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Tuition Remission Plan Clarified:
A Better Deal for Future Students (in 2009)
By Carolyn FisherThe plan for tuition remission at the Graduate Center looks better than ever, according to an announcement made this month by CUNY administration, but is still unlikely to help most current students. Provost William Kelly of the Graduate Center announced this month that at the end of the six-year phase-in period, all graduate students teaching on CUNY campuses will receive tuition remission, regardless of whether they receive one of the new Adjunct Teaching Fellowship (ATF) packages.
This clarification does represent an important improvement to the plan as it was announced in September 2004. According to the plan, the CUNY central administration has made a commitment to phase in tuition remission for graduate students over the course of six years. Under the terms of this commitment, beginning in fall 2004 some incoming students will receive a new type of fellowship package, Adjunct Teaching Fellowships or ATFs. These packages provide tuition remission for the new students over a five-year period. There will be no service requirement in years one and five of these packages, and there is also no provision for living expenses. In years two, three, and four the fellows will be expected to teach two courses per semester and will be paid at the normal adjunct rate. While the ATF recipients will by no means be paid a family wage, the plan represents an important influx of money to the aid-starved GC.
An additional non-monetary benefit of these new fellowship packages is that students will know at which college they will be teaching from the day they enter CUNY. This will give them the opportunity to form relationships with professors at the college where they will be teaching and hopefully foster mentoring relationships between experienced faculty and graduate students new to teaching.
When the commitment to phase-in tuition remission packages was announced last fall, current CUNY graduate students were disappointed to hear that these new fellowship packages were targeted to recruitment, and that they would only be awarded to incoming students. However, administrators pointed out a number of ways the plan would benefit current students as well. First, ATFs awarded to students who dropped out before the end of the five years will be re-awarded to current students. Second, ATFs and the rest of the tuition remission plan represents more money overall coming into the school. In theory, if some students who would have received other forms of support are now being supported by the ATFs, this should free up these other forms of support for current students. These points, though valid, were little consolation for some students who are currently struggling to make ends meet.
Now that a new component of the tuition remission plan has been announced, it is understood that by 2009 at the latest all graduate students at CUNY who teach as adjuncts on CUNY campuses will receive tuition remission. Adjunct positions will not be guaranteed: graduate students will have to find their own positions exactly as under the current system. Adjunct positions will continue to be more available to students in some academic programs than in others, depending on demand.
Administrators hold out hope for a faster phase-in than the one announced. According to the current plan, if no additional money is secured for the plan, it will be fully implemented by 2009 out of the CUNY budget. However, if more money could be secured either through convincing the New York State legislature to add tuition remission as a line item in the CUNY portion of the budget or through private fundraising efforts, the plan would be implemented more quickly. To this end, Provost Kelly has advised the Doctoral Students’ Council that students may be asked to participate in trips to Albany in order to lobby legislators for the line item.This second piece will appear (with jump of first one) in a box on p. 15
Unanswered Questions About Tuition Remission
While disappointing for current students, the modified tuition remission plan will undoubtedly make CUNY into a stronger institution as a whole. However, the plan as it stands leaves a number of questions unanswered.
• First, and perhaps most importantly, will current students benefit from the plan? Provost Kelly states in a recent memo that when students who hold ATF packages drop out, the remainder of the packages will be re-awarded to current students. However, this benefit will help only a minority of current students. The text of the memo reads “Good students who do not qualify for [Gilleeces or ATFs] will be encouraged to apply for adjunct positions at the University, but will not be guaranteed these positions. These students will receive tuition remission during the semesters they teach.” Does this mean that all students teaching will receive this tuition remission, or will current students be “grandfathered?” Inquiries to Provost Kelly on this matter were not answered.
• A second and related question is how the plan will be phased in during the years before 2009. Provost Kelly says that this information is not yet known. The number of ATFs to be created in Fall 2004, for example, will depend on the amount of money included for this purpose in the budget. The budget has not yet been finalized, so the numbers are not known and won’t be known until just before the beginning of each year. In fact, it is unknown how firm the date of 2009 can really be, given that the CUNY budget is held hostage each year to the New York State legislative process.
• Third, the final annual dollar value of the plan as announced in August 2003 was $5.2 million. The value of the plan announced this February is $5,200,250, almost the same amount. If the February plan includes this additional tuition remission for students not receiving packages, why are the two amounts virtually identical? Students have not been shown the details of the budgets of either plan.
• Next, according to Provost Kelly, the new ATFs will not affect the availability of adjunct positions for students who do not hold the packages. The people receiving the ATFs would have been teaching in any case, this reasoning goes, so the ratio of positions to applicants will remain constant. However, is this the whole story? In order to create ATF positions, the chairs of undergraduate programs have been asked to provide the Graduate Center with an estimate of the number of adjuncts they are confident they will need to hire every semester for the foreseeable future. These more or less permanent jobs will be turned into ATFs, and the less predictable adjunct positions—which will be the last minute, one-time-only, emergency, or otherwise non-permanent adjunct positions—will be left for students not receiving packages. This will probably cause adjunct employment for everyone except GTFs and ATFs to become even more unreliable than it already is.
• Finally, it is an open question whether this “clarification” of the tuition remission plan is merely the correction of an inaccuracy in the way the plan was originally announced, or whether it is an actual improvement to the original plan. A memo dated August 2003 from Provost Kelly to Graduate Center EOs described the tuition remission plan as including tuition remission for only the new ATFs, Graduate Teaching Fellows, Science Fellows, and Gilleece Fellows. Last November 2003, at a meeting of the Board of Trustees with CUNY student government leaders, DSC co-chairs complained of the limited reach of the tuition remission plan and the need to give tuition remission to all graduate students teaching in the CUNY system. At that meeting, Executive Vice Chancellor Louise Mirrer said that the plan as it stood already included tuition remission for all students who would be teaching, and promised to provide written materials to that effect. However, in the weeks following the meeting, the DSC co-chairs were unable to find anything in writing, and repeated phone calls to Dr. Mirrer’s office were not returned. Thus, the undated memo released on February 19 is the first written evidence of this portion of the plan. On February 29 at a meeting of the CUNY University Student Senate Council of Presidents, Jay Hershenson, Executive Assistant to Chancellor Goldstein, characterized the changes as a “clarification,” but nevertheless implied that pressure from students had influenced the Board of Trustees’ actions.
The answer to this question, beyond indicating how much or how little power students actually have to influence CUNY’s direction, is significant because of what it would indicate for the prospects of an acceleration of the timeline. As it stands now, there is a commitment for the program to be completely phased in by 2009. However, if student pressure could cause a new commitment to be made, would it be possible for student pressure within CUNY to also cause the money to be allocated more rapidly?