Georgetown University’s College of Arts & Sciences (CAS) will cut Ph.D. admissions for Fall 2026 and Fall 2027 as part of university-wide austerity measures, according to a dozen department chairs and faculty members familiar with the matter.
In early December, CAS’s Office of the Dean met with department chairs to develop cost-cutting strategies, citing budget constraints and federal cuts to higher education. At administrators’ direction, chairs overseeing doctoral programs proposed various plans to reduce Ph.D. admissions over the next two years, which the College’s dean and vice deans then assessed.
Across the College, faculty members warned that decreasing Ph.D. cohorts could harm the university’s educational mission by eliminating potential researchers, teaching assistants and a future generation of professors.
Throughout December and early January, The Hoya spoke with 10 of the 15 department chairs overseeing CAS doctoral programs and several faculty members to understand how departments have begun to implement the College’s directives.
For the Spanish and Portuguese department, this reduction meant cutting admissions for its two graduate programs by 25% after negotiating with CAS administrators. The philosophy department, meanwhile, suspended all Ph.D. admissions for Fall 2026, cancelling students’ applications one week after the deadline. The department of theology and religious studies expects to halve its incoming cohort, repeating a similar cost-cutting measure from Fall 2025.
David Edelstein, the CAS dean, confirmed the College-wide cuts, which have not been previously reported, and said they were the “regrettable” result of budget constraints and diminishing federal funding.
“There’s nobody who is happy about this situation, and certainly that includes me,” Edelstein told The Hoya. “This is, unfortunately, a situation we found ourselves in because of the current higher education environment that Georgetown is a part of.”
Downsizing Programs
As of Jan. 14, eight of the 10 departments whose chairs spoke with The Hoya have finalized their admissions reduction plans, which range from partial reductions each year to full suspensions for one year.
Mark Murphy, the philosophy department chair, said the temporary cuts are unfortunate but necessary.
“Georgetown has, for many years, had a very serious mission in graduate education — has had a successful Ph.D. program for philosophy — and it is true that right now we’re wondering how far we’re going to be able to continue that project, and under what constraints,” Murphy told The Hoya. “It’s a time of uncertainty mode right now, but we’re trying to make plans so that we continue to do the job that we’ve been doing well for so long.”
The Arabic and Islamic studies department, which typically admits four doctoral students, will follow the philosophy department in suspending admissions for Fall 2026 and aiming for full admissions in Fall 2027.
Felicitas Opwis, the Arabic and Islamic studies department chair, said her department is losing strong applicants.
“There was, just recently, one person totally up my alley, where I would say, ‘I’d love to work with her — can’t admit her,’” Opwis told The Hoya. “I encouraged her to apply next year, but I don’t know whether she, in the meantime, will have something.”
Other departments will reduce Ph.D. admissions without a full-year suspension.
The chemistry department finalized a 25% cut, while the biology department plans to admit seven students for Fall 2026, over 20% fewer than typical. The history department also faces an over 25% admissions cut, planning to admit fewer than six students solely using university funds rather than the typical eight. The computer science department will decrease its cohort across both years, though the chair declined to specify the exact number.
The government, linguistics, psychology, German and physics department chairs did not respond to requests for comment. The department of economics and department of mathematics and statistics remain unsure of their plans for doctoral admissions, according to their respective chairs.
With each department developing distinct plans, Edelstein said this individualized strategy was central to his approach, which he hopes distinguishes Georgetown from other universities that have issued broad cuts to doctoral programs.
“There are a number of our peers that have adopted ‘one size fits all’ solutions to this — a general pause on Ph.D. admissions,” Edelstein said. “What I wanted to try and do, and what we’ve been doing, was to say to departments and programs, ‘Let’s have a conversation about what makes the most sense within the context of your program.’”
Ronda Rolfes, the biology department chair, said she appreciated the College’s efforts to tailor admissions reduction plans to each department.
“The idea that not every department is going to be responding in the same way was, I think, a very positive message from the dean, because every department has a different philosophy and a different way of engaging grad students,” Rolfes told The Hoya.
These cuts followed departments in the College making more limited reductions to Ph.D. admissions in Spring 2025 for the cohorts that enrolled in Fall 2025.
In the Spring 2025 admissions cycle, the history department enrolled six instead of eight students, and the chemistry department also decreased its enrollment, according to department chairs. The biology department also cut its cohort by approximately 10% while the theology and religious studies department halved its incoming class.
Ariel Glucklich, the theology and religious studies department chair, said consecutive years of cuts could harm the program’s community.
