As application deadlines for doctoral programs for the fall of 2026 approach, some signs point to a bleak picture of smaller-than-usual cohorts and paused programs in the next academic year.
Many institutions were already forced this spring to reconsider their admissions plans for the current year as the Trump administration announced widespread grant terminations and floated policy changes that would cap the amount of indirect costs universities can recoup for federally funded research. A sense of limbo as courts weigh those moves has forced some of the nation’s most prominent institutions to make further, longer-term adjustments.
The University of Chicago made headlines this month after announcing it would not admit new students in 19 doctoral programs for 2026-27 and reduce the number of internally funded doctoral students by 30 percent by the 2030-31 academic year. Its provost said Chicago’s budget deficit and “ongoing uncertainty in the federal landscape” necessitated those changes.
The tax hike on endowments, a provision of the sweeping budget bill signed by Trump over the summer, has also been cited as a reason to mull trims in graduate education. Yale University will see its tax rate rise from 1.4 percent to 8 percent, prompting it to weigh a 12-percent cut in graduate enrollment in the humanities and social sciences over the next three years, according to the Yale Daily News. While those plans haven’t been finalized, a Yale spokesperson said the university is discussing how it will “adjust and adapt considering the tax on endowment income” and ensure it “can continue to provide outstanding education to all graduate students who come to Yale.”
In statements to The Chronicle, Brown and Cornell Universities indicated they would likely admit fewer doctoral students in the fall of 2026. (At Cornell, a “small number of programs” have suspended admissions entirely “due to circumstances specific to their own areas,” a spokesperson added.) As many doctoral programs have application deadlines in December and January, more institutions may announce their own cost-cutting measures in the coming months.
Other Trump-administration policies stand to affect the admissions picture for 2026, among them the elimination of the GRAD Plus loan program and new caps on the amount of money graduate students can borrow to finance their education, both of which will take effect in July. Several institutions also faced sizeable gaps in their international-student populations this fall amid visa delays and prospective students’ uneasiness about the American political climate. A diminished pool of international students could have an outsized impact on some STEM fields; such students account for 64 percent of doctoral recipients in computer and information sciences, and more than half of those in engineering and mathematics and statistics. Further fueling uncertainty: Trump has proposed limits on how long student-visa holders can stay in the United States and signed an executive order assessing a $100,000 fee on new H-1B visas.
‘Negative Consequences’
All of those factors add up to a necessary “recalibration” on institutions’ part, to ensure that they can fund already-matriculated students, said Chevelle Newsome, president of the Council of Graduate Schools. “They’re really trying to be good stewards. They don’t want their students to come and then not be able to follow through on the commitment that they made to students.”
Newsome said she’s spoken to administrators at some of the council’s member institutions about ways to use temporary admissions pauses or reductions to “be more thoughtful about program enhancement, about structural reviews” and other means of reform. “None of us think it’s a good thing, but I also think that we know that it’s the responsible thing to do,” she said of the pauses, which will also result in “downstream negative consequences” for American competitiveness.
For many institutions, Trump-era stressors are being compounded by headwinds that have buffeted graduate education for years. Newsome noted a “collision of timing” with the demographic cliff that’s scheduled to ripple across higher education in the coming years and will hit doctoral programs after undergraduate programs see drops in admissions. Some doctoral programs are also recovering from the last wave of admissions pauses, which came in the fall of 2021 amid the Covid-19 pandemic. Add to that an increasingly precarious job market for early-career academics — many institutions have instituted hiring freezes in recent months — and graduate education could become less appealing to prospective students.
One department chair told The Chronicle over the summer that the fall of 2025 admissions cuts could spill over into next year as would-be students explore other options. Students who didn’t get into graduate school this year “will have spent a year doing something else — having worked in industry, having taught, having done whatever,” said Kenneth S. Burch, of Boston College’s physics department, “such that by that point, they may be completely discouraged from ever going to graduate school.”
