SDBOR not report its decisions until the following meeting…?
Regardless, I’m afraid this post doesn’t quite grasp the details of how research grants are written, which I admit I didn’t understand before I submitted my own research grant proposal.
So, first off, you have to understand that everything on a grant is effectively taxed by the institution administering the grant: this is usually called overhead, and it can be anywhere from a 40% to 60% rate. This money more or less goes toward facilities maintainance (‘keeping the lights on in your lab’), paying for university staff that administer grants, etc. This means grant proposals from a researcher at any school or institution usually have to ask for about 150% of the actual cost of what they’re asking for. FYI, SD schools have relatively low overhead, last I checked.
There’s a few exceptions as to what doesn’t get taxed overhead, the major one being tuition (which this document seems to call ‘tuition remission’), which means a researcher pays money without overhead for a student’s tuition. This is currently capped at 2/3rds in SD state schools (just look at the original text of the policy; its implied by how students with assistantships are required to pay 1/3rd tuition), and a researcher also cannot ask for money to pay all the fees for a student. This means, instead, if you want to ‘fully fund’ a student (pay all tuition and fees), you have to give them that extra money as salary (i.e. stipend), which means it gets hit with overhead.
This proposal removes that artificial constraint, allowing us researchers to list 100% tuition and fees for grant funding (sort of; notice the math is a little more complicated regarding fees). SDBOR required that such a policy change be budget neutral, however, which means it doesn’t require that more money be spent. This means students on researcher assistantships at the ‘research universities’ in the SDBOR system will see an effective decrease in stipend. The only reason the fictional Plant Sciences student’s stipend didn’t decrease in the little tally in the PDF is because they put that ‘extra’ on other lines.
They didn’t for the TA, and you can see why: stipends for TAs at SD schools are very low (they also vary greatly from department to department). Now, this system should effectively save students on TAships some money, as they’d no longer effectively have to pay tuition at the start of the semester (!) and then get it paid back to them over time as stipend salary (which is then subject to income tax). But this could present real difficulties for other reasons: how many departments at SD research universities were paying TAships that were less than tuition and fees? If this policy passes, departments offering TAships at those schools will be required to pay 100% tuition remission for every TAship, and I wonder if that might present difficulties.
Is it better to have a smaller number of TAs with full tuition coverage, which means fewer classes with TAs, or a larger number if TAs that don’t get paid enough to fully cover their per-semester tuition? And remember, that’s not a question with an easy answer: how many graduate students should we expect a program to have that *aren’t* supported? By far, the more typical situation in schools around the country is to support grad students. This is also complicated by policies that require minimum numbers of graduated students from a grad program each year or the program gets axed, so if we want those programs at all, there has to be a number of students recruited every year. Its quite a knot! Of course, maybe the solution is more simple: SDBOR could pass this policy change and set aside more money for TAships, so departments can pay the tuition remission and offer reasonable stipends for a reasonable number of TAs. But that seems unlikely.
PS: “the majority of masters prepared graduate students are not native English speaking” This statement isn’t detailed enough for me to assess its truth. Nation-wide, across all disciplines, I would find it extremely unlikely, as Business School/Med School/Law School are typically categorized as graduate school programs. That said, yes, there are special considerations and difficulties involved when TAships are given to non-native English speakers. One solution used by a physics department (at a state school in NY) is to give the non-native speakers ‘grading’ positions, while having the English speakers manage the lab sessions. This sort of system isn’t allowed by some school systems as TAships have to involve teaching contact hours.
Kingleon—great background! Thanks for taking the time to help us with that.
Your income tax comment sticks out: do students really come out ahead? Stipend salary is subject to income tax, but students should be able to deduct income paid for tuition. At best, that shift seems to leave the student’s taxable income steady.
That’s a good question… admittedly, as a grad student whose tuition was fully paid (i.e. remission), I never had to deal with that issue (as I had no basis for a deduction). I don’t know enough about the tuition deduction / education credits to know which would be better deal. Also, although I don’t think they are a majority, the number of grad students that are foreign-born is considerable, and their tax situation is very complex. However, given that many grad students don’t have time to look at their taxes very carefully (they should be writing their theses, instead!), I have to think many are missing out on deductions they could take.
All in all, I have to think that its probably better for the student and a researcher with a grant to administer to allow 100% tuition remission: the only loser is the school, which loses out on some overhead (which, notice, the linked PDF remarkably doesn’t seem to mention in its discussion of the policy change being budget neutral… unless I missed it… sneaky!).
A thing to keep in mind here is that the policy change is made to try to attract the best and brightest grad students. The vast majority of competitive grad programs in STEM areas offer their accepted prospective students a nice package: 100% tuition and fees paid, health insurance, and a reasonable stipend (that $22K the hypothetical plant sciences student at SDU makes sounds rather, um, idealistic). Many programs even offer summer support.
