Executive Summary

In Fall 2025, Provost Frank Doyle convened a working group of faculty colleagues to consider doctoral education at Brown in response to the current challenges and changes taking place in higher education more broadly, and at Brown specifically. This working group was chaired by Susan Harvey, Willard Prescott and Annie McClelland Smith Professor of History and Religion and a member of the Academic Priorities Committee (APC), and Deputy Provost Janet Blume, who was the interim dean of the graduate school at the time. Discussions focussed on three questions that were identified by the group at the outset of its work: our responsibility to doctoral students, our responsibility to programs and disciplines, and the allocation of resources in the context of increasing financial pressures.

Responsibilities to Doctoral Students; Career Outcomes
The working group identified a range of views regarding the University's responsibilities to its graduate students:

• Training and Environment: Programs are responsible for providing rigorous scholarly training and a supportive, lively intellectual environment.
• Career Preparation: While most faculty believe that programs are responsible for preparing graduates for post-graduate careers, they also agree on the need for honest discussions about the scarcity of academic jobs. Opinions differ on whether and how job placement should contribute to the University’s decisions on resource allocation and support for programs.
• Outcome Diversity: There is a growing consensus that diverse career paths — including government, industry and NGOs — should be valued and celebrated as impactful and rewarding.

Responsibilities to Departments
Doctoral education is viewed by nearly every department and program as essential to Brown’s identity as a major research institution. Key benefits include:

• Research Excellence: Contributing to advancing knowledge and to the University's identity and reputation as a research university.
• Department Vitality: Maintaining strong intellectual communities and ensuring disciplinary strength.
• Faculty Strength: Attracting and retaining top-tier faculty who value their roles as mentors.
• Undergraduate Impact: Enhancing the undergraduate experience through doctoral students serving as teaching assistants, research mentors and role models, as well as curricular enrichment.

Financial Pressures and Structural Differences
The University faces an urgent need to address the increasing cost of supporting Ph.D. students, which now ranges from a total of $700,000 to $1 million per student. Significant disparities exist in how these costs are managed across divisions:

• Sciences: Largely reliant on external grants, where rising costs are impacting research productivity and program sizes.
• Humanities and Social Sciences: Primarily University-funded and facing concerns over shrinking cohort sizes and recent admissions pauses.
• Overall Budgetary Impact: COVID-19-era funding extensions, increased stipends and rising ancillary costs (e.g., healthcare, childcare) have added to current budget pressures.

Assessment and Resource Allocation
There is no one-size-fits-all approach to assessing programs. Factors discussed included:

• Student Performance and Productivity and Experience: Scholarly and educational contributions to their departments, disciplines and the University.
• Alumni Outcomes: Long- and short-term career paths and impact are important. There are many impactful and rewarding careers.
• Climate and the Student Experience: Annual climate surveys are of limited use, but serious and enduring climate problems call for remediation efforts.
• Admissions and Student Success: Programs should hold students to high standards.

Summary of Recommendations
To ensure the long-term vitality and viability of doctoral education, the working group proposes several key actions:

• Transparency: Provide the community with a clear understanding of the true costs of doctoral education and varied funding models across divisions.
• Fundraising: Prioritize doctoral education in the University's decisions regarding resource allocation and elevate its importance in terms of fundraising.
• Programmatic Changes: Empower programs to rethink educational models, potentially allowing for shorter times to degree and more flexibility to manage admissions targets within well-defined constraints.
• Supportive "Off-ramps": Encourage programs to maintain high standards. Provide mentored support and productive exit strategies for students who leave their programs, removing the stigma associated with terminal master's degrees.
• Refined Assessment: With input from external bodies and professional societies, establish program-specific objective criteria for evaluation, including admissions metrics, student success, impact and alumni career trajectories, while avoiding a "one-size-fits-all" approach.
• Climate and Standards: Program climate is important, but annual climate surveys should be used to guide program adjustments rather than to determine program size, except in cases of extreme and persistent issues.

