UChicago will pause or reduce admission to some of its Ph.D. and Master’s programs for the 2026–27 academic year. Funding for current Ph.D. and master’s students will remain unchanged, and students admitted for the 2025–26 academic year will be enrolled as scheduled.
The University of Chicago’s Division of the Arts & Humanities will reduce or pause Ph.D. admissions across all departments, accepting smaller cohorts in seven and suspending admissions entirely in the remaining eight. The Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice will also pause Ph.D. admissions, and the Harris School of Public Policy will pause admissions to its Harris Ph.D., Political Economy Ph.D., and M.A. in Public Policy with Certificate in Research Methods.
“These unit-level decisions reflect each program’s specific context and long-term goals, with the aim of ensuring the highest-quality training for the next generation of scholars,” a UChicago spokesperson wrote to the Maroon. “The University remains fully committed to supporting rigorous and impactful graduate education.”
Universities across the country are shuttering programs and facing financial crises due to rising administrative costs and sinking demand for certain courses of study, as well as attacks on higher education by the Trump administration.
UChicago’s preexisting financial challenges, including a $221 million budget deficit as of last October, have been compounded by cuts to student loan programs and federal funding from the National Institutes of Health, National Endowment for the Humanities, and National Science Foundation.
An effort to reduce costs and avoid further financial uncertainty prompted the decision for the Division of the Arts & Humanities, Deborah Nelson, dean of the division, wrote to faculty and Ph.D. students Tuesday. Doing otherwise “would be irresponsible to both those students and our long-term health,” she said.
According to communications between Ph.D. committee members reviewed by the Maroon, ongoing talks between Nelson and top University administrators drove the decision, and next year’s Ph.D. enrollment size across all programs may establish a new division-wide cap for future years. The University did not clarify to the Maroon who was involved in making the decision or confirm these details.
The division faces a broader push to respond to “historic funding pressures” by reducing costs and consolidating departments, which has drawn criticism from faculty and students alike. In June, Nelson established faculty-led committees to advise on divisional changes in response to funding pressures, including a committee tasked with evaluating Ph.D. programs.
But the temporary pauses and reductions were not a recommendation of the Ph.D. committee, which would inform “long-term decisions” about the direction of the division, Nelson wrote.
According to communications between committee members reviewed by the Maroon, Ph.D. committee members opposed the idea of applying a pause only to some departments in the division. Additionally, committee members have yet to submit their report with Ph.D. program recommendations to Nelson.
“Up to this point, I had been cautiously optimistic about the fact that Dean Nelson had been so inclusive seeking faculty consultation. This sets a bad precedent for that,” said Whitney Cox, a Ph.D. committee member and South Asian languages and civilizations professor.
The committee had discussed a potential pause in admissions earlier in the summer, but thought an admissions pause should affect all departments equally if it happened, he said.
Within the Division of Arts & Humanities, departments pausing enrollments entirely include Classics, comparative literature, Germanic studies, Middle Eastern studies, Romance languages and literatures, Slavic languages and literatures, South Asian languages and civilizations, and visual arts.
Ph.D. enrollment will be limited for the art history, cinema and media studies, East Asian languages and civilizations, English language and literature, linguistics, and music departments.
“The decision to admit students to these departments is based on the number of applicants in the pools, undergraduate demand based on enrollments and majors, tenure track and other intentional career placements, and well-managed time to degree,” Nelson wrote.
Some faculty on the Ph.D. committee expressed concern that these metrics alone are inadequate for making admissions decisions and are insufficiently informed by academic considerations, according to the communications between Ph.D. committee members.
The University did not respond to questions from the Maroon about whether it had specific goals to reach on these metrics before accepting larger cohorts in future years.
Jason Grunebaum, an instructional professor of South Asian languages and civilizations and Faculty Forward union steward, called the decision “a gut punch” to students and faculty. “It’s infuriating that this administration seems ready and willing to deprioritize and downgrade the cultures of one-fifth of the world’s population,” he wrote.
Pausing graduate enrollments makes professors feel as though they are “allowed to teach college students, but… are not allowed to train the next generation of scholars,” said Andrew Ollett, an associate professor of South Asian languages and civilizations and the director of graduate studies for that department.
