When graduate student employees start "acting up" and talking about unionizing, administrators have two immediate responses. They say the teaching or research assistants are students, not employees. And they warn that a union would hurt the mentoring relationship between faculty and graduate students.

The courts in jurisdictions across the land are throwing out the first argument, given evidence that universities increasingly are relying on graduate students to teach more than half the courses in some disciplines. As to the second charge, a new study shows that faculty don't see any conflict between collective bargaining and mentoring. In the first study of its kind, Gordon Hewitt, then a doctoral candidate at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, wrote his dissertation on the attitudes of senior faculty toward graduate student organizing. He surveyed and analyzed the responses of nearly 300 faculty at five institutions where graduate students had been represented by collective bargaining agents for at least four years.

In "Graduate Student Unionization: A Description of Faculty Attitudes and Beliefs," a paper presented at the Annual Forum of the Association for Institutional Research, Hewitt concluded that, on the whole, faculty attitudes were positive toward graduate student bargaining. More than 90 percent of faculty said that a graduate student union contract did not inhibit the faculty's ability to advise and instruct grad students.

Hewitt also sought comments from faculty, who expressed a range of pro-union, neutral and some anti-union sentiments. Faculty in the sciences were more negative about the appropriateness of unions. Pro-union faculty empathized with the plight of the students and, as one person noted, said unions helped regularize the hiring of graduate students and the systematizing of disciplinary procedures.

Copies of the survey are available from Hewitt, who is a research analyst at Tufts University. Contact him at Ghewitt@infornet.tufts.edu.

Wealthy students cash in on student aid

Most of us think that student aid exists primarily to help the neediest students go to college. That was the intent of the first Higher Education Act, passed in 1965, which created grant programs to serve the disadvantaged, and loan programs to help poor and middle-class Americans.

States and institutions have also contributed funds to the aid mix. Now, institutional financial aid offices use an almost universal formula to determine how much money to make available to students, depending on family resources and the cost of attending the particular institution. Then an aid package is put together for the student combining grants, scholarships, loans and earnings from the student's employment. The message colleges put out is that no student should be denied an education because of lack of resources.

How startling it is today to look at data collected by higher education policy analyst Thomas Mortenson and see how financial aid actually was being distributed in the 1990s. Because of policy changes in recent years, such as passage of the Middle Income Student Assistance Act in 1978, students from the poorest American families receive less aid to meet their college costs than students from middle- and even upper middle-income families. As a result, since 1990--while the U.S. economy has been booming--the rate of degree attainment has gone up for every income group in America except those earning less than $25,000. For this group, the bachelor's degree attainment rate has fallen from 6.9 percent in 1990 to 4.8 percent in 1997.

In the October 1999 issue of Postsecondary Education Opportunity (www.postsecondary.org), Mortenson analyzes data from two states--New Mexico and Colorado--and from the National Postsecondary Student Aid Study for 1996 to document the unmet and "overmet" financial need of undergraduate students. He shows that many aid recipients whose family income is no more than $40,000 have to go to college with a $3,000 shortfall. This is after receiving a package that includes family contribution, grants, loans, scholarships and student earnings.

On the other hand, the financial aid system "overmeets" the need of students from families earning above $60,000 per year. After factoring in all the sources of funds for these students, Mortenson shows that they end up with approximately $14,232 more than necessary to meet their financial need.

The University Professionals of Illinois/AFT has been tracking how public and private institutions in Illinois use state and institutional funds to serve a variety of goals. "What we see is that some of the elite schools are able to award not only federal but state money to fairly high middle-income kinds of students," says Ron Ettinger, UPI vice president. "We call this "creaming the top." Our question is, what is the definition of needy?"

The practice of institutions combining public aid dollars for reasons other than to broaden college access is documented in the national data where those with fewer needs have them met, but those with greater needs are left shortchanged. Even at public institutions, the data show, average institutional grants tend to be largest for students from families with incomes below $30,000 per year and for students from families with incomes of more than $70,000.

What UPI would like to see is balance, says Ettinger. "We are subsidizing private schools through the state monetary awards program at a time when" slots are open at public institutions. "We want the public policy people to look at the policies and reconsider them."