U of C increasing humanities, social science grad student aid

Associated Press

CHICAGO - The University of Chicago will allocate nearly $50 million in additional aid to graduate students in the humanities and social sciences during the next six years, school officials announced Wednesday.

Beginning this fall, a typical base aid package for most of the 250 incoming graduate students in those disciplines will consist of five years of support, including tuition, health insurance, an annual stipend of $19,000 for living expenses and two summers of research support at $3,000 per summer.

The increased aid is expected to shorten the time students need to complete a Ph.D. because they will be able to focus on scholarship.

"This graduate aid program reflects the highest priority of our faculty in the humanities and social sciences," university provost Thomas Rosenbaum said.

Debra Stewart, president of the Council of Graduate Schools, based in Washington, D.C., said her organization was delighted to see the University of Chicago making such a commitment, particularly because students in the humanities and social sciences receive little in the way of government aid.

"It's also good news in that it will give Chicago more capacity to understand the factors that influence a student's chances of completing a degree program in a timely manner," said Stewart, whose organization is working on a multi-campus study of the factors - economic and non-economic - that influence the completion of Ph.D. programs. U of C is not a part of that study, she said.

Stewart noted that humanities and social science graduate students traditionally have taken longer to complete their Ph.D's than those in engineering or the pure sciences, and have a lower completion rate.