Graduate studies for the dependent children of faculty and staff will no longer be covered by USC’s Tuition Assistance Benefits (TAB) program, the university announced Tuesday afternoon in an email to employees.
The university also announced cuts to other previous benefits: It will no longer cover the costs of graduate certificates that faculty and staff pursue. Their partners and spouses will only receive tuition-assistance to cover one-quarter of their tuition, as opposed to the half-tuition coverage before the cut. The changes will take effect in summer 2025.
The age for dependent maximum for dependent children will also be lowered from 35 to 26 years old. The email said that this adjustment is consistent with the university’s health plan coverage.
There will be no changes for faculty and staff already enrolled in the TAB program.
Reports circulated last Friday that USC was planning to cut benefits offered to its employees through TAB, as first reported by Morning, Trojan. At the time, the cuts had not been officially announced. That didn’t stop faculty from voicing their concerns loudly and sometimes explicitly.
At the center of the frenzy was the claim that TAB’s “15-year letter,” which provided benefits to some employees who had worked at the university for 15 years or longer, would be on the chopping block. That benefit will remain in place, according to the email.
In her first in-person State of the University address in 2022, Carol Folt announced the “USC Competes” moonshot to increase the competitiveness of salaries and wages at the university. In Tuesday’s email, the university said that over the last decade, salaries “began to lag behind in the market.”
USC said it’s since raised $500 million in investments towards its moonshot goal to raise salaries by fall 2027, and in fact it had “exceeded [its] targets by more than one year.”
Still, the university said it needed to “control benefit costs” in order to make investments in salaries, according to the email.
According to a presentation shared at a Faculty Senate meeting on Friday, the cuts announced Tuesday would save the university about $8.7 million.
When asked about whether USC cut TAB benefits to keep up with Presidential Moonshot Initiative salaries, a university spokesperson referred Annenberg Media to the university email.