Universities to Cancel PHD Programs for the 2022 Year
In the past six months the COVID-19 pandemic has influenced basically all aspects of normal life around the world. Colleges and universities have had to completely restructure many of their programs— from going completely virtual, introducing hybrid classrooms and teaching, to reallocating funding throughout the university.
Recently, many universities have started announcing cuts to their programs due to decreased funding and monetary issues. Many schools have taken a drastic stance by either postponing or fully cancelling their Ph.D and higher post-grad research for next year. The president of the Council of Graduate Schools, Suzanne Ortega, noted that due to the effects of COVID-19 on budgets and continued uncertainty about the future, “it’s very difficult to predict what graduate school admissions and enrollment will look like for 2021.”
The sociology department at Princeton University announced recently that they would not accept any applications during the 2021 admissions cycle. NYU also announced that they would be cutting their sociology Ph.D students from 9 to 6 to lower funding. Since sociology research requires high levels of human interaction, it makes sense that these program would be the first to go during a pandemic where human research is less feasible.
The School of Arts and Sciences (SAS) at the University of Pennsylvania will not admit any new school funded Ph.D candidates for the 2021-2022 cycle citing the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on the school’s finances. The Dean of SAS and the Dean of Graduate Studies at the university note that this cut is to help support current graduate students as they require more time and funding to complete their research. The Department of Philosophy at University of Chicago has also released a statement that they will not be taking on a class of Ph.D students for the upcoming academic year.
It will be interesting to follow along as more and more schools are forced to cut spending due to the pandemic. Since Ph.D students are individually quite expensive for universities, many more will most likely pause admissions into these competitive programs. This has the potential to make large impacts of the format of these Ph.D programs and graduate school education in the future.