If you would like to share information about similar changes in other units of the University, please contact us at editor@chicagomaroon.com. The Maroon protects source information, and your name and contact information will only be seen by the paper’s editors-in-chief and managing editor.
Matthew G. Andersson, '96, Booth MBA / Aug 22, 2025 at 1:38 pm
In re, “Chicago.” Corporate deficits by definition are created when expenses exceed revenue. As in all universities, those relevant operating expenses are a product of excess faculty headcount, inflated faculty wage costs, unusually high and expensive administrative and staff overhead, and low faculty labor utilization rates. Indeed, as the new Law dean recently stated in a fascinating University interview (“A Conversation with New Dean Adam Chilton,” July 14, 2025), “Many university departments are sleepy places where the faculty mostly work from home, come in to teach their classes, and then leave for the day.” Otherwise, some of the problem results from the accounting matching principle, but that underscores why faculty, and especially a provost, cannot be in charge of labor costs and restructuring: they can’t commit to fixed cost reduction fast enough, or meaningfully enough, under conflicted self-preservation. Concerning Mr. Zimmer’s prior investment project in engineering, it appears strategically sound and promising, and such investment is not a causal factor in current accounting challenges, which are otherwise technically immaterial, except as trend under larger forecasts of revenue, tuition, donor yield, and endowment shape and performance. It is otherwise difficult to know if criticisms of engineering are a result of specific program analysis, or are ideological. In reply to “J,” the writer makes an excellent point about Humanities in general. We found in a formal corporate study many years ago, that before the MBA was instituted, many business leaders had studied History as an undergraduate, which is an approximation to business case learning. You have to point back to faculty for being unimaginative, and ideologically hostile in this regard. Indeed, the head of English once said to me in Stuart Hall where the business school resided for decades, “we liberated it.” This is a disservice to students, and underscores why the tenure faculty monopoly will be deregulated, and administration re-ordered in fit to task, versus amateur rotation assignment from the faculty labor league. Faculty is its own worst enemy.
J / Aug 22, 2025 at 10:03 am
“due to rising administrative costs and sinking demand for certain courses of study”
– You don’t need to have so many administrators: the university’s budget showed they are getting paid more than professors.
– Has it ever occurred to anyone that “sinking demand” does not mean that students are not interested in the humanities, but they have been scared off the humanities by decades of demonization that have portrayed the humanities as a risk and a waste of time? It did not used to be like this, and it doesn’t have to be.
If we stopped telling people the humanities are a waste, more people would enroll, showing more demand, allowing for more jobs. Studies show that humanities graduates DO get hired – there is a long track record of this. You know which degree seems to be pretty worthless right now? Computer science.
The slashing of U. of C.’s greatest strength and a core part of its brand – the humanities – will only make the university take in less money, thus making it worse off. The dean and all those agreeing with this decision are fools.
Ben / Aug 22, 2025 at 10:27 pm
What an idiotic comment.
The notion that humanities decline is simply the product of “demonization” is wishful thinking. Demand is measured by choices, and students are voting with their feet. They recognize what you refuse to admit: a credential in marginal subfields of the humanities does not yield commensurate opportunity.
Your swipe at computer science as “worthless” is equally pathetic. Yes, there is a glut of CS majors—too many students chasing the same credential. But here is the crucial distinction: those who are genuinely competent, those from rigorous programs, are not struggling. Quite the opposite. The Wall Street Journal ran a piece just months ago detailing how the top of the CS market remains exceptionally strong. Anecdotally, my own peers—’24 alums with solid technical chops, as you’d expect from a university like ours—landed $180K–$200K starting packages without issue. The “worthlessness” you sneer at belongs only to the lower tier, i.e., the flood of mediocre graduates who entered the field for a paycheck rather than skill. That is not a condemnation of CS.
Contrast this with the humanities. There is no such “selectivity.” Declining demand is not the product of propaganda but of structural irrelevance. No employer is standing in line to hire yet another graduate fluent in Baltic poetics or “postcolonial discourse.” “Critical thinking” can and is developed in STEM programs every day—through complex problem-solving, system design, and data analysis—with the difference that these skills have direct, demonstrable application.
