Five UC Davis doctoral programs, participating in a campus pilot project, will begin recruiting top student applicants this spring by promising them up to four years of financial support. Innovative "insurance" agreements between the dean of graduate studies and unit deans will enable the programs to borrow from their future fund allocations, if necessary, to make good on their offers. The multi-year packages will be offered to the most promising students in theatre and dance, philosophy, physics, chemical engineering and materials science, and nutrition. "We want to guarantee four years of support rather than guaranteeing the first year and making a promise for the other years," said Peter Rock, dean of the Division of Mathematical and Physical Sciences, who helped develop the pilot project. "We're hoping that this will increase the acceptance rate of the top students." The experiment is part of a comprehensive action plan issued last week by graduate studies Dean Cristina González for improving graduate education at UC Davis. An outgrowth of Chancellor Larry Vanderhoef's 1998 Fall Conference, the plan recommends a dozen steps to enhance graduate student recruitment, mentoring, curriculum and job placement. Among other recommendations in the action plan are: · Finding ways to fund more graduate fellowships, both for in-state and out-of-state students, as well as offering more nonresident tuition fellowships. González, in her plan, called nonresident tuition, which now is more than $10,000 per year, "perhaps the greatest challenge facing graduate education at the University of California today." Establishing more flexible doctoral programs and possibly offering more master's degrees and graduate certificates to meet changing societal needs. Developing campuswide guidelines and a list of "best practices" for graduate-student mentoring and creating awards to recognize the best mentors. Nearly 82 percent of 901 graduate students surveyed on campus last year said guidance on their dissertation was what they wanted most from their major professors; a total of 56 percent said they were satisfied with the help they received on their theses. Expanding internships and career assistance both for students who go into academia and for students who go into government, business and industry jobs. The action plan sent by Chancellor Vanderhoef to the campus community last week sets deadlines for developing more detailed proposals, depending on the topic, by this spring or next fall. "We're trying to be both ambitious and realistic and come up with recommendations that we are confident can be implemented," González said. Many of the steps, such as creating the multi-year support packages, are already in motion to help departments compete for some of the brightest graduate students. Hope to increase fellowships Four subcommittees of a campus Task Force on Graduate Student Support are working on ways to increase the number of graduate fellowships. One subcommittee on financial aid has been studying a system implemented at UCLA four years ago that directs more grant money to departments, rather than the graduate-student financial aid office. "It's been very successful," said Nancy Latta, UC Davis associate director of financial aid and subcommittee chair. "It puts the grants in the department where it's tied to academics and not just to need. So it leaves the financial aid office dealing strictly with loan money and work-study programs." Latta said the panel may look into other models as well. "The issue that we are most concerned with is how we actually get money into the hands of graduate students," she said. "We need to simplify the mechanism whereby students receive aid, because it's too labor-intensive for students as well as for university administration." While some of the actions involve shifting existing money, other recommendations will require finding new sources of money. One task force subcommitee is looking to increase the number of training grants and other extramural fellowships and create non-resident tuition fellowships. At the same time, a fund-raising subcommittee is working to increase endowments for such graduate-student support. Interdependent actions González said all the recommended actions are interdependent, but that strengthened recruitment and retention efforts are linchpins. "If we don't give the students financial support to begin with, we cannot do the other things," she said. "Without sufficient financial support, students cannot concentrate on their studies." Attracting the best graduate students to UC Davis is considered critical for enhancing the university's reputation and for recruiting and retaining top faculty members. UC Davis competes with many universities that can guarantee multi-year-support packages to graduate students. Some programs on campus already offer multi-year support packages, but others make financial commitments on a year-to-year or even quarter-to-quarter basis. Under the pilot project, the participating graduate programs will offer multi-year funding to the top 25 percent of student applicants. If more accept than are anticipated, the unit dean will loan the programs the money they need to cover their offers. González will guarantee at least a constant level of block-grant support to cover the four-year support package. In essence, she said, the programs would pay back any loans from their future fund allocations. Rock said programs participating in the pilot project represent a broad cross section of campus. "This is not one size fits all," he said. González said she hopes the pilot project will give programs the confidence they need to make multi-year offers and aggressively go after the top students. "We have been too conservative, too afraid to take risks. But without taking risks, we cannot compete."