Thursday, March 28, 2024

AdvertiseDonateSubmit
NewsSportsArtsOpinionThe QuadPhotoVideoIllustrationsCartoonsGraphicsThe StackPRIMEEnterpriseInteractivesPodcastsBruinwalkClassifieds

New continuous enrollment rules forces graduate film students into a corner

By Daniel Mather

April 19, 2012 11:46 p.m.

Everyone has deadlines, but if Kimberly Townes, a graduate student in the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television directing and production program, misses hers, she’s going to be on the hook for an extra $7,758.63. The financial penalty comes from a new policy that prevents graduate students whose leave of absence has lapsed from paying a filing fee to submit their thesis.

The new policy, applied across all UCLA graduate schools, brings a distinctly Procrustean mindset to the film school. Because it tries to apply a policy designed for other graduate programs to the film school without taking the unique demands of filmmaking into account, it will make it much harder for film students to graduate in a timely fashion and punish them harshly if they don’t. Furthermore, it stands to raise, at most, a paltry sum for the school.

A film student normally takes a one- or two-year leave of absence in order to shoot his or her thesis film. The leave of absence is useful because it enables film students to raise funds and to cast and handle the logistics of making a movie without juggling classes at the same time, Townes said.

Since students must be enrolled in the quarter during which their degrees are awarded, they used to be able to pay a filing fee after they finished their thesis films in order to fulfill this requirement and get their degrees.

This fee could be paid at any time during the quarter, and if students decided their thesis project wasn’t up to scratch, they could go on leave again and pay the fee once more when they were ready to graduate.

Furthermore, School of Theater, Film and Television graduate students whose leave of absence lapsed could pay the filing fee and submit their thesis without having to re-apply to the school or pay enrollment fees. This was the School of Theater, Film and Television’s interpretation of the Graduate Council’s “continuous registration” policy in its “Standards and Procedures for Graduate Study at UCLA,” which states that “unless granted a formal leave of absence, graduate students are expected to register every term.”

Now, however, the Graduate Council has decided to enforce a new interpretation of the continuous registration policy across all the graduate schools through the UCLA Graduate Division, according to April de Stefano, director of Academic Services.

Under the new interpretation, the filing fee can only be paid once, and it can only be paid during the first two weeks of the quarter in which a student intends to graduate, according to an email sent to the School of Theater, Film and Television graduate students by student affairs officer Cheri Smith.

If it is not paid during that period, students have to re-enroll at the film school. Students would also need to re-apply. Although it seems unlikely the school would reject someone they had accepted before, there are no guarantees. The last students who will be allowed to pay the filing fee under the old rules are those who are planning to graduate this quarter and who are not on leave of absence, according to an email from Smith. The provision for this one-time filing fee was intended to smooth the transition to the new rules for the School of Theater, Film and Television graduate students, according to de Stefano.

But the recent changes have caused uncertainty and bewilderment among the film school’s graduate population.

“I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I’m really worried,” said Shirley Kim, currently in her second year of the film school’s directing and production program.

The new rule raises a host of questions for the film school’s graduate students. For example, while Townes said she plans to finish her degree in June, the grant she needs in order to fund the sound editing and color correction for her thesis project doesn’t pay out till July. If she chooses to pay the one-time filing fee, she said, she will have to beg, borrow and steal to fund the film so that she can have a chance of finishing by June. If she misses her deadline or chooses to wait, she will have to re-enroll.

“It’s like they think we can just shoot everything on a strict timetable, but directing doesn’t work like that,” Townes said, adding that fundraising and logistics could prolong the production process in unpredictable ways.

Since students don’t need a degree to get a filmmaking job, those in Townes’ position who can’t afford to re-enroll might simply take their portfolios and leave without graduating to work in the film industry, which would drive down the overall graduation rate.

The added price tag of a quarter’s tuition ““ $7,758.63 for in-state or $11,840.63 for out-of-state students ““ is a lot of money for a struggling graduate student, but it’s a drop in the bucket for UCLA. And most graduate students will avoid having to re-enroll ““ either by not graduating or by completing their leave of absence and paying the filing fee on schedule ““ so the new policy stands to raise, at most, piddling sums.

This, in fact, is the problem with the new rule. It costs students a lot more than it benefits the School of Theater, Film and Television, and UCLA as a whole. The old policy was a reasonable response to the unpredictable nature of filmmaking; the new policy makes life harder without benefiting anyone.

The new policy has the potential to raise, at best, a paltry amount, and to stop or delay students from graduating. The only reason to enforce this policy is for its own sake ““ that is, to enforce rules for the sake of rules, with nobody better off as a result. Since the new interpretation of the continuous enrollment policy solves no problems and in fact creates several new ones, the Graduate Council should return to a looser interpretation of the “Standards and Procedures for Graduate Study at UCLA.”

_Email Mather at [email protected]. Send general comments to [email protected] or tweet us @DBOpinion. _

Share this story:FacebookTwitterRedditEmail
Daniel Mather
COMMENTS
Featured Classifieds
More classifieds »
Related Posts