Report of the Working Group

Charge and Membership
The working group spent the 2025 fall semester facilitating a series of discussions with relevant constituencies about the future of doctoral education at Brown. The aim was to identify key issues and questions we will need to address to ensure that doctoral education, which is integral to our academic mission and our institutional identity, can adapt to changing circumstances and continue to thrive. The group engaged faculty and students to consider sustainable approaches to doctoral education in the context of University priorities, uncertainties regarding federal funding, a challenging academic job market and broader societal questions about the value of higher education.

The group convened discussions with:

• Department chairs and leaders in
  • Humanities
  • Social Sciences
  • Physical Sciences
  • School of Public Health
  • School of Engineering
  • Division of Biology and Medicine
• Faculty in departments whose admissions were paused by the Graduate School (6)
• Full faculty meetings of departments at their request (2)
• The Graduate Council

The group emailed faculty to invite their comments by email and to solicit requests for the committee to meet with groups of faculty, and received several responses. One department chair submitted a letter to the group on behalf of the department.

Due to time limitations, the group did not collect input from alumni or current doctoral students, with the exception of the current student members of the Graduate Council. Graduate students in one department provided written feedback and entered our meeting with the faculty in their department.

The group solicited input on three central questions:

• Given what we know about changing landscapes — in higher ed, nationally, internationally, federally, etc. — what are our ethical responsibilities to our graduate students, and how do we attend to those?
• What are our ethical responsibilities to departments with regard to maintaining the viability of intellectual life within departments, and the preservation of certain disciplines/areas of knowledge?
• Financial constraints impact graduate education in many ways. How do we assess doctoral programs under these circumstances to guide decisions on resource allocation?
   

I. Overview

Graduate education varies dramatically across academic divisions of Brown University. While a diversity of responses to these prompts is to be expected, we were struck by the ranges of views within divisions and sometimes within departments. However, almost every faculty member with whom we consulted feels that doctoral education is essential to Brown University's identity as a major research institution, contributing to research excellence, attracting and retaining top-tier faculty, enriching the intellectual life of the entire community, and enhancing the undergraduate educational experience. Many faculty felt that doctoral programs are also critical to the continuation of certain disciplines and to the preservation of essential, foundational knowledge.

Discussions also highlighted the dramatic differences in the models of doctoral education across disciplines. These differences include the way that doctoral students are funded, the determination of cohort sizes, the amount of independence doctoral students have, the need for offsite work or language instruction, teaching as part of their training, the way that doctoral students are assessed, the types of job placements that result, and times to completion. In particular, the reliance on external funding to support doctoral education in the sciences stands in contrast to the programs that are largely University-funded in the humanities and social sciences. Many people seemed unfamiliar with these differences, particularly as they relate to University support for doctoral students. This unfamiliarity is a barrier to open discussions about the allocation of resources for doctoral education across campus. Some faculty expressed a belief that the grants in the sciences are charged inflated amounts for graduate students in order to support the humanities and social science programs, while other faculty suspected that recent cuts to admissions targets in the humanities and social sciences were made in order to grow or support doctoral programs in the sciences.

In all divisions, there is an urgent need to contend with the increasing cost of supporting Ph.D. students at Brown. The cost has outpaced increases in grant support, fundraising and the supply of University funds. In many of our meetings, particularly those with departments where Ph.D. students are typically supported on external grants, faculty noted that the current costs are unsustainable and are already having significant, negative consequences on research productivity and graduate education more broadly. External funding availability largely dictates program sizes in these grant-supported programs.

Faculty in the humanities and social sciences — where the vast majority of funding is provided by the University — are very concerned about the small (and often shrinking) size of their Ph.D. cohorts. They noted the detrimental effects that small cohorts can have on students’ experiences, faculty instruction and departmental programming. Faculty were concerned with the lack of control over their admissions decisions, given the way the University currently determines admissions targets under budgetary constraints. Therefore, the cost of doctoral education has a concrete impact on these programs as well. The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has also been significant. Many students received an additional year of funding towards their degree, and although admissions were paused in 2022, the extended funding has contributed to the recent budget pressures that led, in part, to smaller incoming cohort sizes and admissions pauses, even as overall program sizes have remained largely stable.

Some programs suggested revisiting the guarantee of five or six years of support, with programs (and students) encouraged to move more quickly through to the degree. While this would enable more students to move through their programs, the change may not result in financial savings unless overall program sizes shrink. Additionally, humanities faculty were concerned that such reductions would significantly impact effective training.

