The Graduate Professional Student Agenda is adopted at the beginning of each academic year by UCSA’s Graduate Professional Student Committee.
Dignified graduate/professional standard of living
Problem: Many graduate and professional students are responsible for supporting families or have returned to pursue postgraduate education after spending time in the professional workforce. In addition to pursuing an education, many graduate students also perform necessary functions for the university including research and teaching. All students deserve a dignified standard of living. Graduate students needs for affordable housing, food, transportation, and healthcare manifest differently than the needs of undergraduates.
- Establish a UC-recognized graduate standard of living for use in determining estimated costs of attendance.
- Ensure that graduate stipend scales are such that housing costs such as rent and utilities allow for a dignified graduate standard of living, and account for less than or equal to 40% of total income.
- Work collaboratively with local communities so that healthy and affordable food is available on and/or near campus spaces, with hours that accommodate graduate student needs.
- Work collaboratively with local communities to ensure that moderate income housing is available both on- and off-campus for graduate students.
- Ensure emergency aid transition housing spaces for graduate students.
- Improve health care options for graduate students that enable rapid and private treatment on and off campus.
- Ensure accessible food pantries on campus.
- Establish programs on each campus to provide additional financial support for food insecurity.
Diverse campus climate, genuine recruitment, and active retention
Problem: Many departments struggle to foster a sense of inclusion and community among students of color, LGBTQIA students, international students, and nontraditional students. Implicit biases affect how these students are treated within institutions. In the absence of supporting actions that genuinely include their perspectives and experiences, many feel that they fulfill arbitrary “diversity quotas”. The associated stress disproportionately affects the mental and physiological health of these students, placing additional burdens on the performance and wellbeing of those from marginalized backgrounds.
- Increase campus-wide programming to build community among graduate students of color, LGBTQIA students, international students, and nontraditional students.
- Require implicit bias and cultural sensitivity training for faculty and students in all departments so that they feel more comfortable admitting, communicating with, and respecting graduate students of underrepresented backgrounds (e.g., in-person training, required readings, etc).
- Increase intercampus programming to connect graduate students of underrepresented backgrounds and identities from different campuses.
- Screen required curricula by external reviewers to incorporate diverse voices and perspectives whenever appropriate.
- Review graduate student and advisor relationships with an emphasis on following principles of community and non-discrimination clauses.
- Recruit and admit more students from underrepresented backgrounds (e.g. not just one or two per cohort).
- Hire more faculty from minority and underrepresented backgrounds to foster a culture that is more diverse and inclusive.
- Initiate recruitment events after admittance for students of underrepresented or minority backgrounds (e.g. Graduate Student of Color or LGBTQIA student retreats).
- Increase scholarships for underrepresented students, and ensure that the scholarships go to students from these backgrounds.
- Ensure that the burden is not placed on marginalized students themselves to educate departments, campuses, or communities regarding the unique stresses associated being with a minority or underrepresented student.
Best practices for graduate student–advisor relationships
Problem: Graduate students works closely with a faculty advisor who offers academic guidance, and who decides when the student may advance in certain stages of degree completion. Best practices have yet to be implemented to ensure fair, respectful, and equitable working relationships, leading to students being mistreated by advisors in ways that affect mental health and successful degree completion.
- Determine standardized best practices in successful advising, including transparency and accountability.
- Formalize best practices into advising contracts.
- Create a Standardized Reciprocal Evaluation Process (SREP) for advisor-advisee relationships, wherein students evaluate their faculty advisors annually to enable early detection of problematic mentoring relationships. Read UCSA’s SREP Resolution.
- Incorporate SREPs into tenure promotion packages and ensure penalties for multiple offenders.
- Establish structure and designated personnel (e.g. staff within the Graduate Division) for communicating advisor issues.
- Guarantee funding for changing advisors through Graduate Divisions.
- Conduct external reviews of graduate student and advisor relationships with emphasis on preventing discrimination against graduate students based on gender, race, place of origin, or sexual orientation.
Transparency and diversity of funding opportunities
Problem: Allocation of graduate student funding is biased, non-transparent, and insufficient to meet the needs of graduate and professional students.
- Actively include students during decisions at all stages of funding allocation, including review, selection, discussion, and final reporting of the steps of the entire application process.
- Increase funding for graduate research to minimize the need for alternate sources of income (e.g. teaching assistantships).
- Increase campus fellowships to recruit and retain students of underrepresented and marginalized backgrounds, and ensure that such funds actually go to these students.
- Assure year-round funding packages.
- Reinstate graduate student eligibility for subsidized loans at the federal level, and create subsidized loans at the state level, in order to provide the option for better terms and rates of repayment.
- Increase funding opportunities for graduate students in non-STEM fields.
- Increase funding opportunities and eligibility for international students.
- Improve and standardize a UC-wide paid family leave policy (similar to policies put into place by UCSF and UCD policies).
- Freeze tuition during the all-but-dissertation (ABD) stage of graduate education that follows advancement to candidacy.
- Increase funding for professional development such as conferences and career fairs.
Building strong community partnerships
Problem: Insulation within the campus community disconnects graduate/professional students from external opportunities with the potential to address graduate student needs, improve social networks and support, and advance professional development.
- Increase student representation on housing and market committees in local governments.
- Increase off-campus programming with local organizations and schools.
- Increase partnerships with alumni/ae (of UCSA, of campuses, or of relevant student organizations).
- Hold local events to improve social and professional development for graduate students.
- Hold UC-wide conference(s) for graduate student connections.
PDST: affordability, accessibility, and accountability
Problem: Professional Degree Supplemental Tuition (PDST) is levied without transparency which burdens graduate and professional students with debt, disproportionately affects students of lower socioeconomic status, and leaves many students unable to pay for housing and fulfill basic needs.
- Insist that the UC Regents do not alter policies in ways that make it easier to increase PDST.
- Ensure town hall discussions with graduate/professional students and their administration to discuss proposed increases, during which administrators transparently demonstrate the need for these increases to maintain educational quality.
- Include student feedback in every fee increase proposal brought before the Regents.
Creating a sustainable university culture
Problem: Management of resources that sustain UC campuses has important economic, ecological, and social consequences. Improving environmental sustainability within the campus culture requires measured action that has the potential to dovetail with improvements in graduate student health, housing, food, and transportation.
- Provide structural support for graduate students in campus and community sustainability research.
- Investigate intersections between graduate student needs and achieving UCOP’s 2025 Carbon Neutrality Initiative goals.
- Make graduate student events within departments and campuses as sustainable as possible.
- Increase the proportion of sustainably-sourced food available on campus.
- Appoint graduate representatives to attend Global Food Initiative meetings.
- Increase programming to bring graduate students to natural spaces on and off-campus to improve psychosocial health.
- Increase graduate involvement with recycling and composting campaigns.
Bridging graduate/professional and undergraduate students
Problem: Lack of communication between graduate/professional students and undergraduate students limits the potential of these student bodies to achieve more by working collectively at the intersections of mutual goals.
- Encourage graduate student elected officers to meet with their undergraduate counterparts at the start of their tenure, and continually as necessary.
- Encourage joint meetings with administrators and collaborators on reporting and advocacy.
