We made a big mistake

[Ruralguy]

I'm for groveling, mea culpas and EXCEL tutorials.

[Hegemony]

I'll just add that the names are closer than I made it seem — more like Emily Johnson and Emma Johnson. (I did check on whether they're related — it's clear they're not.)

I don't think we have any news to break to the candidate — she knows she has been admitted with no funding, so she is clear on her current situation.

The other members of the committee have turned out to be more sanguine — "Well, some people just don't get funding, it's kind of a crap shoot at the best of times."  It's true that although we usually give full funding to students, some years, by the luck of the draw, we get so many acceptees that some don't get any funding. Sometimes they come anyway — for instance, one year we had an actual lottery winner. She drove a very expensive car and stayed in the Hilton at conferences when all the profs were staying at the Motel 6. But I digress. Anyway, my fellow committee members are opposed trying to borrow funding from next year.

It is true that I am head of this department, and another department besides. However, the second department is basically only a small program with no faculty that runs automatically. I have to sign degree audits once a year and that's about as much attention as the second one requires.

It is also true that our secretary generally emails us when an acceptance comes in, and she did not on this occasion. And the Director of Graduate Studies also emails the committee when an acceptance comes in, and somehow she missed the news, I imagine because the student has not been in touch with us directly. So clearly we need to make our procedure firmer.

We will scour the university for TA-ships and the like, but the deadline to apply is generally much earlier than this.

Thanks for all your thoughts. I will go gnash my teeth some more now.

[mamselle]

Just saying that your compassion for the student is consistent with all else known of you here.

Having dealt with a department that for years erred in advising me incorrectly about my status for financial aid, then turned around and blamed me when it took longer to finish my work because I had to go working (irony, here) as an EA at another school in town, where I learned what the correct procedures were...your consideration, even if it can't be acted upon, is worthy of you, and I'm sure the student will at least recognize and be grateful that their needs matter to you.

Hoping on your behalf, as well as the student's, for an organic solution and a satisfactory result.

All good thoughts.

M.

[no1capybara]

Ugh, what a situation to be in.  Any chance you could go to the development office and see if there is a donor who might be interested in supporting her for a year or two?  It's a special case and might lead to establishing a scholarship down the road.

Good luck and thanks for sincerely caring about your students.

[AJ_Katz]

If you're on decent terms with library or other campus units, you might ask if they have any assistantships or grad student positions available. Our library usually posts several assistantships in summer, but they also take referrals early if student has skills that match their needs. One of mine is doing assistantship in library assessment office this year, where they needed someone with basic statistics knowledge. At former university, I had a couple of students who worked for disability services, which offered hourly wage and flexible schedule, but not tuition waiver.

Good luck finding some funding.

That's what I thought too...  ask around to see if other units have TA positions that can be open to students from other programs.

[Hegemony]

That's what I thought too...  ask around to see if other units have TA positions that can be open to students from other programs.

I'm one of the people who interviews the candidates for other departments' TA appointments, so that's how I know that the deadlines have passed. Unfortunately.

[Mobius]

Here's hoping a funded student decides not to come.

[fizzycist]

I'm having trouble understanding this, probably because I come from a different field. As far as I could understand:

When you send the admission email to students it does not say anything about funding? Then if students accept, you reply to them and tell them how much they are getting as the money becomes available?

So what happens in a normal year if a student accepts but they are at the bottom of your ranked list and all the funding is snatched up? Do they just get told there is no funding, sorry? In that case, I'm not sure why you are bending over backwards for this particular student--you never promised them anything and they don't know that they were one of your top choices.

Also, if they were one of your top choices perhaps they got into other programs as well. So they can choose to go there instead if those places offered them funding?

Sorry if my questions are so far off, I just read through the whole thread and still don't understand what happened and why this is a big deal.

In my dept, our initial offer letters have all the financial details of the offer. If the student accepts, we are on the hook to follow through and come up with the money somehow. Every once in a while we get way too many acceptances and faculty have to get creative with offering RAs and, in worst case, begging the Dean for a temporary bailout in exchange for fewer TA slots in future years.

[mamselle]

Humanities or sciences?

Big difference.

M.

[Hegemony]

Fizzycist, it works like this. ( I will simplify it a bit, but this is the gist.) The funding is granted by semester unit. That is, we have, say, eight semesters of funding. We offer two semesters to our top candidate. Another candidate has a particular situation where he is guaranteed entrance and funding through winning a certain award, so he gets two of our semesters. He wasn't our second-best candidate, but he was good and his award is prestigious (much desired by the university) and he is working on something that our department specializes in, so we accept him. That means we have to use up two of our semesters on him.

We then have four semesters left over to distribute.

