The pipeline for Ph.D.s out of U.S. universities is shrinking

""There are some permanent effects," said Emily Levesque, an astronomer at the University of Washington. "There'll be students who never got to pursue Ph.D.s. That's a group of experts that's lost forever.""

""This is an acceleration of a trend that was already underway," said Julie Posselt, a professor of higher education at the University of Southern California. "It's not a situation that we can solely place blame on the Trump administration for.""

U.S. graduate programs are cutting or pausing Ph.D. admissions across top universities, with Harvard reducing science slots by 75% and humanities by 60%. Several departments at other leading institutions are shrinking admit pools or halting admissions; MIT admitted fewer biology Ph.D.s, the University of Washington's astronomy department suspended admissions, and Brown paused Ph.D. admissions in multiple humanities and social science departments. Contributing factors include rising costs from graduate student unionization, declining international enrollments as students choose other countries and face visa restrictions, reduced federal research funding, and growing skepticism about the value of higher education, risking permanent loss of future experts.

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