The impact of changes to job markets on doctoral education also elicited a range of views. Some programs were extremely concerned about graduates’ job prospects and preparation, noting that many doctoral students come into their Ph.D. programs with the goal of becoming a professor. This has been a longstanding issue, and was discussed in the 2022 Report of the Task Force on Doctoral Education. All programs agreed that many career outcomes should be valued and celebrated, but some faculty felt that the importance and impact of their programs transcend job placements, and the job market — academic or otherwise — should not be a factor in the allocation of resources for graduate education in their areas.

II. Responses to the prompts

Prompt 1: Given what we know about changing landscapes — in higher ed, nationally, internationally, federally, etc. — what are our ethical responsibilities to our graduate students, and how do we attend to those?

Faculty views on this point differed greatly. However, a consistent theme was that programs are responsible for providing rigorous scholarly training and a lively intellectual context. Further, programs are responsible for creating a supportive academic environment where Ph.D. students can grow, learn and develop their professional networks. Most programs welcome students’ participation in activities outside their department as well. And departments must provide an environment in which students can learn from and support each other within and across departments. On that note, cohort sizes are very important.

We heard a diversity of thought about the purposes of graduate study. As noted above, views about the responsibility to prepare students for the job market were surprisingly mixed. Some faculty felt that the post-graduate placements are largely immaterial: that the unique experience of spending several years engaging deeply with important subject matter is an end to itself. Other faculty felt that their main responsibility is to prepare students for the job market, perhaps with a range of possibilities that may include positions in academia, industry, government, etc. Yet all agreed on the importance of maintaining honest and open discussion during graduate student programs regarding the diminishing possibilities of academic job placement.

The increasing scarcity of academic jobs is an issue. Most students in the humanities and social sciences report tenure-track jobs as their goal, even as they are aware that the odds may be against them. Some faculty noted that despite being supportive of a range of career outcomes, they find it difficult to advise students on post-graduate plans other than academia. And some faculty reported that their departments celebrate academic placements in a way that may devalue other career outcomes and add pressure and anxiety to their students.

There were mixed opinions on interdisciplinary training, with some programs noting that deep disciplinary training is necessary to advance research and fields of inquiry generally. Other programs saw interdisciplinary study and opportunities as enhancements to research and education or even as necessary preparation for post-graduate employment and impact.

Many faculty felt there is a responsibility to hold students to high standards, and to provide productive off-ramps for those students who do not meet the standards or who discover along the way that they do not want to continue in their programs. These decisions should be mentored, as part of the advising process, with support of the Graduate School. Some noted that it is difficult to predict who will be successful in a Ph.D. program at the time of application, and it is difficult for many students to know how their interests and talents will evolve as they move through their programs. Some faculty felt that admitting doctoral students who already hold master’s degrees would be beneficial, although the expense and time of a master’s education may ultimately make doctoral education less accessible to people from a range of socioeconomic backgrounds.

Prompt 2: What are our ethical responsibilities to departments with regard to maintaining the viability of intellectual life within departments, and the preservation of certain disciplines/areas of knowledge?

As noted above, faculty felt very strongly that doctoral education is essential for Brown’s position as a major research institution. Faculty value their roles as mentors of doctoral students and find that teaching doctoral students contributes greatly to their department’s intellectual community. Doctoral students also contribute to the undergraduate mission as teaching assistants, research mentors and role models, as well as bringing curricular enhancements through shared courses and related activities. Many departments were concerned about the loss of TA support, and some feared that their teaching loads could increase if doctoral programs were diminished or eliminated. We note that there are other, potentially more cost-effective ways to provide teaching support to departments, although some faculty felt that doctoral students' contributions to undergraduate education are unique because they are active learners and investigators.

There was some consideration of the potential for "interest clusters" of postdocs and/or visiting artists/scholars/teaching fellows to maintain department and disciplinary vitality in place of graduate students. Many faculty in the physical sciences have used grant funding to support postdocs instead of graduate students in order to meet project needs more efficiently and cost-effectively (noting the grants must cover some of students’ tuition in addition to their stipends and other costs). Most faculty, however, felt that teaching doctoral students is a critical part of their and their departments’ intellectual identity and productivity, and that postdocs and visiting faculty could not replace that.

