Harvard’s slashing of PhD numbers is long overdue

Harvard University’s recent decision to slash its PhD admissions has sent shockwaves through academia – but largely not for the right reasons.

Departments in the arts and humanities will see their enrolment of doctoral candidates decrease by 60 per cent over the next two years, according to reports in October, with cuts in the social sciences estimated at between 50 and 70 per cent.

Initial plans to cut admissions in the sciences by 75 per cent, however, were reduced in November to 50 per cent. That reduction was due to faculty pressure and the reinstatement of much of the research funding that the Trump administration had cancelled earlier in the year for the institution’s alleged failures in responding to antisemitism. Other reasons cited for the cuts include pandemic-related losses, Trump-era visa disruptions and the forthcoming endowment tax.

None of these factors are positive in themselves. But while this may be a painful moment, the fact is that significant reductions on the scale of doctoral enrolment should have come much earlier – and not due to political and financial pressure but out of human decency.

At least in the English-speaking world, universities have been producing far more PhDs than the academic labour market can absorb for decades. The US now awards about 60,000 doctorates a year, but only a small fraction of those graduates secure tenure-track positions. In the humanities, the odds are close to one in 10. Still, departments continue to admit large cohorts as if the postwar faculty hiring boom never ended.

Universities celebrate intellectual curiosity and diversity of thought but rarely disclose the odds of stable academic work. The result is a cycle of institutional bad faith: faculty need the doctoral students’ cheap labour to sustain their research output. Administrators need them to teach tutorials and grade papers. University leaders rely on PhD programmes to project prestige. And students cling to the belief they will be the exception who “makes it”.

Their intellectual ambitions are real, but the faculty outcry over Harvard’s proposed cuts reveals how dependent the academic system has become on exploiting precarious graduate labour. When that scaffolding weakens, the entire moral architecture begins to crack. By cutting admissions so sharply, Harvard has, whether deliberately or not, forced academia to confront this longstanding denial.

Publicly, Harvard faculty tend only to imply, rather than openly state, that smaller cohorts could undermine research output or disrupt laboratory continuity, but, in private, it seems that the concerns were expressed much more stridently. In a November email to Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, dean Hopi Hoekstra said she had revised down the size of science PhD cuts because “science departments quickly made clear that graduate education is their highest priority, and essential to the continuity of their research, especially for tenure track faculty.”

The admissions reduction exposes how faculty prestige has become tied to the size of one’s research group or graduate cohort, turning doctoral education into an economy of reputation. A smaller pipeline may disrupt that dependence, and it could also restore some intellectual integrity. It might even compel professors to relearn how to teach and research without armies of graduate assistants – to model scholarship rather than supervise it.

Doctoral education should be rebuilt on transparency, sustainability and realistic career pathways. That means publishing annual placement and attrition data, guaranteeing multi-year funding, and making explicit the employment outcomes of every programme – inside or outside academia.

Regarding the last of those, PhD programmes, especially in the social sciences, should include project management, data analysis and communication skills that prepare graduates for a range of careers. There is dignity in public policy, education and civil service, but academia has traditionally paid scant attention to preparing doctoral students for such careers, tending to see them as something of a Plan B for those that don’t “make it” in academia. But by embracing them, there may be some hope of aligning admissions with actual career prospects without cuts as big as Harvard’s.

The real question, then, is not whether Harvard is right to cut doctoral admissions, but whether others will use this as a moment to reform the system. Other prestigious universities have also announced big PhD admissions cuts – albeit not quite on the same scale. The University of Chicago, for instance, has frozen doctoral admissions in about 20 humanities subjects and is planning “reduced” admissions in “most” other subjects while “schools undertake comprehensive reviews of the programs’ missions and structures”. In addition, the university will reduce its internally-funded PhD population by 30 per cent by 2030-31.

Meanwhile, Brown University is cutting its PhD admissions by 20 per cent, and the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Arts and Sciences already cut its admissions by 33 per cent in the last admissions cycle. Again, the reasons cited are financial, but together they mark an inflection point. Financial limits often reveal moral ones: when institutions are forced to face what they can no longer afford, they also confront what they should never have normalised.

The overdue reckoning may see research output dip. Departments may feel less dynamic in the short term. But sometimes reform only begins when the system starts to burn.

Harvard may not have lit the match intentionally, but it has nonetheless forced academia to face the flames. The rest of us should stop shouting about the smoke and start asking what kind of university we want to rise from the ashes.

Joshua R. Snider is an associate professor of security studies and currently works in the Middle East.