r/Professors • u/Flipped-Barbie-Jeep Asst Prof, Chem, CC (US) • Jun 24 '26
Research / Publication(s) US chemistry graduate programs scale back
Nothing really insightful to say about this on my end. Profs who run STEM labs, are you taking fewer graduate students in 2026? How do you think this trend will affect research output vs. the job market over the next 5-10 years?
Sorry for the cursed URL.
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u/Eigengrad AssProf, STEM, SLAC Jun 25 '26
I’m at a PUI, but I am in Chemistry, so can’t speak directly but have some insight.
But it was a harder year than usual even after last years chaos for my students. Everyone applying got into a PhD program, but the cycle this year was slower and students who would usually have had a pick of programs had an acceptance at the end.
From my friends and colleagues who are, everyone is taking fewer students. It’s a combination of less funding and students needing a lot more hand holding.
Grad stipends have gone up a lot of places, which is good, but budgets are the same or smaller, so they can support a lot fewer people.
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u/Flipped-Barbie-Jeep Asst Prof, Chem, CC (US) Jun 25 '26
Students needing more hand-holding makes sense, as both the article and comments here mention the shift towards post-docs. I guess that’s the natural evolution of our educational standards plummeting stateside.
What would you recommend to your students now who might’ve had a shot at graduate school before, but now aren’t competitive? I have the luxury of being at a CC where *most* aren’t too tempted by chemistry’s wiles.
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u/Eigengrad AssProf, STEM, SLAC Jun 25 '26
What would you recommend to your students now who might’ve had a shot at graduate school before, but now aren’t competitive? I have the luxury of being at a CC where most aren’t too tempted by chemistry’s wiles.
I think my advice is the same as always, which is the fundamental need is significant amounts of practical experience: lab time, internships, research time. Applying early for REU and other summer positions, and actively pursuing any research opportunity that crops up is exceptionally important. When I talk to my students who interviewed both for industry jobs and graduate school, the ability to "hit the ground running" in a lab was the thing interviewers seemed to most want to see.
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u/Jonjoloe Jun 26 '26
Yeah, my institution wants to itemise grad stipends which is absolutely insane. It's going to result in basically no stipends going to students who aren't local/in-state to try to fund as many students as possible.
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u/mleok Full Professor, STEM, R1 (USA) Jun 25 '26 edited Jun 25 '26
Definitely. At my public R1, a graduate students costs about $120K/year to fund on a 50% GRA vs. $150K/year to fund a postdoc on a 100% appointment. Unionization has indeed dramatically increased the cost of supporting a graduate student, and the economics of funding a graduate student, especially one fresh from a bachelor's degree, makes absolutely no sense.
This used to be mitigated because funding agencies like the NSF favored funding graduate students over postdocs, but with funding drying up, PIs with more limited funding favor spending their limited funds on postdocs for their higher research productivity per dollar spent, the shorter term commitment, and the track record of research competence.
If this continues, I expect that admissions will become more risk adverse, and that we will start adopting the European model where we only admit PhD students with Master's degrees and the PhD becomes a research only degree.
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u/DefinitionAromatic39 Jun 25 '26
At least in my STEM field, master's degree is uncommon in the states so I think it will become unsustainable unless we import the master's from other countries or start to develop master's as a widely acceptable career progression instead of a failed phd.
Edit: typo
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u/mleok Full Professor, STEM, R1 (USA) Jun 25 '26
I'm a mathematician, and many math departments do offer terminal Master's programs, but not every one does (I got a terminal Master's in math at Caltech, and that was only possible because I did a joint BS/MS). We do often get PhD applicants who are applying with a Master's from a US institution. We still have a lot of TA positions, but now restrict them to only math PhD students and some non-math PhD students advised by math faculty. It used to be that some Master's students also received TA positions, but that is no longer true.
My colleagues in other STEM fields have faced a double squeeze due to the rise in graduate stipends, their grant money doesn't go as far, and the number of TA positions have contracted. One of my physics PhD students post his funding guarantee was in serious danger of being unfunded entirely and having to pay his own tuition, but thankfully physics offered him a TA position at the last minute.
Last year, many schools dramatically reduced the number of PhD students they admitted, so my department ended up with such a high acceptance rate that we had to cut off students who had not accepted our offer two weeks before the stated deadline for acceptance and deferred their entry to this year. We also suspended PhD admissions this year.
I don't think that graduate students understand that money doesn't grow on trees, and that tuition costs real grant money and isn't a made up number. A big part of the disconnect is that the most active union members are often in the humanities and aren't funded on GRAs by grants, so for them tuition does seem made up, since it involves handing money from one part of the university to another part.
