As a part of the report made by the USC Strategic Directives and Initiatives (SDI) Committee in January 2002, recommendations were made for restructuring graduate student assistantships.  One of the recommendations was to continue the practice of providing an out-of-state tuition waiver for all graduate assistants.  Another significant recommendation was to provide funds to offset a portion of the in-state tuition that each graduate assistant would pay.  The goal of these recommendations is to provide graduate assistant compensation (including salary and tuition) at levels competitive with peer institutions which would have the effect of improving the overall quality of the overall graduate student body at USC.  This improvement is one of the SDI Committee’s main objectives in moving the university toward the goal of becoming a nationally respected, comprehensive research institution within a period of five years.

In order to implement those recommendations, the Graduate School, the Budget Office, the Provost’s Office, and the USC Research Foundation have worked together to establish procedures for charging tuition for all graduate assistants.  As one of the primary methods to increase the graduate assistant compensation to competitive levels, payment of tuition costs will be sought from all external sources of funding for graduate assistants.

To assist with the implementation process, SAM has developed resources for use by departments in requesting tuition for graduate assistants from external sponsors. 

The SAM procedures for tuition for externally-sponsored graduate assistants are available at https://sam.research.sc.edu/pdf/tuitionproc.pdf .  

A Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) page for questions relating to the tuition issue on sponsored projects is available at https://sam.research.sc.edu/pdf/tuitionfaq.pdf .