Northeastern’s College of Social Sciences and Humanities will not accept new doctoral students in three of its seven doctoral programs as it begins to roll out an “alternate-year admissions cycle,” according to a Nov. 20 email that was sent to the seven CSSH department chairs and obtained by The Huntington News.
For the fall 2026 application cycle, the English, history and economics departments will not accept any doctoral students, while the sociology and anthropology, public policy, political science and criminology departments will. For the fall 2027 cycle, the other three departments will accept students while the latter four will not.
As of fall 2024, the College of Social Sciences and Humanities, or CSSH, has 731 graduate students out of the university’s total 23,717 graduate students.
“To ensure that CSSH can continue to provide doctoral training in a financially viable manner, we are introducing alternate-year admissions, which entails rotating PhD admissions among our seven departments,” the email, which was signed by Associate Dean of Graduate Studies Jun Ma and Dean of CSSH Kellee Tsai, reads. Neither Tsai nor Ma responded to requests for comment from The News.
Under the new system, each department will enroll four students every other year. The Office of the Provost, which oversees the university’s academic mission, and the Northeastern PhD Network “support this adaptive strategy,” according to the email.
When asked for a comment on the new admissions system, Northeastern’s media relations team directed The News to the Nov. 20 email.
While the change will ultimately decrease the number of graduate students, it ensures students are accepted with a cohort, said Chair of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology Liza Weinstein.
She said the move is caused in part by budget cuts, but also by a decrease in the number of jobs that require a humanities doctorate. Northeastern joins Brown University and the University of Chicago in limiting or eliminating admissions to humanities doctoral programs in the wake of funding pressures and a decrease in the academic job market.
“I think programs are trying to be thoughtful on, ‘Are we admitting students in a way that serves their interests professionally rather than just admitting PhD students because we need people to work on our grants or we need TAs for our classes?’” Weinstein said.
Doctoral programs can be expensive to run; Northeastern covers students’ tuition, health insurance and salary for five years. CSSH doctoral students are funded by outside grants at a “lower rate” than other colleges, Weinstein said.
“If we’re admitting 15 PhD students each year, they’re being paid upwards of around $40,000 salary for their work, plus their health insurance, plus their tuition,” Weinstein said. “If only a certain, relatively small, percentage of that is covered by grants, then that’s just [the] cost.”
The announcement came after applications to the English, economics and history departments, which are due in December, already started rolling in, which can be “quite disruptive,” Weinstein said.
According to Ma and Tsai’s email, students who have already submitted applications to the English, history and economics departments for the upcoming academic year will be sent a message informing them that the program will not be admitting students for fall 2026 and encouraging them to apply for fall 2027 admission.
Faculty were involved in the discussion over how to divide the number of students accepted each year, but did not have a hand in the financial decisions, Weinstein said.
“There has been a deliberative process, but I wouldn’t say that everybody is happy about it. I think most people are more or less resigned to it [and] sort of understand that PhD education is changing in the U.S. right now,” she said.
Since President Donald Trump took office in January, Northeastern has lost more than 40 federal grants. The Trump administration has also moved to cap indirect costs at 15%, which would hobble Northeastern’s research operations.
“All doctoral students, regardless of funding status, bring value to the college and the university,” the email reads. “Doctoral students provide research support enabling faculty to make scholarly contributions; doctoral students provide teaching support, particularly for large undergraduate populations and eventually teach courses; and doctoral students bring the prestige that follows their own scholarly accomplishments. ”
