Graduate Stipend and Benefits Committee updates fiscal year 2025 baseline stipends
LEXINGTON, Ky. (May 1, 2024) — After reviewing data analyses and working closely with colleges and leadership across campus, the University of Kentucky's Graduate Stipend and Benefits Committee has updated baseline graduate stipends for fiscal year 2025.
Beginning in the fall semester of 2022, the University of Kentucky announced its commitment to further support graduate students through enhanced compensation and benefits.
In 2023, after much work and research, the Graduate Stipend and Benefits Committee provided updates to the Office of the Provost and other college leadership. The university then implemented baseline graduate stipends based upon these recommendations; colleges, graduate programs and other hiring departments had until Jan. 1, 2024, to raise any stipends that did not meet these baseline amounts.
Preliminary data showed that a majority of UK graduate programs already provided stipends on par with or higher than the average for their disciplines when compared to benchmark institutions.
The committee worked closely with colleges and departments, hiring departments across campus, Institutional Research, Analytics and Decision Support (IRADS), and other partners to ensure that fiscal year 2024 baseline amounts were met by Jan. 1, 2024.
The multi-year plan to implement baseline graduate stipends includes:
- Working with IRADS and colleges to regularly analyze current graduate stipends for all graduate programs at UK, as well as stipends provided to graduate students by non-academic units;
- Participating in the Oklahoma State University (OSU) Graduate Stipend Survey, which is an annual national survey with participants including 10 SEC schools in 2022-23;
- Establishing baseline stipends based on standardized data from the OSU Graduate Stipend Survey; and
- Reevaluating baseline stipends annually, using this standardized benchmark data.
“Supporting our graduate students is something we do not take lightly because they are so vital to our Graduate School mission,” said Padraic Kenney, dean of the UK Graduate School and associate provost for graduate and professional education. “We work closely with our partners across campus to ensure we invest in their futures, just as they invest in ours.”
You can find more information about graduate student funding here.
As the state’s flagship, land-grant institution, the University of Kentucky exists to advance the Commonwealth. We do that by preparing the next generation of leaders — placing students at the heart of everything we do — and transforming the lives of Kentuckians through education, research and creative work, service and health care. We pride ourselves on being a catalyst for breakthroughs and a force for healing, a place where ingenuity unfolds. It's all made possible by our people — visionaries, disruptors and pioneers — who make up 200 academic programs, a $476.5 million research and development enterprise and a world-class medical center, all on one campus.
In 2022, UK was ranked by Forbes as one of the “Best Employers for New Grads” and named a “Diversity Champion” by INSIGHT into Diversity, a testament to our commitment to advance Kentucky and create a community of belonging for everyone. While our mission looks different in many ways than it did in 1865, the vision of service to our Commonwealth and the world remains the same. We are the University for Kentucky.