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The Faculty of Arts and Sciences slashed the number of Ph.D. student admissions slots for the Science division by more than 75 percent and for the Arts & Humanities division by about 60 percent for the next two years.
The scale of reductions in the Social Science division was not immediately clear, though several departments in the division experienced decreases over the coming two years ranging from 50 percent to 70 percent.
The reductions — detailed by five faculty members and in emails obtained by The Crimson — stipulate smaller Ph.D. admissions quotas across dozens of departments. Departments were allowed to choose how they would allocate their limited slots across the next two years.
The official deadline for departments to inform the FAS how they want to allocate their admissions spots is Friday, according to an FAS spokesperson. Final allocations could change over the next week, but some departments are already preparing for drastic decreases in their Ph.D. student numbers.
Departments that would only have one new Ph.D. seat after accounting for the percentage reductions will not be allowed to admit any students, according to a faculty member with knowledge of the matter, who added that there might be some narrow exceptions.
The German department is currently projected to lose all its Ph.D. student seats, according to a faculty member familiar with the matter. The History department will be admitting five students each year for the next two years, down from 13 admitted students last year, according to two professors in the department.
The Sociology department has opted to enroll six new Ph.D. students for the 2026-27 academic year, but forfeit its slots for the following year, according to an email from the department’s chair.
The Organismic and Evolutionary Biology department will shrink its class size by roughly 75 percent to three new Ph.D. students, according to two professors. Molecular and Cellular Biology will reduce its figure to four new students, and Chemistry and Chemical Biology will go down to four or five admits, one of the professors added.
The reduction in admissions slots puts a figure to FAS Dean Hopi E. Hoekstra’s announcement in late September that the school would be admitting Ph.D. students at “significantly reduced levels.” Hoekstra cited uncertainty around research funding and an increase to the endowment tax — which could cost Harvard $300 million per year — as sources of financial pressure.
Hoekstra also wrote in her message that the FAS decided to continue admitting Ph.D. students only “after careful deliberation.” She noted that many peer institutions paused Ph.D. admissions altogether, suggesting the FAS may have considered a complete halt in line with its peers.
“To balance both our academic and fiscal responsibilities, cohort sizes will be significantly reduced over the next two years as we evaluate the future model for Ph.D. education in the FAS,” Hoekstra wrote.
The Ph.D. admissions slowdown began last spring as the Trump administration threw the status of Harvard’s federal funding into doubt. With on-and-off grant freezes and an endowment tax hike looming on the horizon, several Ph.D. programs slashed their planned admissions offers. The Graduate School of Arts and Sciences rejected all waitlisted Ph.D. student applicants last spring.
The FAS has instituted a hiring freeze for full-time staff, stated it would keep a flat budget for next fiscal year, and stopped work on all “non-essential capital projects and spending.”
Harvard’s financial outlook has significantly improved in the weeks since early September, when a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to restore billions of dollars in federal funding to the University. Though the White House vowed to appeal the decision, funds have been slowly but surely rolling into University affiliates’ coffers since.
But Harvard’s budget troubles are not over. The University reported last week an operating loss of $113 million in its fiscal year 2025 financial report, which reflects the fiscal year through June. Harvard pointed to “political and economic disruption,” including the Trump administration’s freezes on its federal funds, as a cause of its first budget deficit since 2020.
Some schools have relaxed cost-cutting measures since the favorable ruling in early September. The Harvard School of Public Health revised recent guidelines on funding, including by raising the limit researchers can pull from their federal grants. But Harvard Medical School Dean George Q. Daley ’82 told the school’s affiliates last month that he had been instructed to cut research enterprise funding by at least 20 percent by the end of the fiscal year.
—Staff writer William C. Mao can be reached at william.mao@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @williamcmao.
—Staff writer Veronica H. Paulus can be reached at veronica.paulus@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @VeronicaHPaulus.
