Most graduate program cohort sizes will see a “modest reduction” in the 2025 admission cycle, according to University spokesperson Jennifer Morrill.
Morrill attributed these changes to uncertainty about the University’s budget and research funding. All departments and academic units have been directed to cut 5 to 10 percent of their budgets this academic year, and the University has been rocked by hundreds of millions of federal cuts to its research funding (although about half of those grants have been restored).
Graduate school admissions at the University are already small, with many departments enrolling only a handful of students in a cohort. Because Ph.D. students usually remain enrolled for five or more years, temporary reductions may not noticeably reshape the size of a department’s graduate population.
Morrill declined to share the specific departments instructed to cut graduate admissions and the scale of the reductions, and dozens of departments individually declined or did not to respond to requests for comment.
Several graduate studies directors across departments told the ‘Prince’ that they have received specific instructions regarding new admission numbers.
Joshua N. Winn, Director of Graduate Studies in the Astrophysical Sciences department, said the department has a lower graduate admissions target this year. “But it’s a modest decrease — we are aiming for an incoming class of six instead of seven,” Winn said.
Similarly, Daniel Heller-Roazen, Director of Graduate Studies in the Comparative Literature department, told the ‘Prince,’ the department will see “a slight reduction to [their] graduate fellowship offers.”
Adam Goldstein, Director of Graduate Studies in the Sociology department, said the department “will have a reduced Ph.D. cohort target size.” He said these reductions are not as large as those at Princeton’s peer institutions and are not expected to have a significant “qualitative impact” on the doctoral program.
Despite Princeton’s comparatively smaller admission cuts, Goldstein added that the mandated decrease in admission numbers “fit a broader pattern in which the attack on higher education is having real and unfortunate consequences at Princeton.”
However, not all departments’ futures are clear. Yael Niv, Director of Graduate Studies in the Psychology department, said the department has not received their target numbers for the year at the time of publication.
Niv explained that, typically, departments set their annual admissions targets by “assessing the last three years’ average yield and the number of students in the program at this point, compared to the desired program size.”
Representatives from various departments within the Graduate School — including Civil and Environmental Engineering, Quantitative and Computational Biology, Plasma Physics, Princeton School of Public and International Affairs, and Chemistry — declined to comment on admission trends or targets.
All other departments did not respond to requests for comment by time of publication.
Nikoloz Inashvili is a News contributor for the ‘Prince.’ He is from Parsippany, N.J. and can be reached at ni5710[at]princeton.edu.
Nika Schindler is a News contributor for the ‘Prince.’ She is from Woodside, Calif. and can be reached at ns1295@princeton.edu.
Please send any corrections to corrections[at]dailyprincetonian.com.
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