U.S. universities cut doctoral programs amid federal funding uncertainty

The University of Chicago said it will not admit new students in 19 doctoral programs for 2026-27, a sharp sign that federal funding turmoil is now forcing research universities to shrink their training pipelines. The school also plans to reduce internally funded doctoral students by 30 percent by the 2030-31 academic year, citing both a budget deficit and ongoing uncertainty in the federal landscape.

The pressure has been building for months. In early 2025, universities were already pulling back after the Trump administration terminated hundreds of federal grants, proposed deep cuts to the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation, and pushed a 15 percent cap on NIH indirect-cost reimbursements that was under judicial review and could cost some institutions more than $100 million. Some applicants were told they had informal Ph.D. offers, then saw them withdrawn as schools waited for court rulings and budget clarity.

By October 21, 2025, some U.S. doctoral programs were admitting no students at all because of the uncertainty around federal science funding. Brown University and Cornell University later indicated they would likely admit fewer doctoral students in fall 2026, while Yale University was weighing a 12 percent cut in graduate enrollment in the humanities and social sciences over the next three years. Yale’s calculation was shaped in part by a jump in the tax rate on endowment income, which was expected to rise from 1.4 percent to 8 percent.

The scale of the federal retrenchment has been large enough to shake the research system itself. Nature reported on January 20, 2026, that more than 7,800 research grants had been terminated or frozen and that about 25,000 scientists and personnel had left agencies overseeing research. The same reporting said 5,844 NIH grants and 1,996 NSF grants had been cancelled or suspended in 2025, with roughly 2,600 grants still not reinstated or unfrozen, representing about $1.4 billion in unspent funding.

That funding squeeze matters far beyond this admissions cycle. The federal government funneled around $60 billion to universities in fiscal 2023 for research, and graduate-school leaders warn that smaller Ph.D. cohorts now will mean fewer professors, lab leaders and principal investigators five to 10 years from now. Suzanne Ortega, president of the Council of Graduate Schools, said temporary admissions pauses can give universities time to make sure they can keep promises to admitted students.

The Council of Graduate Schools has also warned that shrinking Ph.D. admissions could become a real barometer for the direction of U.S. higher education and science. For a country that relies on universities to train the next generation of researchers, the damage is delayed but concrete: fewer slots today mean fewer scientists, faculty members and innovation leaders in the next decade.