Doctoral Admissions Freeze

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30 August, 2021

11:24 AM

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Columbia Daily Spectator BY TALIA ABRAHAMSON AUGUST 28, 2021 Starting this fall, fewer doctoral students will serve as teaching assistants in the humanities and social sciences. Columbia's cost-saving decision to limit doctoral student admissions in non-science fields has departments deliberating how best to staff courses over the next few years, and will likely fill teaching assistant roles with master's and undergraduate students, lecturers, and adjunct professors. The pandemic has laid bare the economic trends that have historically worked against the humanities and social sciences. With fewer external tuition funding opportunities and a contracted tenure-track job market after graduation, these fields are both expensive and vulnerable for the University. Although this timeline looks different for every department, department chairs express confidence that all students will be receiving the same, top-quality education, even as instruction becomes more diversified. Now, the question for them is where to find these qualified instructors, how to ensure their good working conditions, and, just as important, how to maintain departmental strength. Last year, as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, Columbia administrators were confronting a $700 million loss. Two significant areas of revenue for the University's finances were disrupted—clinical income decreased considerably when Columbia University Irving Medical Center postponed all elective surgeries, and international master's students— most of whom pay full tuition—were unable to resume their studies. Uncertainty over international student tuition remains the most immediately fragile element to the University's current budget. To save on expenses, the University limited faculty hires, paused travel, salary increases, and retirement contribution increases. It gave the Faculty of Arts and Sciences $62 million in aid, but that was not enough to lift the school from financial insecurity. For departments that offer five-year doctoral fellowships, the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences administration handed down a choice—to either entirely pause admissions for one year or to accept a smaller cohort of students for two years. The stated purpose of the pause was to save money on graduate students, who are often supported by stipends from the University and do not pay tuition, and focus resources toward current students. The mathematics department, unlike other departments, accepted the full pause, but pulled together funding to support its own small group of doctoral students, according to department chair Robert Friedman. In the vein of supporting current students, the GSAS established early career fellowships to support graduating students from departments that accepted the one-year pause. The one-year postdoctoral positions were announced in recognition of hiring freezes and declining tenure-track positions in academia. The pause in doctoral admissions has a poignant, immediate effect for the fall. In all social sciences and humanities departments—with the exception of art history, statistics, and economics, which decided to stagger the pause over two years—there will be a missing cohort of first-year doctoral students. "Ph.D. students really are an important source of innovation in the department. In many ways, they're essential to having a robust, lively place where people are asking interesting questions and pursuing new ideas," Gregory Wawro, department chair of political science, said. One objective of doctoral programs—alongside research—is to prepare students to teach at the university level. At a minimum, academic departments award doctoral students in their first few years of study with teaching fellowships such as course teaching assistantships. Now, without a first-year doctoral cohort, a shortage of students will be progressing year by year through the programs, which can take anywhere from five to seven years to complete, depending on the department. "My analogy is like the elephant moving through the snake, but it's the opposite of that," Tian Zheng, professor and department chair of statistics, said. "It's not a bump. It's a dip. A dip has to go through the snake before we can resume." The admissions slowdown affects only humanities, social science, mathematics, and statistics departments because their doctoral funding packages are paid for by the University. This set-up is in contrast with students who study the natural sciences, who receive external grants to continue their doctoral studies once they transition into lab work. The physics department, for example, has 11 doctoral students entering this fall, which department chair Dmitri Basov said is not unusual considering the need to balance out last year's over-admitted cohort. As with undergraduate admissions, graduate departments are unable to predict the exact number of students who accept an offer of admission, which can cause over-yielding or under-yielding. The English department, meanwhile, took a one-year pause on admissions. Despite a decline in tenure-track English jobs, Columbia's English department is one of the largest among its peers with