The Facts: In light of the state-mandated budget cuts, the University has been forced to give graduate students more responsibility in teaching introductory-level courses, in addition to their own studies.
Our Opinion: Cutting graduate budgets may hurt the quality of education students receive today and hinder efforts to build upon the University’s academic prestige.
With the economy still recovering and the job market looking grim with unemployment hovering at about 10 percent, graduate school looks like an appealing choice for students. And with state-mandated budget cuts, the University sees graduate students as a potentially cost-effective method of educating students while avoiding the expense of paying for full-time lecturers and professors.
Yet even the graduate programs are not immune to budget pressures, and now the University is trying to trim more fat by cutting back some graduate budgets.
This hurts the University in two ways: it detracts from the short-term goals of providing education by putting more pressure on graduate students, who have a good amount of work due to their own studies, and it hurts the long-term goal of maintaining a solid graduate program, which enhances the University’s academic and public standing.
The immediate impact on education is obvious: with class sizes increasing, graduate students may be given more of a burden than they originally expected. While some students can adapt, not everyone can maintain an effective learning environment under the adverse conditions the budget cuts force on every person at the University.
And such unfriendly workplace environments are not conducive to building strong graduate programs – after all, who would desire to go to graduate school if they were required to balance the pressures of graduate-level academics with the difficulties in managing an introductory course, possibly having to deal with freshmen that are still adapting to the college environment?
Failing to maintain a strong graduate program would then be detrimental to the University’s image. Academic institutions do not build reputations on the strength of undergraduate programs – they have solid graduate programs that attract creative, intelligent minds and garner the support of businesses looking to benefit from the ideas born from colleges and universities.
Obviously, the budget cuts do not allow for ideal solutions in which all graduate departments remain unchanged or gain the funding to expand. But to cut graduate budgets indiscriminately is a mistake, hurting the education of current students and the next generation of minds at N.C. State.
