It doesn’t take a Ph.D. to understand that a smaller budget for a graduate school will hurt the school’s ranking, since it means a reduction in the money allocated for research, retention of faculty and recruitment of students.
This year at UNC, many graduate schools’ rankings plummeted, leading us to wonder if they are the proverbial canaries in the coal mine.
That is, does our graduate schools’ collective loss in prestige forewarn of a larger diminishment in prestige for the undergraduate branch of this university?
No one would deny that budget cuts have put many important programs in jeopardy. But the long-term implications of our anemic budget have gone largely unaddressed.
We hope UNC as a whole will fare better than many of our graduate schools have.
Nevertheless, our graduate schools’ recent declines in rankings should serve as a wake-up call to the legislators who have repeatedly voted to slash UNC’s budget in recent years.
And for students unconvinced that budget cuts have affected them, we urge them to consider the long-term value of their diploma.
The problem with the catch-all phrase “budget cuts” is that it obfuscates some of the very real and specific impacts these cuts have on students — even if they don’t realize it.
UNC’s long-term prestige is one of the most vulnerable of these areas. Though “prestige” may be open to many interpretations, there are some concrete ways to measure it: faculty retention, admissions rate, yield and rankings.
