In previous years, Iowa State’s policy was to provide all doctoral graduate students on fellowship with half of their tuition. The university would clear up additional funds if needed in the instance of an enrollment increase.

As a consequence of the succession of budget cuts over the past three years, the President’s Office — who supplies these funds — has canceled the policy, said Research Administration Provost James Bloedel.

The university will now allot a fixed budget for graduate tuition scholarships, Bloedel said.

Funds will be distributed across the programs based on last year’s enrollment, he said. If the number of graduate students had stayed the same, the departments would have enough money to cover the scholarships.

Consequently, the number of graduate students has increased and the departments now have insufficient funds to cover all of the students on fellowships, Bloedel said.

“This year Iowa State did a very aggressive job of recruiting,” Bloedel said. “As a consequence, a lot [of graduate students] wanted to go to Iowa State.”

The downside for graduate programs that wish to continue providing half of the fellowship students’ tuition is they will have to make up the difference on their own, he said.

The heads of the graduate programs, along with the chairpersons and deans, may now consider generating further criteria for recipients of the scholarships, Bloedel said.

Through reallocations, the Graduate College has covered the funding increase on minority students with fellowships from the graduate college, he said.

Michael Whiteford, dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Science, said his college is in the process of discussing the matter.

Whiteford said he wishes Iowa State could have the ability to offer packages to graduate students similar to its peer institutions.

“Many of the schools we compare ourselves to offer full scholarship,” he said. “The fact that ISU has not done that in the past has put us at a disadvantage with peer institutions that do offer similar graduate programs.”