“It’s difficult to advise graduate students when you don’t even know what’s happening,” a dean of a Midwestern graduate school said to me recently.
The chaos and policy shock waves emanating from Washington have shuddered throughout academe, with destructive effects everywhere you look. We all follow the headlines tracking conflicts at universities like Harvard and Columbia, but what about the thousands of graduate students at other institutions across the country who simply don’t know what’s coming next? “Students have a lot of anxiety right now,” the dean said. “They’re nervous about their futures.”
In recent months I’ve been speaking with academic administrators and professors, across a range of disciplines, to ask two key questions:
- What’s going to happen to the United States’ graduate-school enterprise?
- And how can we advise graduate students during these uncertain times?
Not surprisingly, none of the academics I interviewed wanted to be quoted here by name. What stood out from their responses is a common decision to focus on immediate crisis management. It’s not so much that academics are stunned by the violence of the new federal policies and regulations unleashed by the Trump 2.0 operation. (Though some are stunned.) Instead, the emphasis on the short run is because no one can yet imagine what the long run will look like.
Markets don’t like policy uncertainty. That’s an article of faith among investors. And American higher education is surely a market. European universities have historically occupied a space between church and state, and over succeeding centuries, have become fixtures as public institutions. But American colleges and universities are especially sensitive to uncertainty because they’re essentially free-standing economic entities. (Even public colleges and universities here must raise most of their own funds, mainly through tuition.)
Our graduate-school enterprise exists today in a state of anxiety and reactive tension. It follows on the heels of another memorably uncertain time — the Covid pandemic. Many of the professors and administrators I talked with said their pandemic-era experience had actually proved useful in recent months. A graduate dean at a Southern university said he has returned to his Covid playbook as a guide to managing the swirl around him today: “I try to address the short-term problems, while I wait to see the larger shape of things.”
We might also compare today to an uncertain moment more than 70 years ago. In 1944, already foreseeing the end of World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act, better known by its nickname: the GI Bill. Among other benefits, it paid for more than 2 million returning veterans to attend college, far more than ever before. Thanks to that influx of federal money, American academe began a period of exponential expansion.
But not right away. Looking back from where we sit, we see a story of steady growth. The GI Bill proved to be the first of a series of major federal investments in higher education over a period of about two decades. But that’s not how it looked to academic administrators in the late 1940s and early 1950s. They understood they were reaping an immediate windfall of federally financed students, but made no assumptions beyond that fact. At that time, large federal investment in higher education was still new. Enrollments swelled — but colleges didn’t immediately start building new buildings and hiring lots of new faculty members to teach the crowds of new students. Even though campuses quickly became overcrowded, the academic job market of the early 1950s was actually tight.
Institutions didn’t expand right away because their administrators were uncertain. They didn’t know if the government money would be renewed, so they held back. That may look silly to us now, but we benefit from hindsight. The past doesn’t know the future.
Only after federal investment in higher education held steady did academic administrators relax and accept the existence of a new normal — one in which government investment turned universities into a collective research and development lab for the whole country. That federal commitment changed the size and scope of American higher education. In effect, a partnership formed between universities and the federal government. Higher ed here got bigger, stronger, and — because of the accessibility it afforded to strivers — notably more democratic.
That change began more than 70 years ago. It quickly created a new status quo that, despite plenty of criticism, has endured. Campus unrest during the 1960s damaged the bipartisan consensus that created this government-university partnership. For that and other reasons, government support for higher education has been chipped away over the years. But never was the basic structure of that support fundamentally altered — until now.
Said one graduate dean at a public university in the South: “We are witnessing a renegotiation of the academic social contract.”
Higher ed in general is facing a new wave of uncertainty on at least two overlapping fronts: logistics and ideology. Graduate education faces its own particular versions of both.
Funding Cutoffs and Other Logistical Snafus
A large part of the uncertainty facing American graduate education right now arises from the effect of xenophobic immigration policies. Academic administrators have been working frantically to cope with the legal, financial, and emotional needs of international graduate students — and we have lots of them.
The internationalization of our graduate-student population has received little notice outside of campus admissions offices, but it’s a trend that began about two generations ago. According to the National Science Foundation, United States citizens or permanent residents received about 85 percent of the doctorates awarded by American universities in 1978. By 1993, that proportion had dropped to 72 percent, and by 2023, to 61 percent. About 40 percent of enrolled master’s and doctoral students today are foreign nationals. (The percentage of foreign postdoctoral fellows is even higher.)
Today this pool of students needs help of all kinds. A director of graduate studies in a humanities department at a Southern public university described her efforts to advise its international students this year: She has sought contacts for them with the international-student office on the campus and has distributed the now-well known “red cards” that list students’ rights in the event that they are detained. “I’m trying,” she said, “to strike a balance between being supportive, encouraging them to stay focused, and advocating an appropriate amount of caution.” This is not, she wryly noted, “exactly what I signed up for when I agreed to be graduate director.”
