UNC-Chapel Hill cuts graduate funding to five years amid budget pressure
Administrators are enforcing a 10-semester limit on doctoral support while stipends remain below the local living wage, prompting faculty to warn that enrollment is dropping sharply.
By Bianca Herrera ·
UNC-Chapel Hill is tightening the window for doctoral funding to five years as the university works to trim more than $80 million from its budget.
The Graduate School announced this summer that it would strictly enforce a policy limiting full support to 10 semesters. Previously, many PhD candidates received funding for seven or eight years. Dean Beth Mayer-Davis stated that the university can no longer afford to provide resources beyond that limit. She said administrators will become more attentive to the 10-semester cap over a three-year period rather than implementing the change immediately.
Students report that the university’s minimum stipend of $21,592 for nine months is well below the living wage in Chapel Hill, which is nearly $50,000 for those without children. Annaliisa Powers, a psychology candidate who has been at the university for eight years, said she feels graduate students are viewed as a cheap labor source. She noted that supports have quietly disappeared, including reduced travel awards and fewer opportunities to teach summer courses. This summer, the university also announced it would reclaim graduate student housing to make room for more undergraduates.
Faculty members say these changes are hurting the university’s ability to recruit top talent. Scott Duxbury, the director of graduate studies for sociology, said his department received about 100 fewer applications than average this year. The new PhD cohort is less than half the size the department originally wanted. Duxbury compared the situation to competitors like UC Berkeley and Michigan, which often guarantee six or more years of funding, or Duke, which limits funding to five years but pays students twice as much.
Duxbury warned that the university is hemorrhaging its reputation. He said the shifting policies and low pay are devastating morale. The sociology department now relies on graduate students to teach 39% of undergraduate classes. If recruitment continues to struggle, Duxbury expects that percentage to fall. He said the department will likely hire more contracted faculty to fill the gap. He also noted that other departments, such as chemistry, have stopped offering recitations because they have fewer available teaching assistants.
The university aims to increase its undergraduate population by 5,000 students over the next decade. Trustees have pushed to raise that goal even higher. Mayer-Davis said the university does not admit graduate students simply because it needs them to teach. She acknowledged that hiring teaching assistants is expensive but argued it provides an excellent learning experience. She said the overall decline in graduate students this year was largely driven by a drop in international master’s students and uncertainty in federal research funding.
Erin Coyad Wright, a sociology PhD student, is rushing to finish her degree one year ahead of schedule. She said she would find it unethical to encourage others to join the program under current conditions. Wright described feeling discarded after teaching for five years at a low wage. She said students who invested in the university for their future careers have been proven wrong by the recent policy shifts.
