Cultivating the Next Generation of Scholars
Catalysts of connections, discoveries
Graduate students are more like the junior members of a research firm than they are like undergraduates. Every day Cornell graduate students strive to extend the limits of today’s knowledge and performance. Their talent and intellectual curiosity challenge faculty, inspire research, invigorate undergraduate education, and drive scientific and scholarly debate.
Cornell's graduate students in the social sciences are among the best in the nation. In 2007, Cornell's graduate students tied Harvard's for the most Fulbright and Fulbright-Hays research awards—with more than half going to social scientists.
The Social Sciences Initiative seeks to endow a significant portion of graduate fellowships in order to attract and retain the most promising next generation of scholars and researchers.
Cornell faces an increasingly significant challenge in providing the financial support graduate students need. Some 90 percent of all Cornell doctoral students enrolled in the Graduate School rely on direct aid through the university. About 7 percent receive financial support through external fellowships. Only 3 percent of graduate students fund their own education. Until 2004, Cornell's stipends for graduate students ranked lowest in the Ivy League.
The need for graduate student support is even more pronounced in the social sciences, where stipends for research assistants are thousands of dollars less than those awarded to their counterparts in the biological and physical sciences. Ironically, it is in social sciences where graduate students represent the single most vital resource for advancing faculty research. Attracting outstanding graduate students strengthens Cornell's ability to recruit and retain top faculty who want to be assured of having the best research assistants and of being able to create a legacy of mentoring top young social scientists.