Binghamton University recently announced that it will be allocating an additional $600,000 to graduate student stipends beginning in Fall 2016.

Graduate students who serve as teaching assistants for professors already receive some compensation, but BU has ranked below the 50th percentile nationwide in stipend amounts offered to graduate students.

According to BU President Harvey Stenger, the increase in funds is part of the Road Map Plan and aims to increase graduate student enrollment. With the added funds, the University is looking to move into the 75th percentile nationwide.

“Of the 93 proposals submitted through the Road Map process, the stipend increase for new doctoral students was given top billing,” Stenger wrote in an email. “We need to remain competitive.”

However, the increase in stipends will only go towards incoming graduate students — current ones will receive the same amount of money that they do now. This has caused tension among some students, such as Julien Gago-Viel, a second-year graduate student studying chemistry. He said that he currently receives approximately $18,000 a year in stipends, and that next year’s incoming graduate students could receive up to $7,000 more.

“The experienced graduate students who will in most cases be training these new students will receive no pay increase,” Gago-Viel wrote in an email. “The typical scenario for current graduate students will be to perform at least the same responsibilities as new students, train these new students and receive as much as 30-40% less pay than the new students.”

Donald Nieman, BU’s provost, said that although they would ideally like to raise stipends for all graduate students, they don’t have the funds to do so. According to him, the increases will be implemented over the next four years, instead of immediately, and will total about $2.6 million overall.

“Incremental increases will not significantly improve our competitive position [right away],” Nieman wrote in an email. “Eventually, all Ph.D. students will receive higher amounts, but it will take us four years to get there.”

Psychology professor Christopher Bishop said that he is excited to see how this money will benefit the graduate school as a whole. However, he said that he would like to see more conversations about where this money is going.

“Whether this is unfair is subject to perception, however, the disparity is real,” Bishop wrote in an email. “Our department has been considering ways to distribute available resources, create more support for conference travel and use grant funds to supplement existing stipends when we are able. It will be important moving forward to think creatively and engage our graduate students in this process.”

Gago-Viel said that he has spoken with the Graduate Student Organization (GSO), and along with the Graduate Student Employees Union (GSEU), they will be drafting a letter in the hopes of convincing the administration to distribute the new stipends more evenly among all students. Both the GSO and GSEU declined to comment at this time, but Gago-Viel said that he is hopeful that more people will become aware of the issue.

“There is a consensus in several departments I have contacted that the current situation is highly unfair and needs to change,” Gago-Viel wrote.

Susan Strehle, a professor in the English department, said that in the end, it is important that BU is recruiting students to the graduate school, and that this increase in funds will help do that.

“The higher stipends will improve programs by enabling them to recruit the very best students in the applicant pool,” Strehle wrote in an email. “These students have sometimes attended other universities because their stipends are higher, but if the best students attend Binghamton, the programs themselves will improve.”