On Reddit late last week, a prospective Boston University philosophy Ph.D. student posted a screenshot of an email and expressed confusion.
“We have made the difficult decision to suspend admissions for the program you applied to for the upcoming academic year,” the email said. The poster, who used a pseudonym, said he hadn’t even submitted his application and asked his fellow Redditors, “Does anyone else know if BU is not accepting applicants for their philosophy Ph.D. program? Could this be a mistake?”
While it remains unclear why a not-yet-applicant received that message, this much is true: BU isn’t accepting new Ph.D. students for the next academic year in a dozen humanities and social sciences programs, including philosophy, English and history.
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The university didn’t announce this in a news release and has not fully explained the move. In an email obtained by Inside Higher Ed on condition of anonymity, the heads of the College of Arts and Sciences (CAS), in which all the affected programs are located, pointed to increased costs associated with the union contract that graduate student workers won after their historic, nearly seven-month strike ended in October.
According to an undated post on the university’s website, the programs not accepting Ph.D. students for next academic year 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.
The university didn’t provide Inside Higher Ed with interviews Monday. Spokesperson Colin Riley instead sent a university statement that said the decision is “part of our ongoing review of our doctoral programs,” which includes not just completely pausing admissions for some programs, but reducing the number of students in others next academic year.
The statement also said “these actions are part of Boston University’s commitment to re-envision these programs to allow for their long-term sustainability. This temporary pause and cohort reduction will ensure BU is able to meet its commitments to currently enrolled students and to set up its future programs for success.”
Riley didn’t answer multiple written questions—including on how many applicants are being impacted. And the university statement didn’t mention the graduate workers’ union. But a Nov. 14 email from two arts and sciences deans to lower-level administrators did.
In the email, Stan Sclaroff, dean of CAS, and Malika Jeffries-EL, senior associate dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, referenced the new collective bargaining agreement multiple times as the source of what they called “budgetary implications.”
The deans also suggested that the larger university (which last reported an over $3.1 billion endowment) is leaving the college largely on its own to pay the higher tab. “The provost’s office has agreed to fund the increased costs this fiscal year, including students funded on external grants,” the deans wrote. “Beyond this year, CAS must work within our existing budget to fund this transition in our doctoral programs.”
The deans said, “It would be financially unsustainable to move forward with the cohort sizes discussed earlier this fall,” so the college is halting admissions “for all non-grant-funded doctoral programs” next academic year and reducing “cohort sizes of grant-funded programs.” This, they said, “will ensure that we have the financial resources available to honor the five-year funding commitments we have made to our currently enrolled doctoral students.”
Sclaroff didn’t respond to a request for an interview, and Jeffries-EL referred Inside Higher Ed’s request to another university spokesperson, Rachel Lapal Cavallario, who didn’t provide comment. An affected department’s chair said in an email that “we’ve been asked to refer media inquiries” to that same spokesperson.
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The new grad workers’ contract did give Ph.D. students a big raise: They now have a $45,000 minimum annual stipend plus 3 percent annual raises during the three-year collective bargaining agreement. That’s roughly a 70 percent increase for the lowest-paid doctoral students. The university also continues to pay for Ph.D. students’ tuition.
But the BU Graduate Workers Union had sought much more in compensation, including $17,000 more in annual stipends for Ph.D. workers. The union also wanted 7 percent annual cost-of-living adjustments or adjustments tied to the median Boston rent increase, whichever was higher.
The university continually refused these demands, leading to the longest union-authorized work stoppage among any U.S. college or university employees in at least a decade, according to the National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions. (Center executive director William A. Herbert has cautioned that his organization doesn’t know the length of some strikes during that period.) Last month, the union ended the strike—accepting a deal that gave it less than it desired.
The strike was acrimonious. A spokeswoman for the Service Employees International Union Local 509, of which the grad workers’ union is a part, didn’t provide comment or interviews Monday from the union.
But the deans’ email, alongside the university’s statement, indicated concerns about the university’s Ph.D. programs that go beyond the new three-year contract. While they didn’t mention the specific outcomes at BU, on a national level, Ph.D. programs have struggled with high attrition rates and questions over whether the degree is worth the investment.
A Broader Issue
The deans wrote that the pause in admissions won’t merely give the College of Arts and Sciences more time to understand the ramifications of the union contract. They mentioned an effort, underway long before that collective bargaining agreement was signed, in which the university was exploring possibly lowering the number of students in Ph.D. programs. They wrote that “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.”
With the pause, they said, “we will be better positioned to make more informed choices … as outlined in the report of the 2022 Ph.D. Task Force on Ph.D. Education.”
That task force says on its webpage that it finished its work almost a year ago—but its final report is hidden behind a login screen on the private university’s website. Riley, the spokesperson, didn’t provide it, saying it was for “internal use,” but, he said, “discussions on implementing its recommendations started at the beginning of the academic year.”
The task force’s webpage does mention some broader questions across academe about Ph.D. programs. It mentioned, on a national level, “the relatively low percentage of Ph.D. graduates who secure tenure track faculty positions, the failure to train Ph.D. students for a wide array of careers, the uneven quality of faculty mentoring, the adequacy of funding for students pursuing the Ph.D. and shortcomings in efforts to diversify the Ph.D. student population.”
The listed questions the task force said it tackled included a few on finances. There were also questions such as “Should BU consider a ‘one in/one out’ model that allows one entering Ph.D. student for each student who graduates?” and “With the changing job market for Ph.D.s, should BU allow new, non-traditional approaches to dissertations?”
While the full reasons for what the university is now doing are unclear, Russell A. Berman, Walter A. Haas Professor in the Humanities at Stanford University and a former president of the Modern Language Association, said, “It’s sad when access to advanced study is limited, because—one way or another—it’s going to prevent some student from pursuing knowledge.”
“Graduate education is a vital part of knowledge production, not only in terms of training future scholars, but also in the collaboration between graduate students and existing faculty,” Berman said. “Limiting programs stands in the way of knowledge production at a time when it’s needed more than ever.”
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