Graduate students and UA administrators are looking to disperse $1 million in tuition waivers next year to improve retention of UA graduate teaching assistants, who are paid less than their peers nationally.

The Arizona Board of Regents freed up $1 million last semester that was previously unused by the Graduate College because of old restrictions.

Waivers used to be designated for out-of-state or in-state graduate students, but the regents decided to stop dividing up waivers based on residency, so now UA can now award more tuition waivers to in-state graduates.

Historically, there were not enough in-state waivers and too many out-of-state waivers, so the unused out-of-state waivers went to undergraduate students, said Gary Pivo, dean of the Graduate College.

Pivo is working with the Graduate Professional and Student Council to determine whether the Office of Admissions and New Student Enrollment can afford to give up the $1 million in waivers that has been traditionally routed to undergraduate students and, if so, to find the best way the Graduate College could put the money to use.

The waivers might be used to increase the amount of money paid back to graduate teaching assistants after they pay tuition ÷ the tuition remission ÷ from 25 percent to 40 percent or more, to help recruit top scholars from other universities, to help reduce drop-out rates in the graduate college by bolstering academic advising, or to increase the number of students in programs that have a need in the workforce, such as nursing, Pivo said.

UA sees a dropout rate of 18 percent in master's students and 30 percent in doctoral students, Pivo said.

Full time graduate teaching assistants got a $725 raise, along with all state employees on July 1, bringing a typical full-time graduate teaching assistant's salary to $14,830.50.

Most full-time graduate teaching assistants get $648 of their $2,594 tuition returned to them in their paychecks.

The Graduate College is studying the attrition rates and looking for ways to reduce the number of students enrolling but not graduating.

Pete Morris, president of the Graduate and Professional Student Council, said he wants $300,000 to $400,000 of the $1 million to go to giving in-state graduate teaching assistants a bigger tuition remission.

Tuition remission for in-state graduate teaching assistants should be raised 25 to 30 percent, and "we're hoping to push that number up," he said.

"Part of the (million dollars) would go to solving the problem of attrition in graduate students," Morris said. "We want to concentrate on keeping graduate students here and paying them more," he said.

Despite the raise graduate teaching assistants got this year as public employees, their situation in relation to graduate teaching assistants at other universities is worsening.

UA had dropped from the 54th percentile to the 23rd percentile in net stipends for graduate teaching assistants compared to other research-intensive universities around the nation, according to the Association of American Universities.

AAU based its figures on the amount of money graduate teaching assistants students took home after paying their tuition, but the numbers the association used when assessing UA were old, Pivo said.

Now that teaching assistants are making nearly $1,500 more, Pivo said he expects UA's ranking to move up.

"If you factor in tuition remission, my guess is we're around the 38th percentile," he said.

"I want to see the university raising back up into the 50th percentile," Morris said.

Graduate students drop out for a number of reasons, ranging from poor academic advising to changing interests to financial strain.

Morris said that at most colleges, being a graduate teaching assistant is "an assistor," helping keep students in school by supplementing their education with a paycheck.

However, preliminary statistics in a Graduate College study show that being a graduate teaching assistant has no effect on whether a graduate student decides to leave UA, Pivo said.

Pivo said the graduate college has been working to alleviate workload problems by hiring more GTAs, but he added that the college still has a long way to go.

Kosgya Pichugin is familiar with the financial strains of being a graduate teaching assistant.

Pichugin, a chemistry graduate student, said he made $820 a month last year as a graduate teaching assistant.

He often finds it difficult to scrape enough money together at the start of each semester to buy all the textbooks he needs.

But Pichugin said he wasn't sure that giving graduate teaching assistants a raise would be enough to improve their morale.

"It would be difficult to tell, but I think everyone would like a better salary," he said.