And… many of these STEM programs offer this to both RAs and TAs (or, very often, acceptance to a program is the promise of such support, in a mixture of the two). Why would you offer so much to someone to be a TA? Well, sure, TAs are good teachers (or they can be… it may take a few years, an undergrad just coming out of a STEM major is often not a great instructor), but I think the biggest reason is because having good graduate students working on independent projects is an incredible boon to the intellectual atmosphere and success of your program. Its like hiring mini-faculty. Many such students even write proposals for their own funding, but it takes a year or two for that to happen (see, for example, NSF’s Graduate Research Fellowship).
This policy change will make things easier and better for recruiting an RA, even if the minimum stipend policy went away (also part of this policy change). For TAs, though… this change may make it harder to recruit, as now the offer letters will read that all tuition and fees are paid, but here’s a tiny stipend (or even maybe a zero stipend, now that there’s no minimum). Is that better than getting an offer letter that says you will only pay 1/3rd of your tuition, when all the other offer letters say you won’t pay any?
Of course, yes, to some degree the concern seems to be mainly about bringing in better RAs (by changing the restrictions of how federal grant money can be spent on tuition, so that grants now pay 100% tuition), and maybe not so much thought about better TAs (its debatable), even though TAs actually directly interact with the undergraduate student body (who generate most of the income for a school, via tuition). But what about good faculty? Although there are great researchers that are terrible teachers (and vice versa), in general, a school is trying to get both. And, in some STEM fields, your career will stall if you can’t fill your lab with high-quality RAs to do the day-to-day science (not my field, thankfully). So, retaining good faculty, who are great teachers and great grant-getters, will depend on a school’s ability to attract and retain good grad students for RA-ships.
Anyway, as I’m sure you can tell… I’m quite curious if this change got decided, and how.
Some assistants and some professors are good teachers and not good researchers. Some assistants and some professors are good researchers and mediocre teachers, or teachers so much more interested in the research that they refuse to spend adequate time on teaching and students being taught.
Sometimes, as the writer of Devil’s Dictionary noted, “Chinese cheap labor is not inexpensive.” I don’t claim to know what a solution is, but it is obvious there are problems needing solution.
Corey asked:
Wayne, you lead me down a different track: does distance learning mean a net loss for the local economy by decreasing the on-campus/in-town population? Or does distance education draw students who wouldn’t come here otherwise and provide a net economic gain in tuition dollars and local instructor employment?
The answers are yes, and yes. Almost 60% of the student body at DSU is located not in Madison, but On line and at UC. A different pot of money, self support as opposed to state support. Which takes the taxpayer off their roughly 30% state support money requirement. So they buy a few less blizzards by not having 1600 more students on campus. Which by the way we do not have the infrastructure on campus or in town for that increased number.
In the it takes money to make money theory, we are collecting less in the traditional sense but also not costing the taxpayers as much due to the self support that the non traditional delivery mediums charge.
And just to answer something that the guy with the long posts stated, We are at 31% indirects, so 31% of certain costs on the grants I receive are allocated not to the function of my grant but to the university for a plethora of purposes, including the grants office, the college of computing office, and who knows what else. That is why they are called indirect.
31%? That seems like an awful lot not going directly to the proposed work.
But those dollars are the key reason research would get prioritized over teaching. Research assistants can more easily be associated with immediate, concrete incoming revenue figures for the grants they write and win. Teaching assistants just teach (and teach their hearts out, if they are good); their value to the university and GDP is more abstract, difficult to calculate.
Oh, and Kingleon, I still don’t know what the final decision was—waiting for minutes!
Yeah, actually Cory, uh… that number is really low. Most schools in the US take an even bigger piece of the pie. To take an extreme example, Harvard is 61%. UC and SUNY schools, which are our nations biggest state school systems, take overhead (also called ‘F&A’ = Facilities and Administration) somewhere between 50-60%.
At least for federal grant programs, these numbers are result from a negotiation with the federal government about the value of the services an institution provides to a researcher, so its not entirely up to an institution to low-ball or high-ball those numbers. It even varies considerably within the SD system; for example, SDSMT is at 39%.
Really, our low rates work to the advantage of the SD researcher. Many federal programs allow for collaborative proposals from multiple institutions. If we submit a collaborative proposal with researchers at other non-SD institutions, we can move expenses that aren’t necessarily tied to a particular institution (for example, travel costs for a foreign collaborator who isn’t already a principle investigator on the proposal) to the SD researcher’s budget, incurring less overhead and decreasing the bottom line for the whole proposal (thus making the whole proposal cheaper and more attractive for funding in the extremely competitive federal grants rat race).
But you’re right, this is why universities want to be research universities, because it means gaining a revenue stream in addition to tuition. Good TAs and professors help with retention and graduation rates, both of which are financially important for tuition revenue (graduation rates are important for recruitment), but it can be very hard to show a causal relationship.
“…the guy with the long posts…” Yeah, well. ;)