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Programs of Study
Programs of Study

Graduate education at the University of Michigan is a shared enterprise. Rackham Graduate School works together with faculty in the schools and colleges of the university to provide more than 180 graduate degree programs and to sustain a dynamic intellectual climate within which graduate students thrive.
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Admissions

Rackham Graduate School and individual graduate programs work as a team to manage the application review process. As an applicant, you will be interacting with both Rackham and your program office.
Funding
Funding

The University of Michigan provides many sources of financial assistance to help students meet educational and living expenses. Whether you are a prospective student, a current student, a master’s or doctoral student, we want to make sure you know about the funding available for your graduate education.
Navigating Your Degree
Navigating Your Degree

From your first registration through the final stages of the degree process, we’re here to help every step of the way.
Professional Development
Professional Development

Rackham offers opportunities, funding, and resources that prepare graduate students and postdoctoral fellows to access the wide range of careers available to them, and to pursue interdisciplinary learning and community building related to professional interests.
Student Experience
Student Experience

Resources to support the diverse backgrounds and experiences that compose our Rackham community.
About
About

Students are enrolled in Rackham degree programs (doctoral, master’s, dual degree, and certificate) taught and advised by faculty in graduate programs in nearly every school and college across the Ann Arbor campus. Rackham graduate programs are also located on the Dearborn and Flint campuses, where they are administered separately.

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Michigan Doctoral Experience Study (MDES)
Findings and Insights
The Hidden Cost: Emotional Labor, Mentoring, and Graduate Students’ Well-Being

The Hidden Cost: Emotional Labor, Mentoring, and Graduate Students’ Well-Being

April 2025 | American Educational Research Association Annual Meeting
Yiping Bai, Yiran Chen, John Gonzalez, Heeyun Kim

When examining graduate students’ well-being, the emotional and psychological burdens that students experience while navigating the mentor-mentee relationships are largely overlooked. Through the lens of emotional labor and utilizing the most recent data from a large-scale longitudinal study at a flagship Midwestern research university, this conference paper aims to better understand these emotional burdens. We find that doctoral students who are more likely to perform emotional labor have worse mental health, higher stress levels, lower sense of belonging, slower development in self-efficacy and disciplinary identity, and are more likely to leave their programs. We also find the performance of emotional labor is skewed towards underrepresented minoritized students and low-income students, exacerbating the existing disparities faced by various groups of underrepresented students.