But we don't know how many students will accept our offer. We don't want to offer full funding to candidates 3 and 4, because what if they accept and candidates 5, 6, 7, and 8 want to come, but can't come if they have no funding? Then our cohort is too small and the university dings us because we are trying to run tiny seminars.

We get a better "yield" if we offer partial funding to many than if we offer full funding to few. So we use our four remaining semesters to offer half funding to candidates 3, 4, 5, and 6.  If 3, 4, 5 and 6 are all roughly the same level of accomplishment and promise, which is usually the case, then it seems a pretty even-handed way of distributing our meager resources.

And then we offer no funding at all to 7 and 8, if they're admittable candidates.

Unfunded numbers 7 and 8 usually don't come, but half-funded candidates 3, 4, 5, and 6 do usually come.

Except that this time Emily Johnson, got left off the list. So whereas candidates 1 and 2 pay nothing, and 3, 4, 5, and 6 are paying half-price, Emily, who was actually our second-most-preferred candidate, will be paying full price.

I guess the fact that she will be coming anyway could suggest that she has other means of support, or that she is a lottery winner or something, but it's a lot more likely that she is just planning on taking out huge loans. And anyway it's not fair. She's better than 3, 4, 5, and 6, but because of our knuckleheadedness, she's stuck with a huge bill.

I should add that initially we send acceptance and full-funding letters to candidates 1 and 2, and to the others we say, "We have admitted you, we may have funding for you, we will let you know as soon as we can." Then if 1 and 2 turn us down, we know we can offer more funding to the later applicants.

Mamselle, it is a humanities field.

Still gnashing my teeth.

[mamselle]

Sorry, I didn't mean to sow confusion; I figured it was humanities.

It just sounded like fizzycist's bafflement was based in the vast difference between what the sciences usually offer their folks.

M.

[Hibush]

The situation actually sounds less bad with the additional explanation. I thought your offer letter included guaranteed funding. Since you didn't offer any funding, you are off the hook.

What are the opportunities to offer this student funding in the future?
Like fizzicist's, my institution doesn't allow unfunded semesters. From that perspective, the difference between one year of assistantship vs no years isn't that large for a five-year degree.

[Hegemony]

Normally the second year has guaranteed funding for five students. But this year the second-year funding has been cut to four students, plus we had a larger than predicted "yield." So now we will have funding for four second-years, but there will be seven second-years. So three of them will be high and dry. Even worse, our department doesn't have a say in which of our second-years gets funded. The university administrators have decided that job is theirs, for "equity across the university." The students apply and the decision is handed down from on high. That means that we can't even tell our students which of them will get it — they have to roll the dice and see. There are so many egregious things about this system. Every year we try to make it more rational, and every year someone up top has some Good Reason why it needs to stay as capricious as it is. You can tell how I feel about it.

[jerseyjay]

If I understand correctly, the problem is that you have a student whom you would have otherwise given some kind of funding not get funding because of an administrative mixup. The student, however, is unaware of this situation and, knowing that she will not be funded, is coming anyway.

On one level, from the point of view of the department, this doesn't seem to be a big deal since the student is still coming, and you have a decent cohort. Nobody who was promised any funding did not get funding, and the student did not turn down funding somewhere else on the basis of being provided funding from your program. On another level, it is a big deal because this means that a good student will be taking on more debt than she should. I am not sure if there is anything to be done (other than refine your administrative protocols to make sure this does not happen again), unless some unexpected windfall occurs and you can throw some money her way.

Of course you do not know anything about the student's situation--although it is probably more likely that she is going in debt instead of being independently wealthy.

It seems to me that the bigger problem is that the program is admitting too many students then it can fully fund, and that the university essentially forces the program to do so in order to keep enrollment up for the seminars.  In general I still think that students should not earn a graduate degree in the humanities without full funding, so the fact that the university needs students to do this in order to keep the program running is bad. (This is not a reflection on the program, but rather the school as a whole.)

[fizzycist]

On another level, it is a big deal because this means that a good student will be taking on more debt than she should.

See that's the part I don't understand. Based on OPs description (and thanks for the second explanation for my sake, I appreciate it), they would be OK if students #7 and 8 don't get funding (or at least would not resort to heroics and thread writing). But OP is angry because this year student #2 is the one who didn't get funding.


But why does it matter how high of an admissions committee score the student got? If they made your cut then presumably you want all of them and you want them to succeed.  If anything, you might argue this is an ideal outcome. If you had given the funding to #2, then #7 may have declined. Pure speculation, but all else equal, #7 may be less likely to take the risk of going into debt and not finding a job afterwards, given their academic preparation is a bit worse.

And are you confident the committee score is an objective prediction of a student's value to the program anyway? In my program, 2nd ranked student can easily be a dud and 8th ranked the gem. I have trouble believing humanities are any different.