Each winter, L&S completes an exercise to track long-term support guarantees extended to incoming graduate students. The exercise is completed via an online form. This process includes review and approval of departmental support guarantee offer letters, if the letters have been changed since they were last approved by L&S Admin.

For the 25-26 academic year, the online form was due Mon, Feb 24, 2025.

Support Guarantee Letter Templates 

For the 2025-2026 academic year, departments may:

• Use the letter that was approved by L&S during a previous exercise. Minor updates are expected, such as updating the salary to the new rates. The letter does not need to be submitted for review and approval before being sent out to prospective students. If you are unsure what letter was previously approved, please reach out to Lynne Prost (lprost@wisc.edu).
• Use the L&S template letter (available below). Make the adjustments noted in the template, such as including your department's standard appointment % and salary rate. The letter does not need to be submitted for review and approval before being sent out to prospective students.
• Create a new letter or significantly modify one that was previously approved. These letters will need to be submitted via the online form. You must wait for review and approval before sending out to prospective students. When writing your own letter, be sure to review the guidelines for support guarantee letters.

Template documents:

• New students: New Student Support Guarantee Template 2025-26

• Continuing students: Continuing Student Support Guarantee Template 2025-26

Support Guarantee Exercise

The online Support Guarantee Exercise Form was due Mon Feb 24, 2024. The form included the following questions:

Your Name
Your Department
Program (note: if your department houses more than one graduate degree program, please submit the form multiple times)
Typical length of support guarantees for this program
Typical level of support guaranteed for this program (for example, 50%)
Is there anything else typically offered in your guarantee? (Summer funding, scholarships, etc.)

Current year information (please provide each answer as a number only):
Number of offers made to incoming students for the 2024-2025 year
Number of offers accepted by incoming students for the 2024-2025 year

Offers planned for the coming year (2025-2026):
Number of new support offers you plan to make to incoming students
Approximate expected number of acceptances by incoming students

If your support guarantee plans or expectations differ from the past, please provide details:

Support Guarantee Letter Plans:
Select one:

• We will use a letter previously approved by L&S Admin, or we will use the provided template
• We plan to use a new or significantly modified letter
  • After selecting this option, you will be prompted to upload the letter for review and approval

L&S Contact

Questions about graduate Support Guarantee offers should be directed to Lynne Prost (lprost@wisc.edu), Assistant Dean for Graduate Student Academic Affairs.