Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

UNLV takes step toward ‘top tier’ status by boosting pay for assistants

Graduate assistant instructors at UNLV will be making a little more money from now on thanks to a $2 million infusion.

It’s the most significant increase in years, and finally puts the college on par with the national average. Not only that, administrators call it the first official step on the road toward making the university a “top tier” school.

“This is much better,” said Dr. Kathryn Korgan, dean of the UNLV graduate college. “We’re still at the cusp — there are certainly schools that pay more than this — but it was a significant boost.”

Starting this spring, doctoral graduate assistants' nine-month stipends will be equal to the national average for their discipline. That can be as low as $15,000 for most fine arts programs to higher than $20,000 in areas like criminal justice and nursing. The differences are mostly due to the demand for the positions in each program as well as how much money departments have to spend on wages.

Previously, most doctoral graduate assistants were locked into a flat stipend of $13,000.

Master's students, with the exception of those in fine arts programs, are not included in the raise, however. The increases were made possible after UNLV leaders funneled $2 million from the graduate college's existing budget into them, but there wasn’t enough to extend it to everyone. Master’s graduate assistants currently make around $10,000.

Around 960 graduate assistants work at UNLV, and about half are doctoral students. Performing such work as clerical duties, assisting professors with research and teaching entry level courses, graduate assistants are the lifeblood of many academic programs.

The low pay has placed UNLV at a distinct disadvantage when compared to other universities with similar programs but higher wages, Korgan said. Students naturally gravitate to schools where they can make more money during the course of their studies.

“It’s very important that we strategically grow our doctoral field,” she said. “The university mission is to become a ‘top tier’ institution, and one of the critical metrics is how many doctoral graduates we have every year.”

UNLV has aimed to place itself among the ranks of the most prestigious research universities since 2013, but so far progress has been slow. Part of the requirement is increasing the number of doctoral degrees awarded each year. The university graduates around 100 a year, but that needs to reach around 200 in order to be considered on the same level as elite schools like Princeton and Harvard.

The decision came after months of planning that involved a vast swath of the campus. Korgan and her staff scoured universities across the country for data on average graduate assistant wages while a duo of college committees banged out the details.

“It was a very broad, campus-wide effort to get where we landed,” Korgan said.

But it’s only the first step in beefing up the graduate college. Provided the college sees future budget increases, the next step is adding graduate assistant positions, funding those positions during the summer, covering a larger part of graduate’s tuition and fees and addressing the stagnant wages for master’s students.

Graduate assistants pursuing their masters have seen stagnant wages for a long time. And while the new round of raises won’t apply to them, they could be next.

“It’s really not a livable wage,” Korgan said. “It shows we are clearly not done with [addressing] GA pay.”

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