an average of 150 doctoral students in cohorts of 18. Cohort size has been an ethical dilemma for the department, and the dispute reached its height in May 2019 when no one in the graduating cohort initially found tenure-track jobs. English department chair Jenny Davidson has been a historic proponent for accepting fewer doctoral students, and she said the faculty now agrees that the program should not be more than three-quarters its current size. The pause in graduate admissions may have inadvertently given faculty the time necessary to adjust to the idea of a smaller doctoral program. "First of all, the more students we have, the thinner the advising is spread and the more students start to fall between the cracks," Davidson said. "Second of all, what on Earth are they going to do for jobs after they finish, if there are only a handful of tenure-track jobs anymore in English? It's the traditional goal job, although there are a lot of other kinds of jobs that are good, too. It's been clear for a long time that we needed to make that hard choice and cut our program size." Even as the English department contemplates a smaller graduate student population, Davidson anticipates a new tenure-track position for the department. The English department was recently authorized to conduct a search for an assistant professor in African-American poetry. The political science and history department heads said that they have had to scale back some graduate-level course offerings to adjust to the smaller number of students in the coursework stage of their programs. History department chair Adam Kosto said the target was a 40 percent reduction in graduate courses. Ideally, French department chair and director of graduate studies Madeleine Dobie wants the department to admit five new doctoral students per year, but like most, the French department decided to accept the one-year pause. The decision was motivated in part to support the University's finances, to protect more students from pandemic uncertainty, and to provide visa security to a postdoctoral student through an early career fellowship. "The early career fellowship is an opportunity for one of our students that might protect them, which indeed it has," Dobie said. "It's a student from another country whose visa status would have been very difficult, and that's not a situation limited to French. Certainly, we're glad to be able to keep the person in a safer situation in the U.S." The provost office has begun to thaw the hiring freeze by allowing select departments, through a slow and rigorous process, to initiate job searches. Throughout the freeze, departments have been allowed to seek hires through target-of-opportunity searches. Twelve tenured or tenure-track faculty were hired in 2021 thanks to searches that began before the pandemic; 13 searches—mostly targets of opportunity—remain outstanding. Statistics will be one of the first departments to feel the direct effects of the admissions restrictions because it introduces teaching responsibilities in the first year. However, it is one of the departments that elected to split its cohort over two years. Zheng said her department has been proactive over the summer in finding qualified teaching assistants and found enough aid before the fall. With close to 6,000 students enrolled in statistics courses, doctoral students were never enough to cover the department's teaching needs, so the department was looking across all its academic programs, including master's students and senior undergraduate students. The onboarding process for TAs is the same for all students, which is in part why Zheng is confident about adding more master's and undergraduate students. The admissions pause encouraged Zheng's department to expand recruiting efforts to these groups, and Zheng expects it to continue this way for at least the next four or five years. And beyond that, based on past successes with qualified master's and undergraduate student TAs, she thinks that the practice might be here to stay. "In the past, the instructional team was a professor and a doctoral student as TA, but going forward, we may think of a more complicated instructional team. You have an instructor, a senior TA, and junior TAs, and they oversee multiple sections. Junior TAs may be like peer TAs to the students, offering more direct support. That could be the structure," Zheng said. "It's something we thought of as a way to scale up our efforts using the number of students we have, but it turned out to be an opportunity, as well." The political science department has similarly large enrollments, but it accepted the one-year pause, and doctoral students do not start teaching until their second years. Wawro said the department is looking into the potential for master's and undergraduate student TAs or TAs from other parts of the University. For example, University President Lee Bollinger's "Freedom of Speech and Press" course in the political science department employs law students. "We're going to explore as many options as we can because our needs are going to be pretty acute," Wawro said. Art history is another department that opted to admit half of its cohort this fall. Department chair Barry Bergdoll said that the department will have half of the traditional 12 students this fall. His department's decision came