US PhD admissions shrink as fears over Trump’s cuts take hold
Some doctoral programmes are admitting no students at all amid uncertainty about federal science funding.
By Alexandra Witze
Phoenix-Avery Sarían has been interested in astronomy ever since her mother bought her a telescope as a child. But the fourth-year university student faces a cosmic challenge in reaching the next stage of her academic career: enrolling in a PhD programme.
Preliminary survey data show that dozens of US graduate programmes in astronomy and physics are planning to admit smaller PhD cohorts than usual for the next academic year — or even no graduate students at all. To compensate, Sarían, who is studying astronomy at Ohio State University in Columbus, is applying to more graduate schools than she’d originally planned, perhaps as many as 20.
Sarían is far from alone in her predicament. Across scientific disciplines, US university departments are cutting the numbers of PhD candidates they plan to accept in the current application cycle, for students due to begin in 2026. Some plan to pause admissions altogether. Programmes “in even some of the most elite among elite institutions are taking this step out of an abundance of caution”, says Julie Posselt at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, who studies higher education. Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for instance, is significantly cutting PhD admissions across a swathe of departments ? and cutting admissions in at least one science department by roughly 75%, according to a 20 October story in the student newspaper The Crimson.
The cutbacks are being driven by several factors, including institutional decisions about which research fields to support. But the reductions are due in large part to the US political environment, researchers say. Since Donald Trump became president in January, his administration has frozen billions of dollars in research funding at targeted institutions, including Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, and Harvard; although some of this has been reinstated, large deficits and uncertainties remain. The administration has also proposed massive cuts in federal support for research infrastructure. Trump’s administration is now asking all US universities to support its priorities, which include a ban on diversity programmes, in exchange for better access to federal research monies.
Many researchers worry about the long-term effects of throttling the pipeline of trained scientists. “If this keeps up, it would be really devastating for the field, because this is where the next generation of experts comes from,” says Emily Levesque, an astronomer at the University of Washington in Seattle.
Nature asked the US Department of Education for comment, and received an automated reply saying the press office would not respond to queries until after the ongoing US government shutdown ends.
US PhD admissions shrink as fears over Trump’s cuts take hold
I get also that we’re in a profoundly anti-intellectual, culture hating period where the idea that history, literature, languages and social sciences matter has given way to chants of “STEM, STEM, STEM!” but note, for example, that biology is getting slashed and that most of the research cuts and freezes are in the hard sciences. This as China has overtaken the US in biotech and is poised to overtake in pharma.
I cannot wrap my mind around how stupid and foolish this all is. It’s not that American universities don’t need fixing. If I were in charge I’d probably force them to keep faculty and student numbers up and reduce administrative bloat by at least half in 2 years. I’d also force every university to restore control to the faculty senate, and make it so that if you aren’t a faculty member (and teaching plus either writing or researching) you cannot have any actual authority. There’s also a question of research cost padding, but the solution to that isn’t wholesale cuts at the exact moment when one is in peer competition with a challenger.
But this sort of insanity, of reducing or outright cutting the pipeline of future scholars and scientists is outright deranged and self destructive to a remarkable degree.
Ian Welsh – The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine |
