With its admissions cycle set to begin in earnest, Harvard’s biggest graduate school announced that it would increase its financial support for admitted applicants in an attempt to entice promising students to enroll.

The changes, which the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS) plans to implement for the 2008-09 academic year, will improve stipends for graduate students in the social sciences and humanities while making it possible for graduate programs in science and engineering divisions to admit larger Ph.D. classes.

During a three-year period of administrative flux under the tenure of three University presidents, GSAS’s financial support to humanities graduate students fell behind rival schools.

According to data compiled by GSAS Dean Theda R. Skocpol, Harvard offered a $19,700 stipend and two summers of support to incoming humanities students this year. The packages fell short of those offered at other universities, such as MIT, Stanford, and Princeton, which all provided at least $20,000 and four summers of financial support.

The funding shortfalls did not occur without consequences for recruitment.

“It’s definitely a good possibility that people don’t come here because they get better support in some of the rival schools,” Classics Chair John M. Duffy said.

The increased funding, announced Friday in an e-mail to the Faculty, will go toward subsidizing four summers of study for current and incoming graduate students in the humanities and social sciences. Stipends—given to graduate students to cover the costs of living and study—will be increased “much more than incrementally,” Skocpol said this weekend.

Skocpol, who will present the change at today’s meeting of the Faculty, said she viewed the increase in summer coverage as more significant than the slight stipend boost.

“You’re not going to turn Harvard down because of a thousand dollars difference in stipend levels,” Skocpol said.

“Of course we continue to be slightly haughty about the quality of our programs,” she later added. “We have really good programs, but you can’t eat over the summer on prestige—that’s the thing.”

According to Skocpol, the boost of funds to the sciences was necessary to allow FAS and the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences to increase the size of the incoming Ph.D. classes.

“We can’t build the sciences, we can’t build a whole new campus in Allston, we can’t create new areas of research, without graduate students,” Skocpol said.

The additional science funding, which will come from the Harvard University Science and Engineering Committee (HUSEC)—the body charged with overseeing University-wide science initiatives—will offset a recent downturn in national grant money.

Increased opportunities for Harvard backing in the early stages of graduate study could also alleviate the complications and inflexibility imposed by national grants. Currently, students relying on national grants for specialized areas of scientific study can find themselves at risk of losing their funding if they attempt to switch fields.

Kyle M. Brown, an organismic and evolutionary biology graduate student and the president of the GSAS Graduate Student Council, said he supported the move to increase freedom for exploration at the graduate level.

“People come into these sciences and they think they know what they want their field to be,” he said. “They think they have their departments picked out. And then you get into these labs, you start doing the work and realize this is not interesting for me.”

—Staff writer Christian B. Flow can be reached at cflow@fas.harvard.edu.