It's a very difficult question.
Universities don't receive really all the support for housing or for offering what we call “living subsidies” to graduate students. In the current environment and in what we normally do, I would say that only about 10% of our students are funded externally by granting councils. Depending on the institution, it could be even lower, at anywhere between 1% and 16% of the students.
The larger body of our graduate student community would be supported internally by us in the institutions. We offer funding support in the form of teaching assistantships, research assistantships, graduate fellowships and university scholarships. All of those things would come from the university.
I have been in graduate education for the last 18 years. What I have been witnessing in the last few years—maybe three or four years—would be almost unparalleled to anything I have ever witnessed in my entire 18 years of graduate administration. It's a crisis situation for universities. As a graduate dean, I cannot really go to bed not thinking of those students who are struggling on a daily basis.
We do whatever we can internally to mobilize resources to support graduate students to make sure they get through this process, and that they get through this process quickly and painlessly, but unfortunately the whole situation is beyond our control. We don't have the resources to support graduate students the way we want.
If I could just go back to the issue of quotas, I tend to think that the quotas we are proposing would benefit all universities, not just a few, and every single university with a graduate population would receive a number of scholarships dedicated entirely to their own students. They should not lose the opportunity to support the graduate students who desperately need funding support for the amazing research activities they've undertaken.