Draft submitted by Graduate Programs Committee: Mark Hovey (chair), Jennifer Curran, Roger Grant, Cheryl Hagner, Ed Moran
Wesleyan has three fundamentally different kinds of graduate programs, and each program has very different enrollment goals.
On the one hand, Wesleyan has a masters and doctoral program in the sciences and music, where tuition for students is waived and students receive stipends. Because every student receives a stipend, the main goal here is not to overspend. There are 74 stipends in the sciences and 13 in music. In addition, scientists with active grants can support additional stipends through their grants. So what Wesleyan tries to do is to use all of the available stipends, including any grant funding, without going over budget. This certainly has its own challenges, mostly around matching complicated individual situations, such as student leaves for heatlh or other reasons, with the fixed stipend budget. There is currently a plan under development to provide some greater flexibility in stipend budgeting, beginning in 2022-23.
Related to this program is Wesleyan’s BA/MA program, where a limited number of Wesleyan undergraduates (at most 25) can stay a 5th year tuition-free and graduate with a Master of Arts degree if they successfully defend their thesis. Here too we do not really have an enrollment goal. This is more of an opportunity for Wesleyan students; if they take advantage of it, that is wonderful, but it is not a problem if fewer students enroll. In practice, there are more students interested in the BA/MA program than available slots. There are also issues with access to the BA/MA program, tuition is waived, but there are still room and board costs that the students must cover, generally with family assistance. We’ve gradually been moving in the direction of providing financial aid for the MA year of the BA/MA program, introducing a food benefit beginning in 2015-16, and trying to address individual hardships on a case-by-case basis. Thanks to a significant gift received in Fall 2021, we expect to have substantial financial aid available for BA/MA students beginning in 2022-23.
And, finally, there is Wesleyan’s Graduate Liberal Studies Program. This is more of an adult education program, where anyone in the community can take courses, usually one or two per semester, and gradually work towards a Masters of Liberal Studies or a Masters of Philosophy in Liberal Arts. Many teachers from surrounding schools take courses through GLSP, as do many Wesleyan employees (for whom tuition is waived). This program definitely has financial goals, in that it is supposed to pay for itself and return money to the university, but it does not exactly have enrollment goals. If a course is offered and does not receive enough enrollments to run, it is simply cancelled. GLSP enrollments have stayed relatively constant over the last 6 years. There was a drop due to the pandemic in Fall 2020, but we expect to see a gradual return to normal.
The Data First forms mash these three very different programs together, and so can give an impression of enrollment fluctuations that are not significant. There have also been data changes and programmatic changes. In 2015, we stopped including ABD-NOT graduate students in the enrollment count (these are students who have completed all of their graduate requirements except the thesis or dissertation and are not taking classes). This led to an apparent drop in enrollment that was not real. In 2021, we closed the ICPP graduate program, as discussed in Standard 4, leading to a small drop in enrollment.