Christopher Ramirez, outgoing president of GPSA, has asked the University to confront a problem he says hasn't been clearly defined.
"We don't report the same numbers about retention for graduate and professional students who start the graduate program, like how many of them complete and how long does it take them to complete," he said. "We don't know fully what the problem is because we don't even know the information."
Graduate retention rates are not kept on a University-wide basis like the statistics for undergraduates, said Charles Fleddermann, interim dean of graduate studies.
"Graduate education at all research universities is very decentralized," he said. "We don't do centralized recruiting or admissions, and basically individual departments really know about their retention in their programs, because graduate work is so focused on students working with individual faculty."
Graduate student Hakim Bellamy said the University should compile those numbers to develop plans to increase enrollment and make the University experience better for the students already enrolled.
"I think, on a larger scale, they shouldn't be solely responsible for doing their own retention or solely be responsible for doing their own recruitment," he said. "Each department has a certain amount of autonomy that I think makes it a better experience for the students, but at the same time, getting those large-scale numbers and being able to do those projections is super important."
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Graduate student Becky Ellis said not having this information is a big problem. Ellis said the University should keep track of graduate student retention because UNM needs that data to find out what makes students want to leave.
"Graduate turnover is going to be high no matter what," she said. "That's kind of the nature of the competition involved in being a graduate student, but we also need to know if there's internal, structural problems with the programs that are here on campus and that are not actually providing what should be top-level graduate students with the kind of facilities and resources that they need to complete a program and then go on to compete in the job market."
Fleddermann said a retention survey for graduate students could help the University create a better learning environment.
"If we were able to identify a problem that was leading students to leave the programs, or reasons why the students were unable to complete their degrees and were not being retained, we could identify the problems, (and) then we could start to solve them," he said. "If we don't know what the problem is, or if we don't know there even is a problem, obviously we can't do anything to solve it."
Ellis said the problem she sees in the History Department, where she works, is overburdened faculty, stretched thin between research and teaching classes.
"Overworked faculty has been a problem," she said. "People who just have so much on their plate that it's hard for (graduate students) to get individual attention, and we've lost quite a few faculty."
Ellis said graduate students enter their program expecting the best training for their careers, but they don't always get what they are looking for.
"We lost two medievalists, and it decimated the entire medieval program," she said. "The graduates with a master's degree who had planned to go on to a Ph.D. here had to go apply somewhere else."
Provost Suzanne Ortega said the University is considering retention and graduation programs for graduate and undergraduate students.
"We haven't done that much specifically on exit surveys, but we are doing a lot of work to get some programs in place for both graduates and undergraduates to make improvements in graduation rates," she said.
Ortega said her office is narrowing down the proposed programs, but a decision hasn't been made on which ones will be applied.
"I'm hoping that over the course of the next couple of months we really come to some closure on that and get the process in mid-July to begin implementing those proposed changes," she said.
Bellamy said surveys would be more effective if they were done regularly instead of once students are leaving.
Bellamy said that at his previous university, students were surveyed each year to find out what they liked or didn't like about their experience at the school. He said students were more inclined to give in-depth feedback because they were still involved at the institution.
