Graduate Assistantship Policy – Number of Assistantships Per Information Sciences MSLIS Student

Approved by EC 2/2/2022; Effective for FY2023 Academic Year

History of University Library and iSchool relationship on Graduate Assistantships

The University Library has a history of hiring graduate assistants from the University’s School of Information Sciences. The Library has a set amount of funds to pay the iSchool for the tuition waivers and if the total waivers exceed that amount, the iSchool has agreed to cover the expense of the waivers. Starting with the 2021-2022 Fiscal Year, the two units have entered into an agreement with limits to the amount of funds that either are able to contribute.

Rationale for Change in Policy

The University of Illinois School of Information Science has been ranked number one in the nation for years. The number of graduate students in their programs remain high which means the demand on quality assistantships is equally high. By limiting the number of assistantships to one per student, it allows more students to have those hands-on opportunities which also speaks to the university’s desire to make sure programs and services are more inclusive.

Guiding Principle

● Optimize the use of tuition waivers and stipends to provide as many graduate assistantship opportunities as possible.
● For students to receive tuition waivers, they must receive an assistantship appointment of 25-67%.
● To ensure that students have a good pre-professional experience, we encourage units to plan strategically regarding the total number of hours that a student works per week. This may include providing a limited amount of supplementary graduate hourly work or developing shared assistantships across units.

Proposed Policy

Information Sciences MSLIS students may receive one tuition-waiving library pre-professional graduate assistantship appointment per student per year.

This policy does not preclude the possibility of multiple fractional appointments being proposed by one or more units in the regular allocation process.

Policy Oversight

The oversight of the process will go to Library HR and the School of Information Sciences to ensure that each candidate only accepts one tuition-waiver assistantship per academic year.