Brown will reduce its overall Ph.D. admissions to around 80% of its current targets in an effort to regulate University operating costs, Provost Francis Doyle said at Tuesday’s faculty meeting.
When admitting this fall’s doctoral cohort, no Ph.D. program was reduced by more than two admissions slots beneath the program’s typical minimum size. But Doyle said that this minimal reduction was “unsustainable” for this year’s admissions cycle.
If the University continues to admit doctoral students at a rate consistent with recent years, the cost to the University would increase by 7.3%, Doyle said.
President Christina Paxson P’19 P’MD’20 explained Brown’s expenditures on graduate programs will still increase, despite the planned reductions to program size, because many graduate students extended their time at Brown during the COVID-19 pandemic. She also attributed the cost to “rapid growth” in Ph.D. stipends.
Earlier this year, Doyle reported that stipends in the life and physical sciences have grown by 65%, and stipends in the humanities and social sciences have nearly doubled.
In preparation for the admissions reduction, the University adjusted doctoral programs’ target sizes for next year’s cohorts, Doyle explained. These reductions in cohort size were distributed “evenly across divisions,” but individual program reductions were distributed based on factors such as the number of applicants, selectivity, yield, student experience and career outcomes.
He recognized that data on these factors is “both imperfect and in flux,” explaining that these statistics will change as students graduate. Given this, no adjustments to cohort size were decided solely on this data, Doyle added.
Earlier this year, the University paused admissions for at least six humanities and social science Ph.D. programs
Last month, Doyle announced he had convened the Doctoral Education Working Group, a team of faculty members tasked with evaluating diverse input across campus to determine Brown’s goals and approaches toward doctoral education.
At Tuesday’s faculty meeting, Janet Blume, co-chair of the Doctoral Education Working Group and interim dean of the Graduate School, said the group’s goal is to “identify the central questions and key issues as we think about graduate education in this changing landscape.”
The group, she added, will first focus on contacting graduate programs with paused admissions to understand how faculty have been impacted. But in the future, the committee plans to hold meetings with divisional chairs overseeing doctoral programs, faculty groups, clusters of departments, directors of graduate study and alums.
According to Blume, one of the group’s main focus areas is the student experience “in this moment of shifting job markets and shifting value of higher education.”
“We want to make sure everybody has meaningful, fulfilling jobs … and that their time here is rewarding,” she said.
Blume added that some faculty members have expressed concerns that “ending a graduate program might mean the end of a discipline, or be contributing to the end of a discipline.” She emphasized that the working group is “very sensitive” to this issue.
“As we look ahead, we want to, as I noted, be really careful in considering how Brown can continue to train the next generation of scholars,” Doyle said. “This is such a crucial part of our mission. We want to hear from faculty and students.”
Samah Hamid is a senior staff writer at the Herald. She is from Sharon, Massachusetts and plans to concentrate in Biology. In her free time, you can find her taking a nap, reading, or baking a sweet treat.