Prompt 3: Financial constraints impact graduate education in many ways. How do we assess graduate programs under these circumstances to guide decisions on resource allocation?

Opinions were very mixed on how to assess doctoral programs and make decisions on resource allocations. Clearly, there is no one-size-fits-all approach. As noted earlier, graduate education is expensive. The estimated total cost to educate a doctoral student entering this year throughout their time as students is $700,000 to $1 million, inclusive of tuition, stipend and various health fees and payments. (Tuition represents the cost of space, faculty & staff support, infrastructure, etc.) These costs may call for financial tradeoffs. It was understandably challenging for faculty to discuss reductions that could affect their programs, and some programs, particularly in the sciences, felt that their programs needed more University support to help offset the rising costs.

III. Suggested criteria for evaluating programs

• Student performance and productivity: Some faculty looked to measure the impact of their programs by assessing the contributions of their doctoral students while they are enrolled, as demonstrated through accomplishments such as published papers, performances, grants, conference presentations and teaching excellence.
   
• Alumni outcomes: Most programs noted that alumni data captured by Academic Analytics and the Graduate School are deeply flawed, out of date, and do not follow career progression well. Even those programs that felt that alumni outcomes are important were concerned that the University’s reliance on Academic Analytics for this information is problematic. Programs also differed on what constitutes a “good placement” and noted that doctoral alumni have many ways to contribute to society, using their training either directly or indirectly. Some programs were concerned that doctoral recipients are free to choose their career path and that their decisions should not be held against programs. A few programs felt that alumni outcomes should not be a measure of a program’s strength, although most programs did agree that it is undesirable for a program to consistently produce doctoral recipients who are unable to secure the meaningful positions to which they aspire. 
  
  Many programs (but not all) pointed to the impact of their alumni, regardless of their postgraduate pathway, as an important indicator of the program’s strength. Examples of influential placements include positions in government, NGOs, industry, secondary schools, entrepreneurship, museums, communications and libraries.
  
  For those graduates who do take academic positions, most faculty feel that a tenured or tenure-track position is a desirable outcome, regardless of the strength of the college or university. Full-time, long-term teaching positions are also generally valued as influential outcomes. Almost all faculty felt that positions at top-tier colleges and universities are generally the most valued outcomes, although this may not be a realistic metric given the relative scarcity of positions. 
   
• Climate: Most programs were critical of the role of annual climate surveys in allocating admissions targets each season, noting that the surveys sometimes have low response rates, may have taken place at a difficult point in the semester for students, and/or may be influenced by one or more disgruntled students. Small fluctuations in the data captured by these surveys may not be meaningful. Generally, the Graduate School (and often the programs themselves) recognize climate issues as they occur, and the surveys generally do not add new information. Only when climate issues become significant and persistently unaddressed did faculty agree that it may make sense to reduce or pause admissions to allow a program to rethink its approach to graduate education and build a better learning environment. Indeed, some departments have taken that approach voluntarily.
   
• Attrition: Almost all programs felt that attrition should not be held against programs so that they can hold students to high standards and allow them to make informed decisions on their own continuation in the program. That said, it is problematic when students leave a program due to climate issues and/or problematic mentoring by individual faculty members. Attrition late in students’ programs is also a concern. 
   
• Admissions metrics: Numbers of applicants, the strength of applicants, the admit rate and the yield rate are important considerations. However, those in smaller departments are understandably concerned with the use of these metrics.
   

4. Recommendations

• Doctoral education should be a priority in financial decisions at the University and department levels. Fundraising to support doctoral programs is critically important.
  
  Doctoral education is an essential component of the University’s mission. Its presence is intrinsic to Brown’s identity as a premier research and educational institution. Vibrant doctoral programs have an enormous impact on the quality of the undergraduate experience, as well as on faculty recruitment, retention and productivity. 
   
• Provide faculty, staff and students with a complete understanding of the large variation in how doctoral education operates and is funded across the different divisions at Brown. Greater transparency would likely be helpful for the Brown community, especially if there are some difficult decisions and changes on the horizon. It is difficult to have a truly productive conversation about the future of doctoral education when most participants have only incomplete information.
   
