Managing Future
Growth in Research and Graduate Studies
Dear Colleagues:
Our series of internal communiqués
on campus growth continues with this message from Richard Attiyeh, Vice
Chancellor for Research and Dean of
Graduate Studies. Dr. Attiyeh reminds us that managing the growth of a
major research university is a long-range project. The state's current
fiscal crisis will mean belt-tightening in the short run. But in the long
run, the University of California will grow to accommodate population
growth, and its expansion will sustain the excellence that has made it
a world leader in education and research. As Dr. Attiyeh points out, the
key to sustained excellence is balance. We must increase graduate enrollment
across the disciplines; we must strengthen both academic and professional
programs; we must bolster our research enterprises; and we must build
student and faculty diversity.
Robert C. Dynes
Chancellor
Managing Future Growth in
Research and Graduate Studies
Richard Attiyeh
November 20, 2001
As the campus has begun a period
of rapid enrollment growth, considerable attention is being given to the
need to achieve institutional balance, graduate-undergraduate balance,
disciplinary balance, and academic-professional balance.
As a consequence of steady
undergraduate enrollment growth combined with little graduate enrollment
growth over the past two decades, UCSD has a ratio of graduate to undergraduate
students that is unusually low for a leading research university. It has
become a high priority for the faculty and the administration to increase
the graduate share of General Campus (including SIO) total enrollments
from 12% in 2000-01 to 18% by 2010. Given that undergraduate enrollment
is planned to increase by 52% over this decade, graduate enrollment will
need to increase by 2,750 (123%) to achieve the 18% goal. We have made
a good start on achieving this objective by increasing General Campus
graduate enrollments in 2001-02 by 370. In addition to General Campus
enrollment growth, Health Science Ph.D. students are projected to grow
by 160 (72%) during this decade.
The planned growth provides
for increases in all disciplinary areas.
Strong programs in all disciplines contribute to a symbiotic environment
in which disciplines nourish one another intellectually. This is obviously
true for graduate education, where so much exciting contemporary research
cuts across a wide range of disciplines. Moreover, without strong graduate
programs in all disciplines, our departments will be unable to attract
the high quality faculty and teaching assistants necessary for excellence
in undergraduate education. In the past, UCSD has been an innovator in
developing programs in emerging disciplinary areas. We had, for example,
one of the first programs in the nation in cognitive science, and just
last year, we inaugurated one of the first programs in bioinformatics.
Given the interdisciplinary tradition at UCSD, new graduate programs can
be expected to emerge as a result of faculty research collaborations across
disciplines.
Compared to most of our peer
institutions, UCSD has a surprisingly small number of graduate professional
programs. We have been fortunate to have an outstanding M.D. program in
our School of Medicine which, in addition to achieving national prominence,
has been the basis for much of the campus's strength in the biological
sciences. Our only other professional school is the Graduate School of
International Relations and Pacific Studies, which is the only school
of its kind in the western United States. As we grow, we will be working
to attain an appropriate balance between academic and professional programs.
Last year, we added a School of Pharmacy. Just last month, the Regents
approved our proposal to establish a Management School. Our Teacher Education
Program was recently authorized to award the Master of Education degree,
and plans are underway for the development of a Doctor of Education program.
And future plans include restarting the school of architecture that was
established in 1989 but fell victim to budget cuts in 1992.
By 2010, it is expected that
professional (including M.D. and Pharm.D.) students will constitute 34
per cent of graduate enrollments at UCSD.
Collectively, our new and existing professional schools and programs will
fulfill the campus's responsibility to meet societal needs for rigorously
trained professionals. In all our professional programs, the campus intends
to maintain a strong research orientation and to bring together theorists,
experimentalists, and practitioners who both are concerned with the improvement
of professional practice and bring an awareness of unsolved problems to
bear on the search for new fundamental knowledge.
In order to achieve our enrollment
goals and attract high quality students, it will be necessary for us to
obtain the funding needed to provide attractive financial support packages
to our graduate students.
This is especially true in our Ph.D. programs, where we face keen competition
for the best applicants. Given that we can expect our faculty to continue
to be successful in attracting extramural funding, we should be able to
realize significant growth in the number of research assistantships in
many fields. Also, the anticipated undergraduate enrollment growth will
generate proportionate growth in the number of teaching assistantships.
Our biggest challenge will be to obtain sufficient funding for fellowships,
which are an essential component of competitive support packages. Fellowship
support is important in all disciplines, particularly in the first year
in all fields and in the dissertation years in the humanities and social
sciences where extramurally-funded research assistantships are not so
readily available. For this reason, fund-raising for graduate student
fellowships will be a high priority for future development efforts.
As we grow, it is important
that our graduate programs be accessible to students from all groups in
our richly diverse society. Consistent with
Proposition 209, which prohibits providing preferences on the basis of
race, ethnicity, national origin, or gender, UCSD has expanded its outreach
efforts to ensure that students from underrepresented groups understand
the benefits they can receive from advanced training and are aware of
the opportunities open to them on the campus. At the same time, we as
a campus need to be sure that we maintain a learning environment in which
students from diverse backgrounds are comfortable, feel welcome, and can
flourish academically.
Growth in graduate enrollment
is critical to addressing the need of
California and the nation for people with advanced training, to preserving
the intellectual climate appropriate for a research university, and to
taking advantage of the important role that graduate students play in
our teaching and research programs. UCSD has had extraordinary success
in its short history and is internationally recognized as a major research
institution with outstanding graduate programs. The synergistic relationship
between graduate education and research will continue to be key to the
continued excellence of the campus.
Richard Attiyeh
Vice Chancellor for Research
Dean of Graduate Studies
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