By a vote of 14-2, the University’s Board of Visitors approved the creation of a permanent endowment for AccessUVa on Friday evening. This is excellent news for three reasons.
First and foremost, it promises $100 million in dedicated University funds over the next five years, all going to endowing financial aid for undergraduate students who need it. This is real money, and endowment for financial aid is some of the toughest to raise from private donors, making this decision particularly helpful to the University and its mission.
Second, the Board has called for the University to leverage these funds in order to raise additional endowment: they plan to use the University’s $100 million commitment to attract another $200 million from donors, done by matching their grants with the University’s contribution. What this means is that donors will have any gifts of $100,000 or more augmented by 50 percent, (with gifts over a million greeted with a 100 percent match), so that those contributing scholarship money will have extra “buying power” for their donation (for example: Mrs. Smith gives $500,000 in memory of her grandfather, but what will be forever named the “Smith Scholarship” will be endowed with $750,000, the extra $250,000 being earmarked from moneys from the University’s $100 million contribution). Aptly branded as the Bicentennial Scholars Fund, the fund will coincidentally coinciding with the University’s upcoming 200th anniversary in 2019.
Third and finally, the initiative marks a crucial strategic shift in the use of the University’s Strategic Investment Fund, or SIF, from where the Board has voted to draw the original $100 million. Rather than using the fund exclusively for the distribution of grants, they are using it to fund endowment, as well. This is smart, because endowment lasts forever, while grants, by design, expire — the funding must be renewed yearly. It is great news that the SIF will be used to create a permanent institution that will forever serve the University community: an endowed AccessUVa.
Nevertheless, there are reasons to agree with the two Board members who voted against the creation of this endowment. Indeed, while the majority was right to understand this to be a wise investment in an underfunded and yet core program of the University, one dissenter, Dr. L. D. Britt, was right in saying the SIF should be used to preserve the University’s “academic edge”; the other dissenter, Frank E. Genovese, was right that it should be dedicated to “big ideas that [will] move the University forward.”
In that spirit, here is another big idea that will indelibly augment the University’s academic edge: The Board should endow graduate student fellowships at the University. The commitment to graduate fellowships needn’t be as large as the one to AccessUVa. The entire endowment of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences stands only at $62 million (as of June 2016), for example. If the Board could invest roughly a third of what they have set aside for AccessUVa in graduate scholarships — $8 million a year for a total of $32 million over four years — they would create a resource almost 50 percent the size of the Graduate School’s current total endowment. At the same time, the SIF would still have $67 million a year to give out annually over the next four years, which remains an incredibly impressive sum.
Why endow graduate funding? First, it is purely merit aid. Graduate students are recruited for their talent; but that costs money. The University will be better positioned to compete with Harvard, Yale, Chicago and Berkeley if we can match dollar-for-dollar (or exceed) what they pay the rising intellectual stars they admit to their doctoral programs. Right now, we cannot do that. If the University had 50 percent more in resources to hand, we could.
Second and more importantly, graduate education is the lifeblood of the University’s research. Excellent doctoral students make the faculty better, because they bring fresh ideas and perspectives to the intellectual community. They work with professors on research projects, and often push faculty members to think differently. Simply put, nothing is better for a professor’s intellectual life and research program than a good graduate student.
Third, the University could leverage the additional endowment for graduate studies by wrapping it into funding proposals as matching funds. Grant-giving agencies are more likely to support programs that bring their own money to the table; this money could be used for just such a purpose: the new endowment could be housed in the Provost’s Office and deployed strategically. And departments could be asked to apply for the added funding, to offer top-up grants to the most promising students or to earmark fellowships in grant applications.
Finally, better graduate students will improve the undergraduate educational experience, because graduate students often teach undergraduates. Why not equip the University to hire the very best among them? If the Board saw fit, they could even tie some of the new graduate fellowships to required instructional programming at the University’s excellent Center for Teaching Excellence. Undergraduates would clearly benefit from the recruitment of better graduate students.
To sum up: the University is in good hands. With the establishing of a permanent endowment for AccessUVa, the Board is making judicious decisions to guide the University to a renewed and excellence. In the same spirit, isn’t it worth just 8 percent of just four years of the SIF budget to fundamentally and permanently transform postgraduate education at the University? Doing so would markedly improve our research and teaching programs. Let’s finish the job of endowing student aid by permanently funding graduate student merit scholarships with SIF funds.
John Nemec is an associate professor in the Religious Studies department.
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