Topic: Graduate Education
by John Abrams
UT Southwestern Medical Center
01/02/2016
Proposed Actions From my service on study section, I came to appreciate the extent to which institutions have grown addicted to these funds as a means of structural support. Excessive tuition financing by the NIH encourages larger trainee pools and, therefore, eliminating ‘recovery’ for tuition charges should, over time, remove this systemic incentive toward larger graduate class sizes. This change may be easy to implement since tuition charges for senior graduate students (who are full time researchers and no longer taking classes) are difficult to justify beyond nominal fees. Furthermore, by requiring more ‘skin-in-the-game’ from the institution, this reform should also help to highlight institutions that are genuinely invested in the process.