down to wanting to keep a more integrated culture among graduate students and to cultivate a more diverse student body. According to Bergdoll, admissions pauses of competing universities such as Yale and the University of Chicago put his department at an advantage during the admissions process for the fall. "We really had an incredibly selective situation," Bergdoll said. "We had a significant increase in the number of applications for a decrease in the number of places. We think this is just an incredible class that's coming." The French department does not currently have a pressing need for new professors because tenure-track faculty tend to teach more advanced courses. Language-learning courses, which doctoral students usually teach, can be staffed instead by lecturers. Unlike adjuncts, who are paid per course, lecturers have salaries and benefits. Dobie said she was able to hire three one-year lecturers for the 2021-22 academic year and to appoint one lecturer to a renewable lecturer role. "It's clear that in a couple of years, we will have a problem meeting our language course teaching needs with graduate students because we won't have a cohort. They'll be missing," Dobie said. "And there, we will have to hire adjuncts or preferably lecturers to cover those courses that otherwise the graduate students would be teaching." Davidson said she would support hiring more full-time lecturers or letting graduate students teach two courses with twice the pay. The English department offers few large lecture classes, but doctoral students help staff the Core Curriculum classes. Her worry is not about a higher proportion of teaching being done by lecturers, but how tenure-track faculty and the University can support these individuals. Next steps for lecturers include better pay, lighter teaching loads, and opportunities for sabbatical research. "None of us are happy about this move towards contingent labor and that precarious status of people trying to start their careers in academia now, but from the undergraduate point of view, that's really not a concern about the quality of instruction," Davidson said. "It's a concern about working conditions and fair compensation for the instructors." Not every department sees hiring more lecturers as a solution. Chemistry department chair Tomislav Rovis said the department has semi-permanent lecturers who are appointed on multi-year contracts, but they can help to fulfill only the department's teaching mission. The chemistry department, which was not given permission last year or this year to hire new tenure-track professors, needs instead to fill holes in its research coverage. "You're hiring the lecturer because you have teaching needs. Tenure-track faculty are hired because they are good teachers, but really you're hiring them for research," Rovis said. "It's quite frankly unfair to then expect someone that's been teaching for five years or 10 years to be able to compete on the research side." In the sciences, the cost of a tenure-track position can become exorbitant—sometimes millions of dollars—because of expenses associated with investing in a new lab and research. The University wanted to refrain from committing to such a high cost during the pandemic, according to Rovis, which has impacted his ability to hire. As opposed to some humanities departments, which are seeking qualified TAs for large or fundamental courses, the chemistry department can cover those courses. They were allowed a cohort of doctoral students for the fall and successfully admitted 25 students—the exact number they wanted. Rovis said a longer-term impact of the hiring freeze could be the competitiveness of the department and its ability to attract top students, given current difficulties in offering research in developing areas. "To keep the department healthy and strong and vibrant, you always want young people coming in, and any delay is an interruption and a negative," Rovis said. "Any delay, there's a cost associated." The full effect of the graduate student pause will be felt in coming years, and the faculty hiring freeze perhaps even further. Right now, department heads are most concerned about adjusting existing students and faculty to a new school year, where the pandemic still threatens the community with financial insecurity and concerns for physical and mental health. Due to the pandemic, the delicate balance among different parties in the University has been upset, but each department is highly conscious of its specific circumstances. The challenge is to develop strategies to overcome these circumstances, particularly the loss of first-year doctoral students, while preserving Columbia's reputation for academic excellence for both its students and faculty. "We have to be discussing and preparing for it and have viable solutions. We have standards and ambitions to maintain," Bergdoll said. "COVID took the whole world by surprise, but this, we know something's coming. We have to plan for it." Staff writer Talia Abrahamson can be contacted at [email protected]. Follow Spectator on Twitter at @ColumbiaSpec. Founded in 1877, the Columbia Daily Spectator is the independent undergraduate newspaper of Columbia University, serving thousands of readers in Morningside Heights, West Harlem, and beyond. Read more at columbiaspectator.com and donate here.