Tech, STEM, and data-driven fields are the future. They generate industries, create wealth, and push forward scientific frontiers. To argue that we should tether scarce university resources to low-enrollment vanity projects in the humanities is to consign the institution to irrelevance. If the humanities wish to survive, they must compete on merit, not nostalgia. The dean is not a “fool” for recognizing this; the true folly lies with those still demanding indefinite subsidies for boutique disciplines that the market—and increasingly, the students themselves—have already rejected.
One of my favorite pastimes is pulling up humanities alumni profiles on LinkedIn and watching the myth collapse in real time. The narrative that “salaries even out” is absurd—ten, twenty, thirty years out, most are still floundering in marginal, low-paying roles, while their peers in serious disciplines command multiples of their income. The data is obvious, but the mythology persists because it flatters the self-image of those unwilling to face economic reality.
I suggest you stop regurgitating the recycled talking points of the Times, pieces so often churned out by poli-sci majors moonlighting as sages of “critical thinking.” That may pass for wisdom in the Sunday Review, but it collapses under the scrutiny of serious argument.
A B / Aug 25, 2025 at 4:09 pm
I totally agree with this comment.
Chip / Aug 19, 2025 at 3:58 pm
UChicago, similar to most universities, is loaded with costly DEI staff, programs, events, training, scholarships based on race, etc. Liquidate these divisive and frankly racist elements = saves millions and makes UChicago a better place to be for all!
zman / Aug 19, 2025 at 1:35 am
One item that caught my attention is the University’s huge investment in the latest, high technology without having well established engineering departments. When I attended, the attitude of the basic sciences departments was to look down upon engineering as elementary school learning. Some of the America’s most successful university patent mills have formidable engineering programs, but not UChicago. It reminds me of countries that try to buy World Cup caliber national soccer teams without decades of developing an internal soccer program. Then they get blown out of the tournament in the first round by a third world country with only one-twentieth of their population.
Dentist adjunct / Aug 18, 2025 at 9:54 pm
Elimate emeritus pay, pensions for presidents and chancellors.
Matthew G. Andersson, '96, Booth MBA / Aug 18, 2025 at 12:28 am
The full scope of actions is not disclosed here, but this kind of behavior generally tends to demonstrate that universities will avoid hard choices in uniform fixed cost reduction, and use instead the “life-raft scarcity” model of self-preservation by trimming random marginal cost. That is, the faculty will first reduce all costs and all “education” even, except what symbolic functions, bargains or promises, can sustain their personal economics: anything and everything will be thrown overboard and sacrificed, including the core education charter itself, before the tenure labor interest is disturbed. That is why faculty are the last group who should rationally be put in charge of enterprise cost reduction or organizational design: the Faculty will self-deal, self-prioritize, self-protect, and self-insulate, with misplaced self-regard, over all students, before they make any durable material sacrifice, or creative adjustment (there are many available for all departments: see the Hartford Courant, May 6, “Universities Can Solve the Humanities Funding Problem”) in their own cost burden. They will reduce the scope of student academic programs, but will interestingly, not make corresponding cuts in senior faculty, or faculty wages or benefits–except adjuncts and staff. Their otherwise strange worldview appears to be a campus completely devoid of actual students if necessary (cf the ghost town made by Covid, while all tuition for faculty was maintained at 100%). There will be empty buildings and classrooms until the last light is turned off and the doors locked, but professors will still, zombie-like, wander back into empty seminar rooms to discuss Hegelian anti-realism. That is the unfortunate caricature that comes from an institution without the installation of modern corporate finance in a centuries-old closed academic society. See the National Association of Scholars, Minding the Campus: “Are Faculty Senates Facing a Shareholder Takeover? 13 August, and “Everything a University Does Can Be Done in Half the Time for Half the Cost,” 22 January. This Maroon article otherwise highlights the weakness of University leadership, and why the current administration (perhaps any faculty administration) is not fit to task: faculty, and the administration drawn from it, are technically, managerial amateurs, and work in an amateur dimension as administrators. See Noel Annan (UChicago Press), The Dons, ch. XIII. The Don as Administrator. There is no actual professional management function in the modern university corporation. See the NAS essay, “Academia: The Worst-Managed Industry in America,” 23 July.
