The new leave of absence policy, which is effective this academic year, has many negative consequences for graduate and professional students, especially Ph.D. students.
While I understand these new policies were put in place with the rationale of maintaining continuous enrollment and reducing time to degree, they actually just make things worse.
First, the total number of quarters of leave a student can take for any reason decreases from six to three – this puts students with medical issues or those who have more than one child while at UCLA (not that unlikely for students who are here for five or more years) in a difficult situation. Forcing students with serious medical problems to pay tuition for resources they are too sick to use or to withdraw (and hope they are readmitted later) if their illness lasts more than three quarters does nothing to help timely completion of a Ph.D.
Second, we can no longer take a leave of absence for research – instead, if we go out of state for research we can register in absentia and pay 15 percent fees. This 15 percent amounts to about a thousand dollars a year, which is a significant amount.
In absentia registration is only open to students with academic need to conduct research outside of California. Absurdly, students who are doing field research in California are in an even worse position, having to pay full fees even though they may in fact be further away from the campus than those in other states.
Additionally, there are some graduate programs where students taking a research leave to write their dissertations was considered part of the path to their degrees – if their department now can’t come up with the new funds to support these students, they are on the hook for more than ten thousand dollars a year.
I cannot think of a single way the change in the leave of absence policy made any graduate or professional student better off. My colleagues at the Graduate Students Association have already been trying to negotiate on the behalf of students with medical issues who are having trouble taking leave of absences.
The elimination of research leave is meant to keep graduate students at UCLA and interacting with faculty while writing their dissertations, but if the departmental funding is not there, it will lead to these students taking on much more outside work to make ends meet and to pay the extra tuition they now have to cover, which won’t shorten time to degree at all.
In absentia provides an incentive for students in these departments to leave the state to finish their dissertation – which limits contact with faculty much more than simply taking a leave of absence locally. The changes to the leave of absence policy are harmful to graduate students and do not seem to be well designed to achieve their goal of reducing time to degree.