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Faith, a current senior at Suffolk University in Boston, was preparing to submit her application to the Ph.D. program in sociology at Boston University (BU) when she received an email from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences on November 14, just a few weeks before the application deadline, announcing that the program was no longer accepting applicants.
The program is among twelve in the social sciences and humanities for which BU has suspended admissions for the 2025-2026 academic year, including English, history, linguistics, and political science.
“It was extremely frustrating and disappointing because I had already started my application for it, started filling out the forms and getting my letters of recommendation specifically catered towards the school,” says Faith, who asked that her last name be withheld as she is still in the application process at other schools. The timing of the announcement, she says, only makes matters worse: By the time applicants were notified about the pause, it was too close to the deadlines of most programs for them to add another school to their lists.
Nisa Rivera, another senior at Suffolk, was also in the process of applying to the Sociology program, and received the same email. “I found out at about 11 o’clock at night,” Rivera says. “I was like, ‘Wait, can they just do that?’ ”
The abrupt decision by BU was announced a week after the end of a nearly seven-month graduate worker strike in October, which concluded when the school’s Graduate Workers Union (BUGWU) reached a contract agreement that included raises of more than 70 percent for the lowest-paid Ph.D. student workers in the form of a $45,000 minimum annual stipend and 3 percent annual raises during the three-year term.
In a statement posted on Instagram shortly after the announcement, BUGWU claimed the university’s actions were a direct response to the contract agreement.
“Functionally,” the statement reads, “this is equivalent to a massive layoff aimed explicitly at cutting costs for the educational and research programs at BU with a focus on non-STEM departments.”
The statement also referenced a report by Inside Higher Ed which revealed that two deans in the College of Arts and Sciences sent emails to lower-level administrators that repeatedly mentioned the bargaining agreement as the source of financial constraint, arguing that “it would be financially unsustainable to move forward with the cohort sizes discussed earlier this fall” with the existing budget.
Though BU has claimed it intends to reopen admissions for the shuttered programs in future years, and that the temporary pause is meant to ensure that the university can meet its commitments to current students, many students are worried about the long-term implications of the move.
In an email to The Progressive, a BUGWU representative said that “the austerity measures certainly seem to go beyond a temporary suspension of Ph.D. admissions.”
The decision to cut back on programs in the social sciences and humanities, as opposed to STEM fields, is particularly controversial. “It just shows that people don’t care about the humanities as much as they do about hard sciences,” says Rivera. “I feel like I’ve seen that a lot when it comes to academia, there is a lot of discussion around research, experiments, and new technology. I know that’s important, but so are the things that we think about socially and who we are as people.”
“So much of my work is informed by social science and humanities fields,” says Freddy Reiber, a third year Ph.D. student in the Computing & Data Science program at BU. “I draw a lot of intellectual inspiration from critical feminist perspectives and sociological models. When designing technological systems, it's critical to have a deep understanding of how marginalized communities are thinking about their interactions with technology, otherwise we risk accidentally reinforcing already prevalent marginalization. But this understanding doesn’t come out of nowhere, it comes out of these critical intellectual communities.”
For her degree, Faith intends to research incarceration and re-entry within the criminal legal system and its relationship with addiction and the opioid crisis. Like many doctoral students, she hopes to eventually become a professor. But fewer than 20 percent of those with Ph.D.s are awarded tenured professor positions. Instead, many Ph.D. holders work adjunct or contingent positions that pay only a few thousand dollars per course and do not offer benefits.
“It's really disappointing to have a university that supports a number of really great and impactful research initiatives fail to recognize that the foundation for this fantastic work is exactly the work it's choosing not to fund,” Reiber says. “Not only does this harm students in the affected departments, but it hurts students in other departments seeking to do work the university clearly wants to promote.”
BU was one of Rivera’s top choices; she only found out about the labor conditions and resulting strike after the announcement of the suspension of her program. “If I knew about any of this [earlier],” she says, “I probably would not have applied.”
Rivera comes from a nontraditional college background, having transferred to Suffolk, a private university, for her sophomore year after participating in a Massachusetts government program that paid for her first year at Middlesex Community College. When it came time to choose which graduate programs to apply to, her desire to stay in the Boston area was central. “[BU’s decision] made me really nervous,” she says, “because four of the ten schools I applied to were out of state, but I don’t really want to go to school out of state.”
In the Boston area, students are particularly impacted by the skyrocketing cost of housing, which is among the highest in the United States. Faith’s financial situation is a primary factor in her decision to apply to Ph.D. programs directly out of college, rather than pursue an unfunded master’s degree first. “I cannot pay $50,000 for my master’s, so this is one of the only opportunities that I have for going to graduate school,” she says. “Programs need to be more sensitive to that, and be adequately paying their Ph.D. students.”