Editorial: Funding for the summer

Currently, the vast majority of deadlines for submitting applications range from January to April. Already, several such deadlines have passed, including Feb. 1 for East Asian Studies and March 4 for Classics, for example; others are swiftly approaching. Unfortunately, this stretch overlaps with — and indeed, frequently precedes — the actual search for a summer occupation. Many students do not have a real sense of their plans by February or March, rendering them almost assuredly unable to make use of summer funding. Even for students who have begun the summer search early and have submitted applications to internships or summer programs, the early deadlines for funding requests often come before students find out whether they have been accepted. Although the applications generally provide for this uncertainty, students are sometimes forced to submit, as a safety net, multiple funding applications to ensure they will receive funding for whichever program actually admits them. Moreover, the applications for funding ask students to provide a detailed breakdown of the costs they will incur — information that is often unavailable until after they’ve been accepted.

Merely pushing deadlines to later in the semester, however, carries its own set of difficulties. Students often make decisions about their summer plans based on the funding they receive, so it would be problematic if funding awards were not released until after students have already committed to a particular program or internship. Due to the simple fact that each program sets its own schedule for admission, requiring all funding requests to be submitted by a single date — no matter what that date might be — will cause problems for many students submitting applications.

These problems could be mitigated, though, by adopting rolling deadlines for summer funding applications. Students could wait to submit an application until their summer plans became relatively clear, and they would find out about funding decisions early enough to take the award into consideration when making final decisions. Admittedly, it might be somewhat more challenging to evaluate applications before the entire pool has been submitted, and students who apply to opportunities that develop later might be at a disadvantage. But the administrators responsible for making funding decisions likely have sufficient experience with the typical quality of such applications so as to have little difficulty making decisions. Adopting rolling deadlines would enable students to better take advantage of the outstanding opportunities for summer funding that Princeton provides, and the Editorial Board urges departments and other sources of funding to make this change.