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Student Funding

Student Funding Refinement and Implementation Committee (RIC) 15

Committee Members

Stephen Buchwald (Chair), Stephen Bell, Glenn Ellison, Ken Goldsmith, Nergis Mavalvala, Donca Steriade, Will Tisdale, and Naziat Adnan (Staff)

Abstract

The Student Funding RIC recommends a number of steps to ensure that doctoral students earn a living wage and are well positioned to pursue career objectives, and that MIT departments are competitive with peers on grant applications and in attracting top students. The multiyear, phased-in approach includes instituting an all-but-dissertation (ABD) rate of 10% or less in year 5 for non-lab disciplines, increasing the research assistant (RA) tuition subsidy to 75% for students beyond the first year, accepting the funding provided by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and certain other fellowships as fully covering tuition, providing summer support funds to non-lab departments sufficient to provide at least half support for students after their first four years, and providing a tuition subsidy for National Institutes of Health (NIH) and other government-sponsored training grants.

Motivation

RIC 15 was charged with reviewing the ideas on student funding developed by Phase 1 working groups, and with refining and merging these and other ideas to arrive at concrete and specific proposals for implementation. The main focus was intended to be and was graduate student funding.

The committee’s work started with a discussion of two topics on which it came to universal agreement:

  • Graduate students are critical to fulfilling MIT’s mission of advancing knowledge and educating students in science, technology, and other areas of scholarship that will best serve the nation and the world in the 21st century. MIT’s top-ranked PhD programs are a tremendous asset.
  • A number of trends have caused Institute support for MIT PhD programs and for PhD students to fall well behind what peers are providing. This is a form of deferred maintenance that is critical for MIT to address if it aims to remain a leading institution for graduate training and for research more broadly.

Some inefficiencies in MIT’s current policies can be fixed at almost no cost. Several others can only be addressed by committing substantial financial resources.

We believe that addressing even the expensive issues now is critical. As with deferred maintenance to buildings, MIT will continue to incur off-the-books damage to a valuable asset for as long as changes are not made. If MIT further defers this maintenance, it will be doing a worse job of serving its mission in the short run, and it could find itself needing to spend even more in the future to restore assets.

Big-Picture Goals

There is fairly broad agreement on what MIT would like to accomplish:

  • Increase stipends where they are low to bring students up to a living wage.
  • Help make grant applications from MIT researchers competitive.
  • Exploit available funding sources to the fullest extent possible.
  • Avoid situations in which distorted prices provide faculty/departments with an incentive to take actions that are not in the best interests of MIT and its students.

One topic on which there is less than complete agreement is on the size of PhD programs.

  • Some believe that increased PhD enrollment is very expensive and should be tightly limited. Others believe both that PhD students are tremendously important to many goals and that the costs of running top-notch programs are largely fixed costs, so much of the purported “savings” from reducing enrollment will prove illusory.

Our committee is of the latter view but agrees that it is important for MIT to retain levers to control the growth of the graduate student population. The salience of the goals differs across departments. Hence, the best way to address the current problems also differs. The primary difference is between “lab-based” departments in which PhD students are primarily supported through sponsored research, and those in which PhD students are primarily supported by outside fellowships, internal funds, and the general institute budget.

Non-Lab Disciplines

Addressing concerns in non-lab departments is relatively inexpensive, both because the departments are relatively small, and because some of the concerns involve distorted prices in an economy that consists almost entirely of internal transfers. A prioritized list for these departments might be:

  • Institute a very low ABD tuition rate of at most 10% starting in Year 5, so that departments are not disproportionately taxed when they accommodate legitimate student desires to spend sufficient time preparing for academic careers and can encourage such students to seek outside funding which is more available for stipends than for tuition.
  • Centrally fund tuition shortfalls on NSF Graduate Fellowships and other foundation fellowships commonly received by students in these departments, so that departments can more actively encourage their graduate students to seek this funding source.
  • Provide resources to allow departments to provide summer Ras/Fellowships to help guarantee that student support will meet the projected 12-month cost of living.
  • Consider also an even earlier step down in tuition (like that at Harvard) that reduces tuition to at most 50% for students in years 3 and 4. Such cuts would eliminate some distortions and have essentially no revenue impact (if the policy is limited to non-lab disciplines.). Alternatively, the step down could occur whenever a student has met a set of ABD requirements.

Lab-Based Disciplines

Addressing the deferred maintenance in lab-based disciplines will be more expensive but is critical to MIT’s mission. The primary policy changes that are needed are:

  • Increase the RA tuition subsidy to roughly 75% for students beyond the first year.
  • Centrally fund tuition shortfalls on NSF and other individual-based US government fellowships.
  • Provide the needed tuition subsidy for NIH and other government-sponsored training grants.

Recommendations

Combining these lists and prioritizing to address the largest concerns in a manner that is equitable across departments our highest priority recommendations are that MIT

  • Accept the payments made by NSF Graduate Fellowships (and some others) as fully covering tuition.
  • Increase the RA tuition subsidy to 75% for students beyond the first year. If concerns about potential increases in the graduate student population are deemed important these subsidies could be limited as discussed in our detailed report.
  • Institute an ABD tuition rate of at most 10% starting in year 5 in non-lab disciplines.
  • Provide a tuition subsidy for NIH and other government-sponsored training grants.
  • Provide summer support funds to non-lab departments sufficient to provide at least half support for students in the summers after their first four years.

Our detailed report elaborates on these recommendations and discusses a number of other valuable changes that could be implemented if sufficient funding is available.

Implementation

The problems noted by our RIC have been noted by many for a long time and were discussed in great detail by a 2018 committee led by Stephen Bell. We feel that no additional study committees are needed and the provost’s office should simply make plans to implement these policies as quickly as possible.

  • The details on exactly what accepting NSF payments means and decisions on which other fellowships to treat similarly could be worked out by October and announced as applying for the 2022–23 academic year before applications are due. This change will require a commitment of roughly $10M/year.
  • The commitment to centrally fund 75% of tuition for research assistants could be implemented almost immediately and apply to all students supported on grants with applications submitted after some particular date. Implementing such a policy quickly is desirable to remove the incentive to delay submitting applications. This will require an additional commitment of roughly $30M/year in steady state. Costs will ramp up over a few years as the set of grants to which the subsidy applies grows.
  • The details of the set of students eligible for the new ABD policy could be worked out in the fall semester and adopted for the 2022–23 academic year. The reduction in charged tuition could be as much as $14M per year but given that almost none of this tuition is ever paid by non-MIT sources, the true cost to MIT of the policy change would be negligible.
  • The tuition subsidy for NIH training grants could be adopted for the 2022–23 academic year. The added cost might be about $2.5M per year.
  • The details of the summer support subsidies provided to non-lab departments (or directly to students) could also be settled in the fall semester so that they can be described when admissions decisions for 2022–23 are first sent out around January 2022. The cost to MIT would be about $5M/year if full summer support is provided and about $2.5M/year with half support.

The costs of these policies bring with them an opportunity to appeal to donors to help address the challenges. We recommend that MIT also:

  • Launch a major and focused fundraising campaign to support the added expenses and to raise additional centrally administered and departmental fellowships. This campaign could be planned in 2021–2022 and launched when it fits well between other initiatives.
  • Consider changes to fundraising policies that would make it easier for departments to raise endowed full fellowships.