Cornell will enhance its graduate programs by offering 80 new fellowships, primarily in the sciences, to bring its total number of fellowships in these areas to 100 in the 1998-99 academic year, President Hunter Rawlings announced today (Oct. 1).

"We are making a substantial institutional commitment to increase the number and quality of our doctoral students in the sciences and those areas of social sciences that have not had much fellowship support up until now," Rawlings said. "This new initiative will also improve our competitiveness in bringing the top graduate students in the country to Cornell."

Rawlings added that funding for the new fellowships will come primarily through redirecting institutional resources in the Graduate School, which will continue to maintain its current level of support for existing fellowships in the humanities and basic social sciences. No monies presently allocated to undergraduate resources will be used.

"Doctoral students have a crucial role in research conducted at the university and in undergraduate education," Rawlings said. "I want to ensure that Cornell continues to be able to compete nationally in attracting the best graduate students."

The new fellowships will be offered in the physical sciences, engineering, biological sciences, statutory college social sciences and endowed social sciences outside the Arts College, explained Walter Cohen, dean of the Graduate School. Details of the allocation of fellowships are still being developed.

About half of the fellowships will offer a stipend up to $19,000 per academic year, with others at $12,500 for the academic year, Cohen said. A number of two- and three-year fellowships will be available; however, during the first year that the new fellowships are offered, most will be one-year grants.

Additional efforts will be made to strengthen existing fellowships in the sciences, Cohen said. One such effort will be to add stipend increases to National Science Foundation fellowships and training grants.

"We want to provide certain kinds of cushions and safety guarantees and tell programs that if they run out of outside funding, the Graduate School will back them up," the dean said. "That way faculty can be more aggressive in the numbers of students they admit, without worrying that they will be suddenly without funds." Cohen described the Graduate School's role as similar to that of a bank that offers interest-free loans.

The guarantee of solid institutional support for science research programs is important in order to provide funding stability and confidence for faculty, Cohen emphasized.

"We're trying to take money out of the game of competing for graduate students," Cohen said. "We don't want to lose good students because of financial considerations. We don't want their consideration of the academic program and cultural resources that Cornell can offer to be lessened because they can get a higher stipend elsewhere."

Cohen praised Rawlings and Provost Don M. Randel for their support of the new graduate fellowship initiative, which they are backing up with "real dollars," he said. While funding for the stipends will come from Graduate School reserves that have been compiled during several years of planning to increase the number of fellowships, tuition money has also been committed from the endowed university budget.

"The president and provost have been quite generous in foregoing tuition revenues from the Graduate School," he said. "It represents their commitment to this university priority."

Cohen hopes that with this increased new level of encouragement and support from the university, faculty in the targeted graduate programs will be very aggressive in recruiting new students.

"I would rather award too many fellowships than too few," he stressed.