UW-Madison's Current Graduate Assistant Fee
In January 2007 UW-Madison replaced its previous 25% fee with a flat
$8000/year fee for all Research Assistant and Project Assistants
receiving tuition remission (holding a 33.3% or higher appointment).
This new fee represents roughly a 100% increase in cost to employing
departments and thus a significant hardship for many employers.
Particularly hard hit are small departments employing graduate students
on small grants and gifts, and large research groups with many graduate
students working on grants which do not permit money to be budgeted for
this purpose.
Despite these hardships, the new fee does nothing to address the underlying structural deficit in the UW-Madison budget.
What is more, the new fee is calculated to match the deficit assuming
existing numbers of Graduate Assistants, but the fee itself encourages
the consolidation of low-percentage appointments (e.g. 33%) into higher
level appointments (e.g. 66%). What's more, the new fee is causing some
positions to disappear entirely due to departments' inability to pay.
The new fee is being phased in on many parts of campus: 101 funds are
subject to a 3-year phase-in for the School of Education, the College
of Letters and Science and the College of Agricultural and Life
Sciences, and 142 funds (Hatch grants) are fully exempt from the fee
for three years.
Despite these phase-ins, however, the new $8000 fee appears to be
solely responsible for a 16% drop in the number of PA positions since
last year. As the phase-ins progress, more losses can be expected. As
tuition continues to rise while Graduate Assistant positions disappear,
the fee will need to rise to cover the budgetary shortfall.
Ceasing to remit graduate tuition is not an option, since this would
severely damage UW-Madison's ability to recruit top graduate students
and, in turn, deeply hurt its research, teaching and outreach missions.
The only way to get the university's books to balance again is to amend
the relevant state statutes to eliminate the structural deficit.
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