Nov. 14, 2005
The Regents of the University of California
The Davis Faculty Association represents voluntary dues-paying members who serve on the faculty of the University of California Davis. Our membership is gravely concerned about the issue of non-resident tuition for foreign graduate students. As the Board of Regents is well aware, foreign students are currently required to pay significant tuition charges, in excess of the fees that are paid by resident graduate students, without the ability to gain residency.
The Davis campus instituted a policy wherein research grants that employ students as a graduate student researcher must pay the full non-resident tuition. This has created a situation where the cost to grants employing non-resident students has become excessive, to the point where it may be more attractive to employ a postdoctoral researcher, thus reducing both the research and employment opportunities for graduate students. Language departments which seek to employ native-speaking graduate students as instructors in basic language skills are also seriously impacted.
The training of foreign students, many of whom remain in the United States and in California in particular, and who form the basis of the next-generation of faculty for the University and entrepreneurs in start-ups and high tech businesses and industries, is essential. These students contribute to the vitality of our graduate programs, and they make significant contributions to the health of the California economy.
The DFA supports the efforts of the University to ameliorate this problem by freezing graduate non-resident fees for 2005-06 and eliminating fees for three years once students qualify for candidacy to the Ph.D. as a good first step. These proposals offer some relief to faculty researchers and academic departments but are still inadequate in solving this system-wide problem; non-resident graduate students (and their University sponsors) are still burdened with the prospect of enormous fees, and as a result, many simply do not come to California. We are not competing adequately with other institutions that recruit the top talent from overseas.
The membership of the Davis Faculty Association trusts that the Board will keep these issues in mind as it discusses the future of graduate education at the University.
Ian Kennedy, Chair
Davis Faculty Association
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