GSAS Blues

How university-wide budget cuts are reshaping the Ph.D. admissions cycle.

By Anna Patchefsky

Illustration by Ben Fu

On January 17, 2025—in the middle of graduate admissions season—the Office of the Executive Vice President for Arts and Sciences emailed faculty to announce a 65% cut in Ph.D. admissions across all academic disciplines for the upcoming cycle. Then on January 30, citing faculty’s “passionate commitment to graduate education” at an uproarious meeting the day prior, they decreased the numbers slightly for the upcoming year. Carlos Alonso, Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Science, sent out individual emails to department heads with new numbers.

The mathematics department, which usually has a target of 11 incoming students, was told at first that they could have four, and then that they would have six or seven. The art history department, which also usually has 11 students, will have nine. The cuts are not as bad as the original 65% percent, nor as bad as the non-science field freeze in 2021, but they are shaping Columbia’s future. 

Even before Trump announced he was withholding $440 million in federal funding from Columbia, universities across the country reduced or halted Ph.D. hiring. On February 26, Stanford University announced a freeze on staff hiring and the University of Pennsylvania rescinded doctoral acceptances. 

The system of Ph.D. education in the United States, and at Columbia, has changed considerably in the past fifty years or so. Large unfunded cohorts competing for awards gave way to fully funded masters graduates. At one point, it was more common for Ph.D. students to drop out for a few years to waitress. Now Ph.D. students look more like post-docs: They have experience, awards, and usually, the money to have paid for advanced degrees. As Dhananjay Jagannathan, the Director of Graduate Studies for the Classical Studies Program, notes, prestige now looms even larger in each admissions cycle.

While the people who get a degree has changed, so has their economic relationship to the university. It was only in 2005 that all doctoral students were fully funded with a stipend. There has been an increased emphasis on research, an identifiable contempt for the humanities, and a steady decline of focus on undergraduate education even as class sizes have expanded. 

Columbia graduate student admissions information is barely public to prospective students. It takes a while to find the published comprehensive information on Columbia’s Ph.D. admissions statistics online. Individual departments can decide to publish their own statistics, but university-wide data is integrated on prospective applicant pages as an entirely separate web page. A simple search for “Columbia Ph.D. admissions statistics” yields circuitous returns. At most other universities, doctoral dashboards are readily available. A 2018 statement by the Association of American Universities emphasized the importance of graduate data transparency. 

To Dhananjay Jagannathan, the Director of Graduate Studies for the Classical Studies Program, part of the problem is that the announced changes seemed to hold faculty in contempt.

Decisions were announced without any faculty consultations. “There is no consideration for their opinions, even if they are willing to talk about the role of Ph.D. students in the current academic climate.”

In the humanities departments, Ph.D. students TA the majority of lecture courses. Among them, the history department is uniquely collegial, its doctorate students weighing in on appropriate assignments and general course direction. Columbia sells itself with the core curriculum, promising intimate classroom settings. Ph.D. students teach the majority of these courses, not tenured professors. “We are the foot soldiers of the university,” said Juliana Torres, a current doctoral student in the history department.

In certain departments, like psychology, computer science, or economics, undergraduate students serve as TAs. Their roles, however, are more limited in scope: Having completed the course before and received a high mark, they are prepared to hold office hours and grade students’ work. But a model like this would not work for humanities students and departments. While Torres understood that the current loss in Ph.D. students might not have an immediate effect because first-year graduate students do not typically teach, the gap in departmental institutional knowledge will eventually trickle down—leading incoming Ph.D. students to fill teaching slots and shoulder a larger responsibility. Without TA’s, professors may have to resort to using Masters students as graders and changing assignments to make grading a faster activity.

Jagannathan has already noticed that a steady decrease of graduate students over the past years has impacted undergraduate education. When he first started teaching at Columbia in the Spring of 2018, the philosophy department had 40 Ph.D. students; seven years later, the department has 30. As a result, Jagannathan assigns shorter essays, with fewer people to read and grade them.

Jagannathan also recognized that Columbia’s inconsistent and vague messaging left department heads with unclear directives. There are usually four students in the classical studies program, and while the original annulment only allowed for one, since then the target has moved to three students. The revised admissions target told Jagannathan that the program could put out two to three offers. If someone rejected a spot off the waitlist, the department could offer two new ones. The revised letter says that if only one applicant chooses not to attend then they could admit someone else. Did that mean he could admit three students? “I read the email eight times before I could figure it out,” said Jagannathan. 

In a February op-ed in the Spectator, the union criticized the administration, writing “Columbia has yet to issue transparent communication about the issue.” The university’s obfuscation over the Ph.D. emails is part of a broader pattern: Columbia trades in secrecy. When I went to meet with Professor Michael Thaddeus of the mathematics department, he had the Harvard alumni magazine flipped to the page breaking down the endowment’s budget. At Columbia, the budget is shown once a year, in a room in Low Library, and you have to register to see it. Information is doled out at specific moments, and only to the select few. As Thaddeus put it, “The secrecy surrounding the budget is more fit for an intelligence agency.” 

Columbia’s veil of secrecy—which Thaddues partially unmasked in a 2022 report that Columbia was submitting “inaccurate, dubious or highly misleading” statistics to the U.S. News and World Report—demarcates the line between perception and reality. Columbia upholds international reputation, even as its internal trust crumbles in on itself. As Thaddeus says, “Columbia wants to avoid reputational damage while damaging it themselves.”

Unlike STEM Ph.D.s, who receive grants as funding for their year-round lab work, humanities Ph.D.s typically do not have the same support; their funding barely covers the cost of summer research travel. The university knew that negotiations were forthcoming. They expected graduate students to demand being paid on a 12 month contract—a sum to cover the cost of research and living—per the unions internal pre-bargaining votes. 

Columbia’s administration provided three reasons for the Ph.D. cuts: academia’s fledgling job market, competition with peer institutions, and upcoming union contract negotiations. In citing the negotiations as reasons for the cuts, the administration implied that its lawyers would easily acquiesce to the union’s demands.

In reality, Columbia fired the president of the union, Grant Miner, on the eve of scheduled negotiations. Negotiations were delayed as a result. Then, the university and the union could not agree on a Zoom option that would allow Miner to participate in the bargaining process. As this article is going to print, no agreement has been reached.

Unlike Masters students, doctoral students are laborers, not scholars: They are paid to work. Torres wondered if, by cutting graduate students, the administration was selecting less radical voices into their cohorts, such as students that maybe would not sign a union card.  

Columbia, a large research university, relies on government funding for doctoral students to produce the knowledge vital to the United States intellectual predominance. To Dmitiri Basvov, the chair of the Department of Physics, graduate students are responsible for some of the most innovative scientific breakthroughs. Limiting the role of graduate students “is not just bad for the university, but bad for science in this country.”

To Thaddeus, the cuts were more budgetary. The cuts diverted money away from the students and into the elusive renovation of Uris Hall. The asbestos filled building is largely unused, and in the middle of campus with no street access; renovating it is expensive. However,  students and departments would benefit from the open space; it would be a necessary and long-promised relocation of the center of the undergraduate intellectual community. Ideally, Uris’s circular void would be repurposed, and Ph.D. admissions would not have to be sacrificed in the process. 

Jagannathan, speaking around the Columbia consensus concerning the endowment, helped to historicize the financial crisis Columbia seems to perpetually be in. Just in 2019, 8% of operating funds were clawed back from all departments because the Manhattanville project was too expensive. Columbia could dip into reserves, or even liquidate the endowment. As Jagnathan says, “It’s a rainy day fund, and it is certainly raining.”