University aims to cut Ph.D. enrollment by 10 percent

The university will aim to admit about 100 fewer doctoral students next year as part of a push to increase completion rates while decreasing the amount of time students spend in the program.

Enrollment targets call for the majority of the university's 13 colleges to admit fewer doctoral students next year and for overall enrollment to decrease 10 percent by 2013. Fewer students will allow for closer relationships between students and mentors, more funding for graduate students and increased advising support, Graduate School Dean Charles Caramello wrote in an e-mail.

He added that these factors will help to increase completion rates and decrease completion time — two of the goals of the university's Strategic Plan.

"A strategic and gradual decrease in overall enrollment will positively affect the university's graduate programs and will help to achieve the goals laid out for graduate education in the Strategic Plan," Caramello wrote.

Both the arts and humanities and the behavioral and social sciences colleges will both cut their enrollment by about 30 doctoral students next year, the largest two decreases, while three colleges — the mathematical and physical sciences college, the engineering college and the public health school — will actually admit more students.

"I'm really worried about the importance of the behavioral and social sciences and humanities decreasing," Graduate Student Government President Anupama Kothari said. "Everything seems really oriented toward engineering."

But arts and humanities Associate Dean Elizabeth Loizeaux said adjusting enrollment would actually help the college and emphasized that enrollment changes were not uniform across the college's 17 doctoral programs.

"‘Right-sizing' will, in fact, help us build even stronger graduate programs — programs with better financial support for their students and with higher job placement rates," Loizeaux said. "All of this will enhance the humanities."

The new targets were based on programs' successes in "training, mentoring and appropriately placing doctoral students" along with their abilities to "recruit, train and mentor top students and support them financially," Caramello wrote.

The decision to examine doctoral enrollment was not motivated by budget concerns, he noted, but some programs may have suggested decreasing their enrollment because of the budget.

The new figures would help to ensure that doctoral students find suitable employment after they leave the university, Loizeaux said.

"We also need to align our programs with the availability of jobs," she said. "Students come into graduate school with dreams of entering the profession for which it trains them. We need to help assure that if they are successful in their programs, that dream will be realized."

Kothari said she was concerned by that kind of calculation, because it fails to take into account the inherent value of education.

"We are in the business of education — we are not in the business of placing students," Kothari said. "It's not a numbers game. You're going for a Ph.D. because you want to learn more."

Teaching assistants' workloads will not increase as a result of the new targets, Caramello wrote, a concern GSG officials brought up last semester.

It took 15 months to arrive at the new targets, Caramello wrote. Each of the university's 83 doctoral programs gathered data on their successes and resources and proposed their own enrollment targets, he wrote in a letter to the graduate programs.

Final enrollment targets were selected after meetings between graduate school officials and representatives from each college.

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