IU can provide grad students better benefits now or later. It's in the University's best interests to do it now.

It's not often that I make common cause with the Graduate Employees Organization. Don't get me wrong, there are folks in the GEO who I know and I quite like -- it's just that our ideological differences tend to lead us to disagree on things. However, regarding the University's short-changing of graduate student health and dental insurance, we find ourselves on the same page. Furthermore, recent statements made by officials of the Graduate and Professional Students Organization -- grad students' official voice with the administration -- indicate that the GPSO is on this very page as well. \nTake, for example, Benefits Committee Chairman John Scott's advocacy of a dental insurance plan, and Moderator Paul Rohwer's support for subsidies for grad students' dependents. In short, there seems to be a consensus building that IU is not doing enough to insure its graduate employees -- and the University administration would be wise to take note.\nIn Thursday's protest, the GEO called on the University's sense of social justice -- for instance, by highlighting the financial burden faced by students with families. In a March 22 staff editorial, the IDS appealed to the University's desire for excellence -- warning that IU might hurt its ability to attract the "best and the brightest" grad students if it does not offer a better benefits package. The nobler angels of IU's nature having thus already been taken -- I'll speak to the institution's less idealistic seraphim: the ones monitoring its pocketbook.\nAs the state of Indiana's flagship institution, IU-Bloomington faces some fundamental tensions. One lies in providing a quality education while remaining widely accessible to Hoosier students (meaning, among other things, pressure to restrain the growth of tuition). Another lies between pursuing high standards in teaching, while, simultaneously, pursuing high standards in research. Like many schools, IUB has sought to square this circle by employing graduate students. \nCheaper than faculty -- especially as much of our compensation comes in the form of scholarships (that is, foregone revenue for the University, rather than pay-outs) -- grad students are used to teach the high-enrollment, introductory-level courses and do the more menial aspects of research. This frees up faculty to undertake the more specialized, value-added activities, such as advanced research and special elective courses. To the undergrads reading this: If you find your tuition high and your classes large now -- imagine what things would be like without grad students.\nAnd yet, conditions outside the University are challenging IU's ability to attract grad students. For instance: the strength of the U.S. economy. An unemployment rate of 5.1 percent; a gross domestic product growth rate of 3.5 percent; an emphasis on information and service-based industries; and, according to consulting firm Challenger, Gray, & Christmas, the best job market for college grads since 2001 -- it all adds up to fierce private-sector competition for the very people who might consider graduate study. \nAnother is that fewer Americans are getting doctorates in the vital STEM fields (scientific, technical, engineering, and mathematics fields), making universities increasingly dependent on foreign graduate students -- and, yet, the supply of the latter might be reduced by tighter immigration laws and greater international competition (foreign graduate applications have only recently rebounded after being in decline since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks -- Financial Times, March 24). Meanwhile, high-enrollment disciplines, such as Business, are facing a critical shortage in doctoral faculty. Based on a 2002 report by the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business, the AACSB's BizEd Magazine reported "that the number of business doctoral degrees conferred in the U.S. during the second half of the 1990s declined considerably in comparison to those conferred in the first half" and "projected that the shortage would only worsen. In coming years, demand for management education will increase just as supply will be decreasing …" (January/February 2006). To state the obvious: as the scarcity of graduate students rises, so too does the scarcity of qualified faculty. \nIn short, IU is offering a lower-quality insurance package at the same time as market forces are conspiring to raise the premiums for\n qualified graduate students in many key areas.\nAnd while IU has strong graduate programs, these are not so high as to allow complacency regarding competition for graduate students. In the 2007 U.S. News & World Report Graduate School rankings, only education, sociology, history, criminology and several specializations of psychology were in the top 20 nationally (April 4). Then there's one of IUB's most enduring problems: the fact that Bloomington, while lovely, is far from the major metropolitan areas where many job and research opportunities lie. To take my own field (political science) as an example, Bloomington is an hour's commute (one way) from the center of Indiana politics -- much less the "corridors of power" for the national or international stage. And the lack of job \nopportunities can be a particular \nproblem for married grad students -- whose spouse might not want to leave his/her career ambitions \nbehind. Thus, the University is not only offering a lower benefits package \nunder conditions of tight competition -- it is also doing so when, in poker terms, its hand is not unbeatable.\nIU faces a choice, then: it can improve the benefits package now -- or it can wait. And if it waits, it will incur additional costs from scrambling to recruit graduates in short-fall areas, from paying more for scarcer faculty, from making high-value-added faculty undertake low-value-added work, from risking reducing the quality of its programs -- and, then, end up bowing to market conditions and having to pay for higher benefits, anyway. \nAt the moment, the University administration is looking at the short-term and thinking that they cannot afford to provide greater benefits to the grad student employees. But the fact is that, looking at the longer-term, they can't afford not to.