PhD Excellence Initiative

The University at Buffalo launched the PhD Excellence Initiative in fall 2019 to enhance the education of the next generation of scholars and researchers.

UB is committed to recruiting the very best PhD students and providing them with transformative academic programs that prepare them for future success.

Nationally, in many disciplines, there is a concern that PhD programs take too long to complete and that too few students actually finish their programs. There is also concern that PhD programs are not preparing students well for the range of careers and professions they pursue both inside and outside the university. In addition, in order to enhance the diversity of researchers, scholars and university faculty around the nation, we need to ensure that the next generation of researchers and scholars come from diverse socio-economic and cultural backgrounds—an issue that this campus-wide effort is focused on examining.

Given these national trends, UB is committed to continuing to work to ensure the excellence of our PhD recruitment, programs, culture and outcomes. UB’s goal is to significantly increase completion rates in our PhD programs and decrease time to degree, while significantly increasing the recruitment and retention of underrepresented minority PhD students.

In summer 2019, UB’s deans unanimously decided to establish a floor of $20,000 for academic-year stipends for all full-time, funded PhD students on 10-month academic TA/RA/GA appointments, starting in fall 2019. With this new floor, UB’s stipend levels are now among the top five of public Association of American Universities (AAU) institutions.

UB’s PhD Excellence Initiative will ensure that our academic programs are among the very best. As a major research institution and a member of the AAU, UB is leading the discussion about the future of the PhD and we are committed to ensuring that our PhD programs remain among the strongest in the world, and that our students graduate prepared to be successful.

At UB, we have long been committed to designing and continuously improving degree programs at all levels to ensure that they are meeting students’ needs and preparing them for future success. Examples of recent and ongoing university-wide activities to enhance PhD programs:

• Building a culturally and intellectually diverse and academically inclusive community of graduate students through the Institute for Strategic Enhancement of Educational Diversity (iSEED).
• Revising processes for the allocation of Presidential and Schomburg Fellowships to improve recruitment and reward academic units that engage in best practices in educating and mentoring underrepresented graduate students.
• Expanding mentorship and guidance beyond an individual’s department through the Network for Enriched Academic Relationships (NEAR), which can help students with a range of issues including systematic bias, marginalization and personal life circumstances.
• Preparing PhD students to effectively communicate their research to a wide audience through the Three Minute Thesis competition.
• Helping students complete their programs more quickly through dissertation resources.
• Helping early-stage PhD students navigate their PhD journey through the Pathway to the PhD—Preparing for Success micro-credential.
• Helping PhD students prepare for and find non-faculty careers through access to the Beyond the Professoriate platform.
• Raising minimum stipends to $23,690 and $30,797 for full-time, fully funded PhD students on 10-month and 12-month appointments, respectively, effective fall 2025.

The PhD Excellence Initiative builds on these efforts and focuses on enhancing PhD education at the program-level.

To ensure strong faculty input and to account for the diversity of PhD programs across the campus, academic deans will be working with their faculties to create unit-level plans based on program reviews. These plans will address, as is appropriate for each discipline, enhancing diversity and inclusion in PhD programs, ensuring a student-centered curriculum with professional development opportunities and teaching preparation, enhancing time to degree, degree completion rates and career outcomes, balancing teaching and scholarship, as appropriate, and ensuring the sustainability of competitive stipend levels over time.

At the same time, the Graduate School Executive Committee (GSEC) will review and recommend university-level policy and practices to improve time to degree and completion rates and to reinforce the role of teaching in PhD programs, as appropriate, and ensure that TAs receive appropriate teacher training. The GSEC serves as the principal body of the Graduate School charged with providing general oversight of all graduate degree programs to ensure their standards, academic integrity, and continuing relevance.  

The Graduate School will work with deans on a process to ensure that UB’s stipend floor remains competitive over time so that we will continue to recruit the best PhD students to the university.

Through the initiative, UB seeks to ensure that PhD programs prepare students for the specific opportunities and challenges they will encounter as 21^st-century scholars, researchers, teachers and professionals. It will result in exceptional, student-centered programs that are designed to align with the intended outcomes of the program, that enable students to complete their degrees in a timely manner, and that provide support to ensure student retention.

Students will benefit from being part of a more diverse and inclusive community of scholars, from enhanced programs that provide better educational and career outcomes, and potentially from a better balance of students’ teaching and scholarship duties within their respective PhD programs.

In the short-term, this initiative enables academic units to provide students with funding packages that are nationally competitive and will remain competitive over time. Beginning in October 2019, about 1,016 UB PhD stipends were increased to place UB in the top five of public Association of American Universities (AAU) institutions. Subsequent stipend minimum increases were implemented in fall 2023 and fall 2025 to remain competitive with AAU public research universities.

The PhD Excellence Initiative is funded through enrollment growth revenue, Academic Excellence Fee revenue and through unit funds resulting from the deans’ reprioritization of their respective budgets.

The provost provided bridge funds to allow stipends to be raised in the 2019-20 academic year. Annually thereafter, deans are invited to request further funding from the university through the Annual Resource Planning Process (ARPP), the annual budget process by which the university invests in strategic priorities. Investment decisions will be based on unit-level plans to achieve the central goals of this initiative.