American and international students alike have faced dire economic threats since the new administration took office. The hail of financial blows has left university administrators scrambling: “Students are losing their funding,” said another Midwestern graduate dean. “We’re trying to cobble things together to keep them afloat.” Those strategies sometimes involve interoffice collaboration — a good idea in these times. For one student, the dean said, “one office has committed to covering the health insurance, and we have other offices who are trying to help cover the stipend and the tuition for next year.”
Some of the funding losses take malevolent form. When the National Institutes of Health recently clawed back a grant from a graduate student in the social sciences at a Northeastern university, the legalistic language was followed by a statement that read: “Research programs based primarily on artificial and nonscientific categories, including amorphous equity objectives, are antithetical to the scientific inquiry, do nothing to expand our knowledge of living systems, provide low returns on investment, and ultimately do not enhance health, lengthen life, or reduce illness.” Such statements — and that one is typical — are both gratuitous and mean-spirited.
The specter of funding reversal obviously affects students’ decisions about what topics to choose for their research. “It certainly adds a new layer to the candid discussion about whether it’s wise to start a particular research project if you need funding to do it,” a social-science professor said. If students can’t expect financial support for, say, the fieldwork they need to do, it makes sense to encourage them to choose a different topic. In that way, ideologically driven funding cuts verge on censorship. All you can advise your students is to “continue to do great research, but be careful,” said a humanities professor at a university in the South.
New Ph.D. students also face new employment problems. Reduced federal funding for higher education will lead to reduced job openings on campuses going forward. Most science Ph.D.s, for example, go on to postdoctoral positions, but that economy has been disrupted. For the first time, said a science professor in the Midwest, “I have two students in my lab who are graduating without their next position in place.”
The massive public-sector layoffs of government scientists and social scientists have also straitened employment prospects for Ph.D.s outside of academe. Experienced workers are now competing with new doctoral recipients on the job market. “I don’t know what to say to my students,” admitted the science professor. She was not alone in that sentiment.
Politically Motivated Challenges
Ideological differences with academe obviously drive the funding cuts. But the naked anger that the government is now directing at universities is especially striking: “This administration hates higher education,” a social-science professor said, “and it’s taking that hatred out on students.”
For many faculty members, it’s hard to determine how to protest against all this upheaval. Unprecedented attacks on academic freedom have thrived in certain red states in recent years, but the Trump administration has intensified these assaults and widened their scope. A science professor who teaches in a state with an “intellectual-diversity law” (which threatens to discipline faculty members who fail to “foster a culture of free inquiry”) described her “uncertainty about what I can and cannot say” in the classroom. She said she has “tried to keep my politics separate from my mentoring of students. But given direct cuts to funding and threats to academic institutions, that stance becomes increasingly hard to maintain.” In the end, she said, “I feel my speech is being restricted.”
It’s even harder when you’re a dean. Asked about the scorched-earth approach to diversity policies in his state, a Midwestern graduate dean said tersely, “We will always follow the law. If the law changes, we will change what we do.”
What’s next?
Universities are changing what they do — in a different way. A year ago, in these pages, our attention was on the growth of graduate-student unions and on reforms to improve doctoral training and workplace culture. Those conversations have been mostly submerged by the Trumpist tsunami. It’s unclear when (and in what form) they will re-emerge in the unsettling years ahead.
But we are witnessing legal and social resistance, and — gratifyingly — an upsurge in student care. Graduate advising has always been a caretaking venture, but it’s especially so these days. And many deans and professors are answering the need.
A Midwestern graduate dean has been “holding open hours just for students to come and experience community.” She has been adding summer programming for graduate students — which especially benefits international students, many of whom are afraid to return to their home countries to see their families over the summer for fear that they won’t be able to return. But the dean’s purpose is not just to help foreign students. She simply wants, she said, “to bring people together.”
The Southern graduate director has found similar value in “solidifying the graduate students as a community.” Whether through professional-development activities or just a coffee hour, she wants them “to feel heard and supported, beyond being in class together.” Writing groups “add a level of community” even as they help students stay focused on their work in distracting times.
The value of such caretaking is more than emotional. It’s also tactical. “Everything starts at the same place,” she said: “being informed.” She regularly meets with students and colleagues to talk about “how to protect ourselves, and how to push back.” It sends a supportive message to graduate students, she said, “when faculty are on the same page.” She convenes meetings to share pedagogical resources and holds workshops on “how to teach under current restrictions.”
This move to community is, in fact, long overdue in graduate education. The storm clouds around us don’t harbor much in the way of silver linings, but such a communal approach can help graduate programs. “People need connection,” said the graduate director. It shouldn’t take an existential attack for us to realize that.
