Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) Jeremy R. Knowles has announced significant improvements in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences' (GSAS) financial aid program to help effect the recommendations of a faculty committee. The Dean has pledged the income from approximately $125 million in FAS endowment funds (roughly $5.7 million per year) to be phased in initially over three years and to become a permanent part of the financial aid budget.

"The new funds will allow us to improve the quality of our offers and will provide our graduate students with greater support and stability as they pursue their studies," Knowles said.

GSAS Dean Christoph Wolff outlined the plan in a memo late last year to department chairs, directors of graduate studies, and administrators. "We do this with the benefit of a number of years of careful study by the Graduate School," Wolff wrote, adding that the goal over the next two years is to establish a system of cohort-based funding. He said such a system will "help departments stabilize the size of their graduate programs, make their resources more predictable, and allow them to make competitive offers to the best prospective students."

Knowles convened the Faculty Committee on Graduate Student Financial Support, chaired by Professor of Anthropology and Associate FAS Dean Peter Ellison, in 1997. The "Ellison Report," issued last spring, included several recommendations adopted in Knowles's plan.

The committee stressed the symbiotic relationship between faculty and students. "The health and vitality of Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences depend on attracting and sustaining the very best professors and the very best students. An erosion of quality in either of these areas, one must assume, would be quickly followed by erosion of quality in the other," said the report. "The unsurpassed quality of our undergraduate student body, attracted by the resources and prestige of the institution and its faculty, depends on a level of financial support that makes need- blind admissions a realizable policy. Sustaining the quality of our graduate school student body . . . requires a level of financial support necessary for competitive offers to the best prospective students each year. While Harvard's academic resources and the quality of the faculty continue to attract large numbers of applicants to our graduate programs, and while our admission yields remain high, competition for the best prospective students is steadily increasing."

Under previous GSAS policy, departments receive a set amount of aid funds each year, and admitted students receive two- year financial aid offers from departments. The new plan allows for aid packages that follow individual students for up to five years. In addition to helping departments recruit top students, this system makes admissions planning easier. "[It eliminates] the need for departments to recalculate the financial aid commitments to continuing students in order to determine the funds available for the incoming class," Wolff said.

The $5.7 million in endowment interest earmarked by Knowles has been allocated in three increments: $0.7 million this year, $2 million more in 1999-2000, and a further $3 million in 2000-2001. This additional funding will ultimately result in a 25 percent increase in the Graduate School's financial aid budget.

"In accordance with the faculty committee's recommendations," Wolff said, "GSAS will address, in the first year, primarily the needs of the Humanities and Social Science departments." After that, he said, "we will also turn our attention to a review of appropriate funding for the natural sciences and interfaculty programs."