Graduate Student Ecruitment and Financial Aid

In absolute terms, our best offers can be viewed as sufficient. For example, the estimated cost (tuition, fees, room and board, and incidentals) to a resident graduate student for 2006-2007 is $19,017. A financial aid package consisting of a GAT with its accompanying tuition reimbursement and a $5000 fellowship will completely cover this amount. Nevertheless, there is evidence that competitors’ offers may be higher both absolutely (due to higher tuition or cost of living elsewhere) and relatively (schools are offering packages that more than cover their university’s estimated expenses.) While we would not want to do this for all of our graduate students, in order to get the very best Ph.D. students we will have offer packages substantially above the university’s estimated cost.
Recommendations
• Develop endowment funds for graduate (“bridge”) fellowships for Masters students. As outlined above, we currently devote a certain amount of our fellowship money to $1000 fellowships for Masters students. These fellowships often make it possible for non-resident students to attend, or are enough to show our current undergraduates that we are interested in their continuing on for the Masters degree. Ideally we could increase this amount to $2500/year for two years. Since these students are highly sought after by employers once they have their Masters degrees, the consulting engineering firms of Texas are a logical place to look for these endowment funds.
• As a subtask for this recommendation, we should develop a database of who the recipients of these Masters level fellowships are, and where they go for employment after graduation. It would be a useful development device to be able to show prospective donors that the recipients of these fellowships are working for their firms.
• Develop more endowment funds for Ph.D. students to increase the number of available fellowships. Three possible approaches to utilize these funds to recruit Ph.D. students are outlined below. It... [continues]

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