While LSU Graduate School is becoming more competitive in some areas, it is not offering health insurance like other schools to students who get kicked off their parents’ health insurance plans.
Graduate schools across the nation are adding insurance plans to their yearly tuition programs to become more competitive, according to this year’s World News Report’s study on graduate schools. Students get removed from their parents’ plans between the ages of 23 and 25; therefore schools recognize the competitive edge a health insurance plan achieves, according to the study.
Graduate School Associate Dean Pamela Monroe said she understands the importance of health insurance but said the University has chosen another avenue for money investment.
“This fall, we begin a tuition remission program for full-time graduate assistants,” Monroe said.
The tuition remission program will take three years to achieve fully. This fall the program will pay one-third the tuition of those graduate students who are awarded assistantships. Next year half the tuition will be paid. By the 2004-2005 school year, entire tuitions will be covered.
“That investment of funds was chosen as our focus for improving the competitiveness of graduate assistant stipends,” Monroe said. “That doesn’t mean we don’t value health insurance as a benefit, only that we’ve elected to put our finite into that program.”
In 2000, the American College Health Association, an organization that promotes health care on campuses nationwide, issued guidelines recommending that schools make insurance a mandatory condition of enrollment. According to this year’s World News Report on graduate schools, 90 percent of private universities have implemented insurance policies, while 75 percent of public universities have not.
The founding director of Women and Gender Studies, Michelle Masse, advocates health insurance for students and said that 25 percent of undergraduate and graduate students who do not carry policies is an appalling figure.
“Offering health insurance for graduate students is important for two reasons,” Masse said. “First, most are not covered under their parents’ policies. Second, as they get older, risks get higher. They miss the preventative routine testing that could mean the difference between a healthy future or future complications.”
Library science graduate student Joseph Greene said graduate students worry about so many other factors that health insurance just adds to a long list of burdens.
“Most students are too exasperated after considering tuition and living expenses to think about health insurance,” Greene said.
At 24 years old, Greene has another job that offers benefits, but two years ago when he was kicked off his parents’ plan, he said he did not give health insurance a second thought.
Masse said young students shopping for graduate schools would rather gamble in hopes that they will not need insurance than pay the extra money.
“Students think, ‘I’m 23. I’m healthy. I’ll take that chance,'” Masse said.
Offering health insurance to graduate students would not only be advantageous to students, but the University would benefit as well, Masse said.
“We lose some of the best and brightest because they go to competitive universities,” Masse said. “In the realm of health insurance, we cannot compete. We take care of the minds of students, but we need to do more to take care of their bodies in a way that is reasonable.”