A Jan. 16 Star article gave a nice explanation of the Doctoral Dissertation Completion Awards that the Graduate School makes available to outstanding NIU graduate students completing their doctoral degrees. If I may correct one serious factual error in the article, however, it would provide an opportunity to emphasize that Northern Illinois University is a major center for graduate education.

There are at this university approximately “1,000 graduate assistants,” not “1,000 graduate students.” These graduate assistants serve as teaching assistants, research assistants, and staff assistants in a large number of academic and other departments. The fact is that there are 6,000 graduate students at NIU, about one-fourth of the total university student body. Among Illinois public institutions, this number is exceeded only by the University of Illinois, and this number is greater than the graduate school enrollments at many of the primary state universities across the country.

Jerrold Zar

NIU Graduate School Dean