By Michael T. Nietzel,

The PhD degree is facing hard times on multiple fronts. Long considered the pinnacle of academic achievement earned by scholars for independent research and scholarship, the degree now is weathering strong headwinds, particularly from a federal government that, under the leadership of President Donald Trump, has reduced its support for university research and graduate training.

Leading PhD programs across the nation are cutting back their admission of new students. International students are increasingly looking to other counties to pursue graduate education. PhD staff are fleeing federal agencies in droves. Long-standing efforts to bring greater numbers of traditionally underrepresented minority students into the PhD fold are under attack.

While some have argued that such pullbacks represent a long-overdue rightsizing of a glut of doctoral graduates, most observers are rightly alarmed by what recent developments could mean for America’s traditional leadership in graduate education, particularly in the STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) disciplines.

Universities Are Cutting Back PhD Admissions
Last year saw several of the nation’s leading research universities announce they would reduce or freeze future admissions to their PhD programs. In August, the University of Chicago sent shock waves across higher education when it said that mounting financial pressures would cause it to pause or cut back admissions in several areas, with the social sciences, arts and humanities particularly hard it.

It was far from alone. In October, Harvard indicated it would significantly reduce the number of new PhD students it admitted. Yale, Columbia, Brown, the University of Southern California, Boston University, and the Univesity of Pennsylvania are examples of schools that also scaled back, rescinded, paused or stopped new admissions. Large public universities — such as the University of Wisconsin, Michigan State University and the University of Washington— took similar steps.

The magnitude of the admissions slowdown nationwide is hard to estimate because there’s no reliable count of the number of individual programs that quietly decided, without any central administration directive, to pull back on their numbers. Anecdotes suggest that such decisions were widespread.

Doctoral downsizing continues. Just this month, George Washington University announced it was exacting a 7% cut in doctoral student support. It will admit smaller cohorts of students in 13 programs and make no new admissions in five — clinical psychology, anthropology, human paleobiology, political science and mathematics. The pause on admissions to the clinical psychology program is particularly noteworthy, given that at many universities it has historically attracted the largest number of applicants.

“Graduate student Ph.D lines are the bread and butter for maintaining a research program at any university,” said GWU Department of Biological Sciences Chair Guillermo Orti, adding that “if you’re cutting Ph.D packages to recruit students, you’re basically cutting the capacity to do research at the university.”

The reductions are the almost inevitable result of the administration’s stated desire to reduce federal spending on research, the major source of funding for most doctoral training programs, especially in the sciences. President Trump has proposed deep budget cuts for the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation and other federal agencies. While Congress currently appears inclined to reject those reductions, most universities are playing it very cautiously with respect to research and graduate education commitments, given the uncertainty that’s likely to continue at the federal level.

Other countries are now trying to capitalize on the fraught funding environment in the U.S. Canada launched an aggressive strategy in December to lure leading international investigators and research teams to its universities. It intends to invest nearly $1.7 billion in Canadian dollars (about $1.2 billion in U.S. dollars) in that effort, including spending $133.6 million over three years to encourage up to 600 highly promising doctoral students and 400 post-doctoral researchers to relocate to Canada. Many from the U.S. are expected to take up those offers.

On top of this, recent shifts in U.S. visa and immigration policy are being blamed for dramatic reductions in graduate applicants from other countries, traditionally a rich source of interest in STEM programs.

Results from the Global Enrolment Benchmark Survey found that enrollment of new international graduate students in the U.S. dropped by 19% last year. Nearly two-thirds of U.S. universities (63%) reported declines in graduate student enrollments. By contrast, graduate enrollments of international students were up in other regions. Asian universities reported a 3% increase, with European institutions and those in the UK up 5% and 3%, respectively.

Even before universities were putting the brakes on future admissions, PhD enrollments were stagnating. While total U.S. postsecondary enrollment grew 1.0% in fall 2025, that increase was due primarily to greater undergraduate enrollment. The latest National Student Clearinghouse Research Center enrollment report found that doctoral enrollment saw a slight .3% drop off last fall, equating to a loss of more than 2,000 students.

PhDs Are Fleeing Federal Agencies
A new Science analysis of White House Office of Personnel Management data reveals a dramatic surge in the number of employees with a PhD who are leaving employment at federal research agencies. At the 14 agencies that Science examined, PhD departures outnumbered new hires in 2025 by a ratio of 11 to one, resulting in a net loss of 4,224 STEM PhDs.

The losses were steepest at research-intense agencies like the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation, but every one of the agencies lost more STEM PhDs in 2025 than in 2024, before President Trump took office.

NIH topped the list with more than 1,100 PhD departures in 2025, compared to only 421 in 2024.
NSF saw a net reduction of 205 STEM PhDs between last January and November, amounting to 40% of its total pre-Trump PhD workforce of 517.

On average, the 14 agencies lost roughly three times more of these experts in 2025 than in 2024, while the number of STEM PhDs hired at every agency was markedly lower in 2025 than in the prior year.
Across the 14 agencies, there was an average 17% decline in the number of STEM PhDs employees between December, 2024 and November, 2025.

Science also examined the reasons that the workers left their employment and found that federal reductions in force “accounted for relatively few departures.” Instead, it reported that “at most agencies, the most common reasons for departures were retirements and quitting. Although OPM classifies many of these as voluntary, outside forces including the fear of being fired, the lure of buyout offers, or a profound disagreement with Trump policies, likely influenced many decisions to leave.”

PhD Pipeline Programs Are Being Attacked
Last March, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights notified 45 universities that they were being investigated because of their participation in The Ph.D. Project, a pipeline program begun in 1994 that was designed to help diversity business school faculties by assisting Black, Hispanic, and Native American professionals earn PhDs. Its website claims that “since 1994, we’ve helped more than 1,500 members earn their doctoral degree.”

The department alleged that the institutions had violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by partnering with an organization “that purports to provide doctoral students with insights into obtaining a Ph.D. and networking opportunities, but limits eligibility based on the race of participants.”

The universities included public powerhouses such as Arizona State, the University of Michigan, the University of Washington, The Ohio State University, the University of Wisconsin and the University of California, Berkeley, along with private schools like Yale, NYU, Vanderbilt, Cornell, Duke and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The response to the investigation was swift and largely obliging. Understandably, most institutions issued brief statements indicating they would cooperate with the investigation. Others — like Arizona State University and the Universities of Iowa, Kentucky and Wyoming — promptly cut their ties to the organization. Several institutions — under political pressure — went so far as to begin restricting their faculty from attending diversity-related conferences.

According to the Project’s CEO, Alfonzo Alexander, about 20% of institutional partners have stepped away from the organization, causing it substantial financial difficulties and forcing it to intensify its private fund-raising efforts. Alexander told Poets & Quants the program had been reexamining its policies before the investigation was started and has removed race and ethnicity from its application criteria.

For decades, The PhD Project has served as a valued, non-controversial bridge-builder for universities and minority professionals. But that changed last year after it became an ideal target for conservative activists and an administration determined to stamp out any and all programs promoting diversity, equity and inclusion goals.

When the full history of the Trump administration’s campaign to remake higher education according to the president’s political views is finally written, the troubles that PhD education has encountered in the past year will deserve its own chapter. And one of the main lesso...

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