Harvard’s Dismal Grad School News Is Just the Tip of a Very Bad Iceberg

Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily.

A few weeks ago, I spoke to students at my university, here in Qatar, about what they needed to know before pursuing a doctoral degree in the United States. Not only do I have a Ph.D., but until recently I was a tenured professor at a major U.S.-based research university, so it’s natural for me to be on these types of panels.

A couple of years ago, I would have repeated stock advice about cover letters, research statements, and reference letters, along with cautions about the path ahead. A doctoral degree is at least a five-year commitment—and it is far from certain that it will lead to a permanent job like mine. Students, I used to say, should think carefully about pursuing the path.

This time, my message was shorter: Don’t.

I’m a political scientist specializing in U.S. foreign policy. I often have to talk about subjects that others find unpleasant, from the details of congressional lobbying to the aftermath of nuclear war. I don’t take pleasure in discouraging young people from following in my footsteps. As a scholar and a teacher, though, I have both a duty to truth and a duty to my students. And this is a terrible time to be contemplating doctoral education in the United States—especially if, like most of my students, you are not an American citizen.

Now, my warnings look more prescient than most of my predictions. On Tuesday, the news broke that Harvard is slashing slots for doctoral students, cutting 75 percent of Ph.D. admissions in science and 60 percent in arts and humanities for the next two years. The Ivy joins other American schools that have paused or reduced graduate admissions this year, including similarly elite ones, like the University of Pennsylvania, Brown University, and Cornell. These decisions are one manifestation of a broader crisis triggered by the Trump administration—one upending the plans and futures not only of the United States but countries around the world.

Universities strive to maintain a façade of genteel prosperity—I think the kids call it quiet luxury—but they are exposed to downturns both general and targeted. U.S. academia is no stranger to financial crisis. I began my career as a Ph.D. student in the autumn of 2008. I remember sitting in the back of the class on Russian politics for which I was a teaching assistant, watching one of my students track the stock market on his laptop. The numbers kept dropping. It was the September 2008 crash.

Advanced doctoral students, on or about to go on the job market, looked ashen. Wealthy institutions canceled job searches—something unheard of in an industry in which it may take years to secure permission to hire a new faculty member. By the following year, the financial crisis had weakened even Harvard’s balance sheets to the point that it famously stopped providing cookies at faculty meetings.

Eventually, higher education recovered, more or less. (Computer science more, the humanities less.) I unwittingly timed my graduation well, hitting a relatively benign job market in 2015. Even so, scholars a few years older than me bore unmistakable psychic scars from the experience. And those of us who had been through that era were much less likely than some of our older colleagues to breezily recommend that students consider pursuing a doctoral degree. After all, we thought we had seen just how bad it could get.

It’s worse now than we could have imagined.

There are two big points worth knowing about doctoral programs in U.S. higher education. First, funding for academic projects at research universities—the kinds that have Ph.D.programs—largely comes from three sources: grants, endowments, and tuition. Second, whereas undergraduates and master’s students pay for their degrees, most Ph.D. students cost their universities money. In some disciplines, research grants can recoup those costs, but in other ones (like mine) substantial grants are less common. And often funding commitments to grad students are made for a long term—three to five years.

This idea that Ph.D. students cost their institutions more than they’re worth might seem counterintuitive—especially if you’ve ever had to live on a graduate student stipend! But at many institutions, after adding together stipends, health insurance, tuition waivers, and other benefits, doctoral students may be pricier ways of providing instruction than teaching faculty or undergraduate TAs. And if grants disappear, then doctoral students on research duties in labs will become pure cost.

The Trump administration has thrown tuition and grant funding into chaos. International students, who disproportionately pay full sticker price for undergraduate and master’s programs, appear to be avoiding the United States. The administration is changing financial aid programs, in part to allow students to obtain federal aid to pursue short-term programs leading to narrower credentials. (That’s not necessarily a bad thing in itself, but remember this is being managed by the guy who brought us Trump University, so there’s no need to extend a presumption of good faith.) Federal grant-making agencies have halted or canceled billions of dollars in grants to research universities, and even if litigation has stayed the worst effects, for now the short-term outlook is incredibly grim.

