California Monthly
UC Berkeley
June, 2000
Berkeley Lags in Fellowships for Graduate Students
By Robert M. Berdahl
Chancellor,
University of California, Berkeley
When I attend gatherings of alumni, I am frequently asked, "Are faculty salaries competitive so that we can recruit and retain our best faculty?" The question reveals an understanding of the concern we have frequently expressed, especially since the cutbacks of the early 1990s, about the competitive salaries we are able to offer. Recent salary comparisons published in the Chronicle of Higher Education show that Berkeley generally lags somewhat behind its chief competitors. At Berkeley, the average salary of a full professor is listed as $108,700; that of an associate professor, $69,600; and that of an assistant professor, $60,100. At Stanford, the salaries for each of the three ranks are $121,000, $81,200, and $65,800. At Harvard, they are $128,900, $71,600, and $66,500. Clearly, we need to work hard to keep salaries competitive.
Average salaries of faculty, of course, are only one, relatively crude, indicator of competitive position. They don't take into account other factors that faculty consider in deciding where to do their work: the quality of university facilities, the quality and cost of living, and the quality of students. If we are to recruit and retain the best faculty, we must pay attention to each of these factors. Salaries will always remain a high priority; we are engaging in an ambitious campaign to improve the facilities of the campus; and we have begun discussions about how to further assist faculty in securing affordable housing in the area around Berkeley. We also need to assure faculty that Cal is able to recruit the very best students. We admit outstanding undergraduate students, but increasingly we find ourselves unable to recruit the top graduate students. Increasingly, they are being attracted by better offers from other top universities.
While undergraduate students and their families are expected to bear much of the cost of their education, the education of graduate students is generally subsidized by a combination of fellowships, teaching assistantships, and research assistantships. Universities avidly compete for the top applicants with offers of support. Top applicants typically decide which graduate program to attend based on the quality of the faculty and the amount of support they are offered.
Berkeley struggles to be competitive with support for graduate students in all disciplines. We are somewhat more able to compete in the sciences and engineering, where research assistants can be paid from the federal grant funds garnered by our faculty. In the humanities and social sciences, however, where fellowship support is essential to recruit new students, we have been losing ground. At a recent meeting, department chairs in the humanities identified fellowship support for new graduate students as their top priority.
Some comparative statistics show how we have slipped. In 1990, Berkeley's fellowship offers were comparable with those in the Ivy League; all were in the range of $8,000 to $8,500. This past year, MIT offered 100 fellowships at $21,000 per year; Cornell had 100 fellowships at $19,000; Stanford had 200 fellowships at $17,000; Berkeley, by contrast, was able to offer only 55 at $13,000.
In a study conducted last year, we learned that Berkeley's graduate support offers did not rank in the top tier of institutions in any of the seven disciplines surveyed. We ranked in the upper range in chemistry and electrical engineering/computer science, in the middle range in psychology and molecular and cell biology, and in the lower range in English, physics, and history. It is not surprising, therefore, that several departments report their inability to recruit their top choices for graduate admission.
We cannot allow this trend to continue, for we know that the University is a fragile ecosystem, in which the deterioration of any single component can adversely affect the entire system. Nobel laureate Y.T. Lee, Ph.D. '65, expressed the mutual relationship of faculty and student quality when he commented, "I came to Berkeley as a graduate student because of the quality of the faculty; I returned to Berkeley as a faculty member because of the quality of the students." Faculty come to Berkeley and stay at Berkeley because of the quality of the students. Because graduate students also play a vital role in the education of undergraduates, the quality of our undergraduate program is also dependent on recruiting the best graduate students.
The value that our highest caliber graduate students bring to this University is immense. We must find ways to ensure their place on our campus, and thus our excellence, as we move forward into the 21st century.