• Similarly, it would be helpful for faculty, students and staff to have a full understanding of the true costs of doctoral education across departments and divisions. Most are aware of the annual stipends and tuition (when charged to grants). Ancillary costs, such as insurance benefits, childcare subsidies, travel costs, research funding, student health and support services, and other expenses are not well understood. Faculty — particularly new faculty — who support doctoral students on grants should be provided with the information and administrative tools needed to effectively plan and manage support for their doctoral students.
   
• Empower programs to rethink their educational model, in collaboration with peer programs and professional societies, such as the effort underway by eight humanities faculty members who are with the ACLS’s three-year initiative about reforming humanities graduate education. 
   
• Revise programs to allow for shorter time to degree in programs where it makes educational sense (and would not decrease Brown’s competitiveness), and potentially limit the number of years of guaranteed support. 
   
• Given the importance of cohort sizes, continue building intellectual and social interactions between doctoral students in different programs.
   
• Support departments in upholding high academic standards, and expect them to provide the necessary support for their students to succeed. Provide acceptable "off-ramps" for students who do not meet milestones or choose to leave their programs, removing the stigma of "terminal masters." 
   
• Tie admissions targets to the number of students enrolled in the program, effectively allowing departments to recruit new students when students leave the program, either through attrition or by completing their degrees. Consider changes in the size of the faculty, as those changes may impact the department’s capacity to support students.
   
• Program climate is important. Students cannot learn in a difficult environment. Annual climate surveys may be helpful in guiding programs to make program adjustments, but they should not be used to determine program sizes. That said, there may be times when extreme and persistent problems may warrant a pause on admissions to allow the programs to rethink their approach. Signs of extreme climate issues include large numbers of verified student complaints and/or students leaving the program. Faculty who consistently fail to succeed as mentors of doctoral students should be held accountable.
   
• Establish program-specific academic criteria by which programs are assessed, with input from external reviewers from peer or aspirational peer programs and relevant professional societies.
  • Given the cost of doctoral education and the time and effort students invest in earning their degrees, job placements must be a factor in assessing the strength and impact of a program. It will be important to consider immediate job placements and the longer-term career trajectories. Program-specific criteria would also include ways to assess career outcomes and impact.
  • Admissions metrics should be considered in the context of each program, perhaps admissions trends (numbers of applications) over time playing a role.
  • Other criteria, such as research and teaching contributions of Ph.D. candidates during their time as students, may also be a factor.
  • Reactivate external and internal program reviews, with reviewers being provided with specific criteria for evaluation.
     
• Revisit the University’s means of support for graduate programs, with greater transparency (as noted above), potentially allowing departments to make decisions on admissions based on the strength of their application pools, their roster of graduate students and research emphases, with the understanding that admissions targets may be increased or decreased in future years — within prescribed financial constraints.

Working Group Membership

• Susan Harvey, Co-chair; Willard Prescott and Annie McClelland Smith Professor of History and Religion; Member, Academic Priorities Committee (APC)
• Janet Blume, Co-chair; Deputy Provost; Interim Dean of the Graduate School
• Prudence Carter, Sarah and Joseph, Jr. Dowling Professor of Sociology; Peltz Ruttenberg Family Director, Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America
• Colleen Dalton, Professor of Earth, Environmental, and Planetary Sciences; Member, Faculty Executive Committee (FEC)
• Virginia Krause, Professor and Chair of French and Francophone Studies
• Diane Lipscombe, Thomas J. Watson, Sr. Professor of Science; Professor of Neuroscience; Reliance Dhirubhai Ambani Director of the Robert J. and Nancy D. Carney Institute for Brain Science; Member, APC
• Brandon Marshall, Royce Family Professor of Teaching Excellence in Epidemiology; Professor of Epidemiology; Member, University Resources Committee (URC)
• Monica Martinez Wilhelmus, Thomas J. and Alice M. Tisch Assistant Professor of Engineering; Member, (Graduate Council)
• Kevin Quashie, Royce Family Professor of Teaching Excellence in English
• Ethan Bernstein, staffing the committee; Executive Dean of Administration & Finance, Graduate School