What’s New
Boston University is suspending admissions to a dozen doctoral programs in the humanities and social sciences for the 2025-26 academic year, citing a commitment to “long-term sustainability,” according to a statement from a university spokesperson.
In an email obtained by Inside Higher Ed, administrators implied that the contract the university signed last month with graduate students to end a strike had forced their hand. While the university’s statement on the suspensions did not mention the strike or contract, the administrators’ words point to a broader set of tensions surrounding graduate-student unionization and the need for reform in doctoral education.
The Details
The programs pausing admissions are American and New England studies, anthropology, classical studies, English, history, history of art and architecture, linguistics, philosophy, political science, religion, Romance studies, and sociology. Three of those programs — American and New England studies, English, and sociology — also paused admissions in 2020 as a response to pandemic-era budget cuts. They were among the more than 50 graduate programs in the humanities and social sciences nationwide that did not admit students for a year around that time, a reflection of how rare such admissions pauses are.
Colin Riley, a BU spokesperson, said in a statement that other programs will see their cohort sizes reduced to “ensure BU is able to meet its commitments to currently enrolled students and to set up its future programs for success.” (Riley did not specify which programs will admit smaller cohorts, or how much smaller those cohorts would be.)
In an email reportedly sent last week and obtained by Inside Higher Ed, the dean of BU’s College of Arts and Sciences and the senior associate dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences alluded to the “budgetary implications” of the new union contract. “It would be financially unsustainable to move forward with the cohort sizes discussed earlier this fall,” the administrators wrote; instead, “all non-grant-funded doctoral programs” would pause admissions while grant-funded ones would admit fewer students so that “we have the financial resources available to honor the five-year funding commitments we have made to our currently enrolled doctoral students.”
The deans also indicated that the budget troubles could extend further. “The provost’s office has agreed to fund the increased costs this fiscal year, including students funded on external grants,” they wrote. “Beyond this year, CAS must work within our existing budget to fund this transition in our doctoral programs.”
The seven-month BU strike was the longest union-authorized work stoppage of employees at an American college in at least a decade, according to data from the National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions, at the City University of New York’s Hunter College. That contract netted BU graduate workers a $45,000 minimum annual stipend, plus a 3-percent raise in each of the three years of the contract, which amounts to an approximately 70-percent raise for those earning the minimum. BU will also continue paying doctoral students’ tuition, among other benefits.
But Service Employees International Union Local 509, which represents the graduate-student union, said in a statement to The Chronicle that its members “reject the suggestion” that those higher labor costs were a driver in BU’s decision to pause admissions. The pause, the statement continued, “raises serious questions about BU’s long-term commitment” to disciplines where “graduate workers play an essential role in teaching and research.”
One faculty member said his department wasn’t consulted on the admissions decision. “It was delivered to us as a fait accompli,” Daniel Star, director of graduate studies in the philosophy department, wrote in a comment on the philosophy blog Daily Nous, adding that the news came shortly after faculty members submitted a report to the administration highlighting the department’s “extraordinarily high” placement rate. “We have also been assured that this is a temporary emergency measure needed for budgetary reasons. I do believe BU aspires to be a leading research university and will right the ship before the next admissions cycle,” he wrote. (Star confirmed to The Chronicle that he had written the comment, but declined to speak further. Directors of graduate studies in several other departments that are pausing admissions did not respond to requests for comment Tuesday afternoon.)
The Backdrop
While the absence of an official announcement from BU makes it difficult to definitively tie the admissions pauses to the union contract, William A. Herbert, the executive director of the CUNY collective-bargaining center, said he has not seen a comparable decision linked to labor actions. “I don’t know what the discussions were, but certainly on the university’s side, in their preparation for negotiations, they have undoubtedly done an analysis of financial ability to pay. That’s a central feature of the negotiations,” Herbert said.
It’s also possible, Herbert said, that BU’s decision was a reflection of the lackluster job market for scholars in the humanities and social sciences. That issue is a perennial one, said Robert B. Townsend, program director for humanities, arts, and culture at the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. “It’s always a difficult balancing act in terms of deciding whether a Ph.D. program is helping its students or not, especially if they think they’re only training students for tenure-track jobs,” he said. “Given the state of that particular piece of the job market, it’s obviously highly problematic to keep cranking out students.”
Indeed, administrators have long striven to “right-size” their doctoral programs — even if doing so proves difficult. “You need a certain number of people to be working their way through a doctoral program in order to have enough people to teach, enough to put on doctoral-level classes. When you start to squeeze those numbers down, then you run into a pedagogical or teaching problem,” Townsend said. “But then there’s obviously the financial side of this as well,” making it challenging for institutions to support students throughout their program.
BU has been weighing such questions in recent years, through a “Task Force on the Future of Ph.D. Education” that issued recommendations to the provost in December 2023. As part of that work, the deans wrote in their email about the admissions pauses, “all departments and programs contributed valuable reports on how to right-size our doctoral cohorts, considering factors such as selectivity in admissions, student success, job prospects and placements, standing and reputation of the program, etc.” One of them, Malika Jeffries-EL, the senior associate dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, also co-chaired the task force. And while the group’s recommendations are being implemented starting this fall, Riley, the university spokesperson, did not share a copy of those recommendations.
What to Watch For
Townsend, of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, said admissions suspensions may become more commonplace, given the downward pressure on the academic job market and the coming demographic cliff.
Similarly, administrators might increasingly cite recently negotiated contracts for their decisions to suspend programs or otherwise cut back. According to the National Center, the strike at Boston University came amid a decade-long wave of labor activity among graduate students. Between 2012 and January 2024, the center found, the number of graduate-student employees in unions rose 133 percent.