The obvious question is why universities can’t tap their endowments to make up the shortfall. After all, some universities have eye-popping endowments ($57 billion for Harvard!).

The answer is less obvious but remorselessly practical. Most—even most research universities—aren’t actually that rich. Sure, an endowment of a billion or two is not exactly chump change, but those funds can’t provide enough to make up for truly large shortfalls. (In fact, merely a billion dollars wouldn’t even get you on the Forbes 400 list of the country’s richest people, which now has a $3.8 billion cutoff.)

Legal restrictions on endowment funds limit flexibility—you can’t just take donor money supporting scholarship on classical civilizations and give it to physicists. Beyond that, it’s unwise to eat your seed corn. Endowments are meant to endure, essentially, forever. As a rule of thumb, only about 4 to 5 percent of endowments should be drawn down each year. (That lets good years, like the past few, cover for bad ones—like those that will come if the A.I. bubble bursts, for instance.) Taking much more than that amount would permanently weaken universities—exactly the outcome it appears that the Trump administration wants to bring about. (Indeed, that’s probably why Republicans hiked taxes on the richest universities’ endowments this year.)

Seen in that light, cutting admissions for doctoral students, freezing hiring, and cutting cookies for faculty meetings make sense, even for rich schools like Harvard. It’s easier to trim spending by not taking on new obligations than by cutting existing ones. (Although we should be clear that the sector is also undergoing more sweeping cost-cutting measures. The University of Southern California, for instance, is laying off staff and faculty.)

Understanding the logic of the situation doesn’t make it pleasant. Admissions to Ph.D. programs were already exorbitantly competitive in the good old days (last year). Cutting the number of slots will ratchet up the pressures on aspiring scholars to unprecedented levels. (Undergraduates who haven’t begun seriously pursuing research opportunities by their second or third year were already disadvantaged, but will now find themselves well behind the curve.)

For those who get through the hunger games of admission, the actual experience is likely to be more unpleasant than for previous generations. Austere university budgets will lead administrators to continue to look hard at cost centers like doctoral education. International students face the prospect that policy changes or quota-driven immigration enforcement could end their education before it’s finished. At the very least, Trump’s anti-immigrant policies are casting a chilling effect on international students’ speech—and for some disciplines, where you can’t avoid talking about politics, that implicates academic freedom as well.

Students who brave that gantlet and emerge with a Ph.D. (which is far from all of them) will then have the privilege of competing for scarce faculty jobs. Yes, in some disciplines, a doctoral degree opens doors to jobs in industry—but another legacy of the Trump administration has been to eliminate some traditional “alt-academic” routes (in my specialty, for instance, both the U.S. Institute of Peace and the U.S. Agency for International Development have been eliminated) and to make others much less appealing (fancy working for the U.S. intelligence community?).

If the harms of the administration’s assault on higher education were limited to breaking the hearts of budding eggheads and making Harvard professors do more of their own grading, it would be sad, but not tremendously important for anyone else. But the harms are greater than that.

Forget, for a moment, the importance of colleges for the economy of their communities or even the country. Over the past several decades, U.S. universities have provided torrents of scholarship that have expanded what we know about the universe, the human body, our past, our society, and our minds. Those advances all came about because, ultimately, young people decided to devote themselves to research and teaching.

American institutions have been particularly successful because they could draw from a global talent pool, matching the best American intellects with the best the world could offer. The United States has benefited from those arrangements in ways that go beyond citation counts or patents. We should value cultivated intellects and the civilized societies they bring us for their own sake. Instead, the administration is promoting a cruder and crasser society—and one that may well be poorer, too.

Scholarship itself will not die, but its authors will increasingly reside elsewhere. I encouraged my students who still wanted research jobs to consider European universities (although I suspect admission to those programs is about to become much more competitive, too). After my talk, a student contacted me to thank me for my frankness—and to say that he was giving up on graduate study in the United States in favor of returning to his home country, China.