Universities will produce fewer underemployed, overcredentialed and aggrieved young people.
Universities across the country are slashing admissions to doctoral programs and freezing faculty hiring as they come under financial strain. Facing a $160 million deficit, the University of Chicago paused admissions this year into more than a dozen Ph.D. programs, including anthropology, social work, social thought, Middle Eastern studies, Romance languages and visual arts.
Brown University suspended doctoral admissions for six humanities and social-science programs including Egyptology and Assyriology. “The University faces an urgent need to address the increasing cost of supporting Ph.D. students, which now ranges from a total of $700,000 to $1 million per student,” a faculty committee reported this spring. “The current costs are unsustainable and are already having significant, negative consequences on research productivity and graduate education more broadly.”