“A course with eight is much more productive than a course with four, and the community of graduate students is shrinking little by little,” Glucklich told The Hoya. “It stops being really a community.”
Federal Cuts Influence Georgetown’s Decision-Making
The Ph.D. program cuts come as higher education institutions grapple with revenue loss amid declining federal funding and restrictive immigration policies that may discourage international students.
The university lost $17 million in international student tuition as of November, and is forecasted to lose $35 million in federal research funding.
While the university has looked to increase graduate admissions for master’s students to generate tuition revenue, Ph.D. students’ programs are generally fully funded, posing a significant cost to the university.
Edelstein said the university’s goal of minimizing layoffs has guided its financial approach, distinguishing it from other institutions but limiting the scope of cost-cutting measures.
“The university has taken a position of avoiding widescale layoffs, as we’ve seen in lots of other institutions,” Edelstein said. “So if you recognize that the vast majority of the College’s budget are those types of compensation expenses, then that leaves a relatively small number of things that we can look at to make additional cuts within those non-compensation expenses. And one of those things is how we think about our Ph.D. programs.”
Universities across the United States have reduced Ph.D. enrollment for many of the same reasons. The University of Chicago, one of Georgetown’s peer institutions, suspended Fall 2026 Ph.D. admissions for 19 of its 59 programs, including classics, linguistics and public policy, in August and October.
Adam Rothman, who was interim chair of the history department until early January, said that while the cuts are painful, they are the unavoidable result of the Trump administration’s efforts to reduce research funding.
“This is just one of many ripple effects or consequences of the war on higher education that’s being waged by the Trump administration,” Rothman told The Hoya. “I’m sad and angry about that. I think it’s wrong headed, it’s unfair, it’s shortsighted. It’s bad in a lot of ways, and it’s only one dimension of a multidimensional crisis.”
“I really feel that we are about to kill the goose that lays the golden egg of knowledge in the world,” Rothman added.
Edelstein, who won the university’s Gerald Mara Graduate Student Mentorship Award in 2013 for his work with Ph.D. students in the government department, said having to downsize doctoral programs is particularly agonizing.
“It’s such a deep part of my identity as a faculty member at Georgetown to be supporting doctoral students and to see them thrive and develop these really interesting dissertations and then go off and do wonderful things in the world when they leave here,” Edelstein said. “So for me personally, and I think for a lot of the faculty in the room, there’s real sadness that we’re at this point where we need to have this conversation.”
Edelstein said he is operating on three principles when evaluating cost-cutting measures: shared sacrifice, recognizing differences between programs and protecting the university’s research mission.
“Even while we’re doing this, we’re going to do it in a way that doesn’t fundamentally undermine our identity as a research university and make sure that we sustain that capacity, we sustain that mission and we sustain the ability so — when, hopefully, our current challenges relent — that we can build back,” Edelstein said.
Faculty Stress Changes to University Programs
Amid these changes to Ph.D. programs, faculty members reaffirmed the importance of doctoral students as researchers and educators, warning of threats to the university’s educational mission while recognizing the university’s difficult position.
Glucklich said downsizing Ph.D. programs threatens the essential roles that doctoral teaching assistants serve in the theology and religious studies department.
“We lose that,” Glucklich said. “As they become more advanced, they teach their own courses, and so we lose instructors as well.”
Rothman said without Ph.D. students to serve as teaching assistants and instructors, the history department will have to reimagine undergraduate learning.
“It causes stress. It makes it harder to plan for the long term,” Rothman said. “We have a system and a structure in place for planning classes, but if all of a sudden we have fewer teaching assistants to support us in those classes, we have to rethink the structure of the undergraduate curriculum.”
Arik Levinson, vice chair of the economics department, said cutting Ph.D. programs removes an essential part of the university.
“It makes me less enthusiastic about the mission of the university,” Levinson wrote to The Hoya. “And it will make it more difficult for Georgetown to hire high-quality faculty in the future. My colleagues and I find Georgetown attractive because we get to teach smart, curious undergrads and train the next generation of Ph.D. economists.”
Rolfes said the biology department is prepared to make some sacrifices alongside other departments, though they may be painful for its program.
“Belt tightening is never fun, but if we can do it strategically, and make it so that the impact is handled as best as we can, shielding our most junior faculty members, allowing faculty who are being productive to remain productive — if we can be strategic in how that belt tightening is hitting our department, then I think that’s the best thing that we can do,” Rolfes said.
