our students to carry health insurance, but we do not provide these students sufficient stipend support to
purchase this insurance.
The woeful support that we offer our M.S. students is financially unsustainable first and foremost
for our students, but also for our program and our university. We are asking our students to take on critical
educational roles in our university, and we are not paying them enough to meet their basic costs of living.
We are also charging them almost 5 0% of their wages to be enrolled in our program. Although our
department has a long history of supporting graduate students with extramural grants, the current federal
and state funding climate is not conducive to remedying all of the fiscal deficiencies described above.
Further, it is inconsistent and unrealistic to expect the faculty to generate extramural support sufficient to
offset these shortfalls while simultaneously committing extensive time and effort to our undergraduate
teaching mission. These deficits are so profound that institutional realignment is necessary to ensure the
health and competitiveness of M.S. graduate programs at UNCW.
Figure 3. Comparison of UNCW M.S. graduate stipend (black bar) with M.S. stipends for biology
departments from other universities that compete with our department for graduate students.