Budget cuts are drying up the flow of Department of Education funding for graduate student fellowships.
The effect is one more blow to the drive for diversity in higher education, according to higher education post-graduate experts.
"My view is that it just seems that federal higher education support for graduate students is dead," said Council of Graduate Studies scholar in residence Anne Pruitt.
After two years of steady decline in the amount of federal funding available for master's degree and doctoral students, there will be no new applications approved for ED graduate fellowships in fiscal 1996, according to ED assistant secretary David Longanecker.
"Our general strategy now is to focus our resources on areas of the most significant need," Longanecker told Black Issues In Higher Education as the Clinton administration's latest budget request was unveiled.
He was referring to department officials' decision to emphasize the continued funding of undergraduate aid, including the Pell Grants, TRIO programs and other federal student financial assistance programs.
As a result, key funding mechanisms for graduate programs are temporarily stalled, including the Patricia Roberts Harris and Jacob Javits fellowship programs.
"In a budget that's very tight, some otherwise important and very worthy programs end up taking short shrift," he said.
The remarks of the department's senior official for higher education came as the Clinton administration's fiscal 1997 budget request called for a total of $30 million for graduate fellowship programs -- a dramatic drop from last year's request of $112 million.
The impact of that decline is already evident at ED offices.
"We will not be making new awards for the Patricia Roberts Harris and for the graduate assistance in areas of national need [GANN] programs," says the recorded telephone greeting to callers at the ED office that handles those two programs.
In 1995, the ED requested $20.2 million -- and Congress appropriated $10.2 million -- for the Harris fellowship, which provides grants of as much as $23,000 a year for minority master's and doctoral candidates.
