Removing Barriers to Graduate Student Success, Part 1: The Students We Lose in Summer

By: Dr. Deborah Tollefsen, Vice Provost & Dean of the UofM Graduate School

It was the summer of 1994. I was lying in a hammock with my husband—our first anniversary was that July—having the kind of conversation that every couple dreads: finances. Those conversations are difficult in any marriage, but ours felt especially precarious because we were both graduate students, fresh off the first year of a master’s program.

During the academic year, my husband worked as a note taker through the disability support office, but the work disappeared once classes ended for the summer. I had a graduate assistantship, but it covered only nine months, and tuition still came out of the stipend. Like many graduate students, we were discovering that “funded” and “financially stable” were not the same thing. The apartment we had rented that year was a tiny house behind a duplex advertised as a “dollhouse.” By spring, the plumbing had failed so badly that sewage backed up into the bathtub and spilled into the yard. We needed to move, but with no steady summer income, we packed up and headed back to New Hampshire to stay with my mother-in-law while we tried to regroup. So there we were in that hammock, making lists and doing math. Could we find summer jobs? Could we afford another apartment in the fall? How much debt could we realistically take on to make ends meet and still enroll full-time?

We had a safety net. Parents that would help us out. We were lucky. For many graduate students there is no safety net and the summer has a way of revealing every crack in the system. Financial instability becomes more visible. Housing insecurity surfaces. Students who rely on campus employment suddenly lose income. International students face additional employment restrictions. Students with families scramble for childcare. Students that are in programs that continue coursework through the summer juggle shifting family schedules. And the structures that hold students in place during the academic year—assistantships, campus jobs, regular contact with faculty, cohort relationships, even access to services and office staff—often disappear or weaken considerably between May and August.

Graduate students are often expected to remain continuously productive during the summer: writing theses, conducting research, preparing for comprehensive exams, revising articles, or moving closer to program milestones. Yet for many students summer is less a season of uninterrupted scholarship and more a season of survival logistics. It is easy for students to become disconnected during this period. A missed summer check-in can become a delayed thesis. A delayed thesis can become a student who quietly stops enrolling. Sometimes attrition does not begin with academic failure. Sometimes it begins with isolation, uncertainty, and the feeling that no one notices when a student disappears for a summer. That is why summer engagement matters. Advisor check-ins, graduate school outreach, writing groups, flexible professional development opportunities, emergency funding, and simple reminders that students still belong to an academic community can make an enormous difference.

At the University of Memphis, we initiated a summer dissertation completion grant to address some of the financial instability students experience in the summer. The grant assists doctoral students financially while they focus on finishing their dissertation during the summer months. We also collaborate with our colleagues in the university libraries to offer Dissertation/Thesis Writing Retreats during July to make sure the summer remains productive.

Summer may expose the vulnerabilities in graduate education, but it can also reveal where institutions have the opportunity to keep students connected, supported, and moving forward.

I'd love to hear from other colleagues with ideas on how to keep graduate students connected and supported during the summer months.

Published: May 2026