The Graduate Employees Union, or GEU, looks to alleviate those strains by requesting a flexible tuition waiver in its negotiations for a new contract with MSU. The GEU’s current contract expires May 15.

TAs and research assistants are allotted credit hours for the semesters in which they are active, earning nine credit hours for fall and spring semesters and four in summer. Those credits, however, are only available for the semester the TA is teaching and cannot be accumulated.

With a flexible tuition waiver, teaching and research assistants would be able to roll credits into the following semester.

The flexibility gained by the waiver would help TAs to better arrange their schedules, Rowley said.

“There were times when the courses I take just don’t add up to a full course load and it would be extremely helpful,” Rowley said.

The amount of work and time being a TA requires can vary from semester to semester, Rowley said. If she knew one semester would be lighter than the other, she would roll over those credits and use them when it would be easier.

Graduate School Dean Karen Klomparens said rolling over credits is problematic because of the uncertainties graduate students face.

“There’s no guarantee that people will have an assistantship next semester,” Klomparens said. “The assistantships go from term to term. Students can be appointed to an assistantship for a full year, but they have to be making good academic progress.”

A flexible tuition waiver is an arrangement that would greatly benefit TAs and research assistants, said Julia Smith-Heck, assistant staff representative for the GEU.

“We would like to see surplus credits allowed to be applied to the following semester,” Smith-Heck said.

“This (lack of roll over) is most problematic in summer when there are classes one wants to take that are five credits. It would be in everyone’s best interest if there was a little more flexibility in how those credits were distributed.”

Klomparens said a more fundamental hurdle to rolling credits over could be one of the university’s systems.

“The human resources system is outdated and can’t handle that level of detail,” Klomparens said.

Although the system is undergoing an overhaul and will be replaced with the Enterprise Business Information System, it won’t be completed until 2010, Klomparens said.