Chicago / Aug 18, 2025 at 2:30 am
What a bizarre and ill-informed comment. The university is facing a deficit of $200 million because the former president, Robert Zimmer, made massive investments in new construction and molecular engineering that did not yield the expected profits. This was not a decision made by faculty (the faculty senate at UChicago does not have any power except to approve the minutes of the previous meeting) , this was a decision made by the President in conjunction with administrators with mindsets such as those recommended by Matthew G. Anderson, MBA who talk a big game about managerial experience and then go on to lose money. Please, do a bit of research into why the university is actually facing budget problems. And consider that the current budget problems arose as a result of precisely the management model that you are recommending: where the purported management ‘experts’ run the institution into the ground by talking a big game about their professional expertise to ‘manage,’ and then leaving the people doing the real work of research and education to foot the bill.
Thomas Palaime / Aug 17, 2025 at 2:03 pm
U Chicago along with Columbia University and University of Texas at Austin created strong ugrad humanities reading courses around the time of the Great Depression to inculcate into those who were well off and well educated true humanistic understanding of the universal suffering of mankind which is at the core of all great world literatures.
At a time when mobile phones, computers, virtual reality glasses, AI and manipulation of the news by those with economic and political power are stripping individuals of their individuality and their sympathy and empathy for others to cut humanities courses, especially because of bloated administrative costs, makes little sense.
Regarding the latter, despite frequent requests two decades back to have reports made on the escalating salaries and the rapid increase in upper administrative offices and heads of offices, none was ever forthcoming. For a while UT Austin even had I believe it was a vice provost or vice president whose office monitored graduation rates. Perhaps it still does. We also had for several decades an ever more costly office of Diversity and Community Engagement, while the needle for certain minority faculty and students stayed in the range of 4% year in year out.
But as a late great Chicagoan among the greatest true folk singers of the last 100 years put it exactly 50 years ago:
It don’t make much sense that common sense don’t make no sense no more! John Prine 1975
These are my personal opinions as a Chicago-based Macarthur fellow and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and recently retired Armstrong emeritus professor of Classics at UT Austin. These do not reflect the opinions of the administration, other faculty members, the students or the regents of a great university and community that it has been my pleasure to serve for now my fortieth year. Nor of the governor or legislators of the state of Texas.
May G-d have mercy on the souls of leaders of cultural and educational and political and governmental institutions and business and economic leaders who are leading our great country deeper and deeper into a period of anempathetic and uneducated anarchy.
Hmmmm / Aug 17, 2025 at 6:41 am
This article does not explain (for readers who are nonfaculty) how these measures will save money, or how much. I can only conclude that it comes down to the stipends given to PhD students for living expenses. My understanding is that many (all?) PhD students in the humanities are fully funded, meaning that tuition is waived and they receive a stipend for up to eight years to cover living expenses during coursework and dissertation writing. For each year that new PhD students are not admitted, perhaps $30,000 per student will be saved. If, hypothetically, 60 new humanities PhDs are admitted each year in all departments, the total is less than $2 million a year. Perhaps the university could consider returning to the model where funded students receive a stipend for only four years, or where PhD students who have their own means of paying for rent and food still receive waived tuition. After all, tenured humanities faculty will continue to be paid, presumably tenure-track faculty as well, and also instructors who teach undergraduates who take courses in these departments for a well-rounded College education. This way, the university could continue to train the next generation of researchers while saving the same amount that this admissions freeze is apparently achieving.
J. / Aug 22, 2025 at 10:08 am
What is needed is to slash the amount of administrators. There is bloat in administration, whose numbers have gone up at seemingly every school in the country, as opposed to tenure-track faculty – and grad admission numbers – which are down compared to what they used to be.
Graham K. Slater / Aug 16, 2025 at 8:27 pm
Dear administrators, please cut funding to the Department of Geophysical Sciences as well. It is a cesspool of woke ideology and mediocrity.
Comeuppance / Aug 16, 2025 at 3:01 pm
And nothing of value was lost.