Countywide : Graduate Students Feeling Fee Pinch

Christine Mallon knew it wouldn’t be easy to get through graduate school and complete a Ph.D., but rising fees and dwindling financial aid resources have made it much tougher than she ever expected.

A mother of two young children, Mallon not only carries a full course load and teaches a class each quarter in her comparative culture program at UC Irvine, she also works part time at a birthing center in Upland.

“I knew what I was up against when I started, but I figured I could handle the hard work,” Mallon said. “What I didn’t count on was getting these fee increases each year.”

Students seeking higher degrees at public universities throughout the county are struggling not only with rising fees but also with increasing competition for teaching assistant stipends, financial aid and federal research grant funds.

At UCI, graduate students are facing a fee increase of at least $605 next fall, bringing total annual fees for state residents to more than $4,200, including health insurance.

Students enrolled in the medical school at UCI pay an additional $376 in annual fees.

With next year’s projected 20% fee hike, the cost of attending graduate school will have doubled over the last four years.

Graduate students at Cal State Fullerton, although less dependent on teaching assistant positions and research grant funds than their UC counterparts, have also been affected by a steady increase in fees, university officials said.

At UCI, the projected $605 fee increase will make it “very difficult” for many of the university’s 2,200 graduate students to continue their studies, according to David Goldstein-Shirley, the president of Associated Graduate Students.

“Many of us have families, and hardly any graduate students rely on their parents for financial assistance,” he said.

“It’s especially difficult for us to budget when the fee increases are so enormous year after year.”

While the number of graduate students has risen about 5% a year at UCI in the last decade, the number of teaching assistant positions, which pay from $12,000 to $14,000 annually, have hardly increased at all, according to officials.

The university has netted more money in research grants in recent years, but those funds have primarily supported graduate students in science departments.

About half of UCI’s graduate students receive some sort of financial support from the university at any given time, including coverage of health insurance premiums for teaching assistants, said Mark Warner, assistant dean of graduate studies at UCI.

About half also live in state-subsidized, on-campus housing, where rents range from about $590 to $800 per month for a two-bedroom apartment, a bargain compared to the cost of housing elsewhere in Irvine.

Still, it’s getting “tougher every year to be a graduate student,” Warner said.

Campus officials are unsure whether they will be able to cover the coming fee hike for the university’s 500 teaching assistants.

With the continuing fiscal uncertainty, officials are also unsure how many merit-based fellowships will be available for incoming graduate students, which could make it difficult to lure the nation’s top graduates to UCI.

“It may get worse before it gets better,” Warner said.