The Graduate School of Arts and Sciences posted a budget surplus of nearly $2 million in fiscal 2010, up from a budget deficit of $1.77 million in fiscal 2009, which can be attributed to an increase in the number of students admitted to master's programs and a decrease in the number of admitted Ph.D. candidates. In an interview with the Justice, Prof. Malcolm Watson (PSYCH) explained that master's students pay tuition but that Ph.D. students at Brandeis, like at most universities, receive tuition remission and a stipend from the University, which "costs the University a lot of money."

Watson said the decision to make changes to the number of admitted students was made during the worst of the financial crisis when the administration of the GSAS was worried about losing the school entirely. "The graduate program, for the most part, has always functioned in the red," said Watson, "but we couldn't sustain that."

The GSAS currently has 923 graduate students, according to Watson. "Out of that number, 529 are Ph.D. students and 394 are master's students, and we had a total of 355 students who matriculated this fall," said Watson. He continued to say that for the current academic year, there were 1,117 Ph.D. applications of which 16 percent were accepted (a total of 178 students) and there were 1,120 master's applicants of which 48 percent were accepted (a total of 537 students). "These were significant increases from previous years," said Watson.

Watson said that he expected the number of applicants to continue to rise and that while the school may accept slightly more applicants next year than it did for this academic year, he expects the numbers to "soon reach sort of steady state."

The increase in students has provided GSAS with challenges ranging from increased work needed to process all the applications to efforts to provide the appropriate and needed resources to the students. "The main thing is that the professors who mentor these students really don't get paid more to take on master's students, but they're willingly doing it," he said.

Watson said that while no one can determine admissions figures for upcoming years, the Curriculum and Academic Restructuring Steering committee and the Brandeis 2020 Committee set a decreased target number for Ph.D students in various departments for the 2008 to 2009 academic year, and those are still the numbers on which the GSAS is operating.

The International Business School reduced the number of students admitted this year, according to the Senior Associate Dean Trenery Dolbear. In an e-mail to the Justice, Dolbear wrote that while he was unable to provide the exact admissions rates from the previous academic year, the "number of new students this year is actually lower than last year."

Dolbear explained that while IBS was asked to contribute about $2 million to the budget, "this target hasn't changed by a substantial amount ... so we were not under pressure to push up acceptance rates to increase revenue."



-Alana Abramson contributed reporting.