ACUP reviews five-plan for grad students’ health insurance

At its meeting April 9, the Advisory Committee on University Planning (ACUP) reviewed a proposal that in the course of five years would reduce to zero the amount graduate students would have to pay for health insurance.

The proposal is particularly timely: The cost of graduate student health insurance will rise 27.23 percent next year, according to Michael Plater, associate dean of the Graduate School. The two-year contract recently signed by the University caps the second-year increase at 13 percent, he said.

In May, ACUP will submit to Interim President Blumstein its recommendations for spending about $750,000 in anticipated budget surplus. Executive Vice President and Provost Kathryn Spoehr and other ACUP members voiced strong support for putting some of the surplus toward graduate students’ health insurance costs in the coming year, and budgeting in the following four years to ultimately reduce graduate students’ out-of-pocket insurance expenses to zero. "With modest increases each year, we can do our graduate students a bit of good," Spoehr said.

Brown had to go to the market this year to negotiate a new contract that reflects the economic realities of health care. Judith Michalenka, vice president and University controller, was the University’s primary negotiator. "We have been dodging a bullet for years," she told ACUP members. Health insurance and health care costs have experienced double-digit increases for several years, she said. At the same time, for every dollar paid by Brown in premiums, the insurance carrier has paid $1.10 in claims. Brown was spared the true impact of the situation until it was time to renegotiate, she said.

"It’s a good policy" that covers "more than what other schools offer in the student health insurance world," Michalenka said.

Earlier in the meeting, Peder Estrup, dean of the Graduate School and research, recapped for ACUP a graduate student financial aid proposal originally presented last October. The plan would give each graduate student five years of support, with fellowships in the first and fifth years; summer stipends; and health insurance coverage. Full implementation of the five-year program would require a $4-million increase in the budget.

Brown’s current graduate student aid is inferior to its peers, Estrup said. In the last few months, Princeton, Yale and the University of Pennsylvania have announced significant improvements in their graduate student financial aid programs. "It is increasingly clear that we must implement a graduate student financial aid competitiveness program," he said.

ACUP also heard from University Librarian Merrily Taylor, who presented data comparing Brown to other universities in the Association of Research Libraries (ARL). "Fundamentally, through the 1990s we did not keep up with our peers and inflation," she said.

Among the Library’s priorities are filling gaps in its regional studies collections and increasing the number of serials, Taylor told ACUP.