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Harvard’s deep cuts to Ph.D. admissions are on track to leave undergraduate courses short of teaching fellows within two years, a looming squeeze already pushing departments to prepare contingency plans.

For now, the impact is delayed: G1 and G2 students do not teach, giving Harvard a brief buffer before the much smaller incoming cohort reaches the teaching-heavy G3 year. But TFs run sections, tutorials, and much of the grading across the humanities and social sciences. With fewer of them on the horizon, departments are being forced into early planning.

Some faculty expect to shoulder the burden themselves.

Philosophy professor Edward J. Hall — who leads undergraduate studies for the department — said a possibility is that “faculty will need to start teaching sections.”

“I think faculty are going to have to step up and just increase the amount of teaching they do,” he said, calling the situation “serious and desperate.”

Hall added that he has been told that the department can admit only four graduate students over the next two years — down from the 12 it typically enrolls every two years — and that all four slots will likely be concentrated in the first year.

From there, he said, the department has little flexibility. It remains a “non-negotiable” that TFs be trained in philosophy, ruling out borrowing students from other units at Harvard. But, he said, the department is considering turning to graduate students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The planning comes after the Faculty of Arts and Sciences announced it would slash Ph.D. admissions by 60 percent in the Arts and Humanities division and by 50 to 70 percent in the Social Sciences division as part of an effort to close an approximately $350 million budget deficit.

The Economics department is preparing to cast its net wide.

Senior lecturer Jeffrey A. Miron, who serves as the director of undergraduate studies in Economics, said the department “will end up needing to hire a somewhat broader group of people” to teach tutorials. That could include economists at the Boston Federal Reserve and graduate students at other schools in Boston — pools the department has tapped before, Miron said.

Some courses may lean on undergraduate course assistants when grading is “objective and clear,” he added, though advanced research and theory classes will continue to require graduate-level expertise.

Miron also said that hybrid staffing could become common, suggesting that a course that once hired ten graduate students could now rely on two graduate students and eight CAs.

Dean of Undergraduate Education Amanda Claybaugh acknowledged the uncertainty in a statement, writing that “there are a lot of things we don’t know yet.” Still, she added, “our students came here for a great education, and we’ll make sure they get it.”

But she declined to comment on the contingency measures faculty are considering or specify ones administrators are weighing.

That uncertainty is already rippling outward: programs defined by intimate, seminar-style teaching are also bracing for changes in course sizes and offerings.

Angela S. Allan, the associate director of studies in History and Literature, wrote in a statement that the program is still determining how many seminars it can offer.

“While we are thinking about how to best ensure coverage with a smaller Tutorial Board, preserving the close-knit nature of the Hist & Lit tutorial experience is a top priority for us,” she wrote.

In Philosophy, Hall said course caps would be a likely course of action even if it comes at a “serious cost.”

“We need to put caps on courses that formerly didn’t have them, or put lower caps on courses that formerly had higher caps,” he said.

But he warned that if many departments adopt similar measures, “students will have much worse experiences.”

—Staff writer Victoria D. Rengel can be reached at victoria.rengel@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @VictoriaRengel_.