Sun editorial:

Paying for education

Graduate pay at UNLV should be boosted to raise the university’s quality, status

Wednesday, May 14, 2008 | 2:06 a.m.

UNLV’s academic reputation is being hampered because it cannot recruit some of the nation’s best graduate students. The incentives UNLV offers to prospective students pale in comparison with those offered by other colleges and universities.

Doctoral candidates at UNLV may receive a stipend of about $12,000 a year for teaching and doing research work. Students pursuing master’s degrees are given a smaller stipend.

Other schools pay twice as much as UNLV, and the university has seen many promising students go elsewhere.

As Charlotte Hsu reported in Sunday’s Las Vegas Sun, UNLV President David Ashley said the problem is at the top of a list of priorities for improving the campus. Despite the state’s budget crunch, he is looking for ways to improve graduate pay.

It is unclear how he might do that, but it is worth the effort. UNLV wants to become recognized as a research institution, but that will never happen unless it can attract and retain high-caliber graduate students to teach and work on research projects.

Eugene Moehring, chairman of the history department, said the university will benefit if the state spends more to attract students, allowing them to focus on their work, not on their finances.

“That’s how you become important,” he said. “You produce faculty and students who succeeded in a big way. You’ve got to invest some time and money unless you want to let California handle all the Ph.D. students.”

Nevada, however, has not done so. For decades, the Legislature has not properly funded education. It shouldn’t be that way.

The state should be producing better-educated students and attracting the best. To do that the state will have to spend more money. Sadly, between the current economic situation and the current administration in Carson City, that is unlikely.

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By JohnF

May 14, 2008

8:53 a.m.

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The situation in Carson City makes it very unlikely this will happen any time soon. One department in a major school just had to fire pretty much its entire adjunct faculty and full-time faculty have had to take on full-time teaching loads*. If the University can no longer provide faculty with the opportunity to do research, how can it provide graduate students with the opportunity to do research?

The cuts to the University budget have been very damaging, but apparently there are more to come. What will happen then is that full-time faculty will have to be let go. UNLV is already suffering on the research front as professors no longer have the time to conduct any meaningful research, but teaching will suffer dramatically as well. Class sizes will necessarily grow as offerings will shrink.

The destruction of higher education in this state will have serious long-term consequences for all of us, but thank goodness the businesses that rely on the University to provide them with an educated work force won't have to pay any additional taxes (or any taxes)!

*For those of you who will scream about faculty not already teaching full time, let me explain. Faculty are paid not only to teach, but to produce research. A university's reputation rests not so much on the quality of its academics, but the quality of its research. When faculty no longer have the time to produce research the University's academic reputation suffers. Further, many, if not most, of the top ptofessors in this country base their careers on their research. If UNLV can no longer offer professors the opportunity to do research the professors won't come here any longer.

The advantage to having the top researchers on your faculty is that the people who are on the cutting edge of a given field are the ones teaching the classes as well. If those people stop coming here the quality of education offered at UNLV will suffer greatly.