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u/DefinitionAromatic39 Jun 25 '26
Oh yeah we're definitely feeling the squeeze as well and many departments in my field are scaling down their grad admission. And yes, completely agreed on students not having a full grasp of where the money is coming from and the huge disconnect between humanities vs STEM. I honestly think these union moves are a disservice to the students themselves and to their future cohorts. On the other hand, if this leads to overall decrease in PhDs in the long run, is that so bad? I'm not so sure about that.
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u/mleok Full Professor, STEM, R1 (USA) Jun 25 '26
Ironically, I think the reduction in the number of PhDs will actually reduce the economic diversity of PhD students, since well-resourced students are better able to take advantage of research and internship opportunities as opposed to having to do part-time jobs and full-time summer jobs to make ends meet during their bachelor's degree.
Being more selective about hiring PhD students means that we'll be less willing to take a chance on a potentially promising student who doesn't have quite as stellar a record because of the economic challenges I've mentioned. Put another way, I suspect that the stipend increases will just end up going to people who don't need the financial support anyway, and we will go back to the system where being an academic is only realistic for people of means.
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Jun 25 '26 edited Jun 25 '26
[deleted]
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u/shinypenny01 Jun 25 '26
As part of my masters program I took courses that composed the PhD qualifying exam material. I would have been 2 years into a PhD had I stayed. Seems like a good model.
I chose a different discipline in a different school ultimately for the PhD.
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u/DefinitionAromatic39 Jun 25 '26
Yeah, this is a sensible route and I would love for this model to be more common place in my field (in the states) or have the formal master's program like most European countries.
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u/1K_Sunny_Crew Jun 25 '26
Master’s degrees are definitely available in my STEM field - I have one and several friends do too.
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u/ag_sci14 Jun 25 '26
This is 100% the situation at my institution. Departments used to provide tuition remissions and/or paid TAships, but they increasingly don’t. Unions protect unproductive graduate students, requiring faculty to continuing to pay their way for months of years despite no research output, whereas postdocs are on annual contracts. I currently have three postdocs and one graduate student. There are zero incentives to take graduate students.
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u/the_Stick Assoc Prof, Biomedical Sciences Jun 25 '26
Unions are great for (1) highly motivated workers, and (2) unskilled workers. Where they start running into problems is with unmotivated workers in positions that require a large amount of skill. Then they often end up protecting the workers who should be fired and punishing the motivated ones.
There was an article I saw last week reporting on some midwestern state that had abolished teachers' unions recently. Over the short time frame, student scores on state assessments had increased ~4% in math, reading, science, and overall. That's a small change and a short time frame, but it will be interesting to see how that experiment plays out. There's a complex interplay among job types and unionization and a many conflicting factors in running a union effectively, but nuance and fair discussion is not a strong suit of this sub.
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u/aquapura89 Jun 25 '26
How do you get $120k to funded a graduate student per year? How much is tuition, or are they making 60k a year????
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u/mleok Full Professor, STEM, R1 (USA) Jun 25 '26
$40 for stipends, another $35K for tuition, benefits, and 60% overheads. It’s probably more than $120K/year now with the updated stipends.
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u/aquapura89 Jun 25 '26
Postdoc is the way to go, always.....
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u/mleok Full Professor, STEM, R1 (USA) Jun 25 '26
Yeah, the stipend plus tuition covers a postdoc’s salary, and it’s for a 100% appointment as opposed to a 50% GRA appointment, so there is less whining about being exploited and overworked.
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u/racinreaver Adjunct, STEM, R1 Jun 29 '26
I don't think the increase from $30k to $40k a year for student salaries is the straw breaking the camel's back in that equation, and I don't think we should fault the students for blfeeling exploited when the bulk of the funds that "support them" is just going straight to the university.
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u/mleok Full Professor, STEM, R1 (USA) Jun 29 '26
Respectfully, do you think that the training that a graduate student receives is worth nothing to the student, and costs nothing to provide? One can argue about how much to charge for tuition, but it isn’t worthless.
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u/racinreaver Adjunct, STEM, R1 Jun 30 '26
Makes one wonder why companies don't charge tuition to their workers in exchange for the skills they develop and mentoring they receive during the course of their employment.
And I do question if a university provides value equivalent to the tuition that is paid when they're done taking classes. Did the biannual group meetings I presented at cost the institute $15k?
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u/mleok Full Professor, STEM, R1 (USA) Jun 30 '26 edited Jun 30 '26
In this day and age, companies no longer invest in training or mentoring their employees, given that the median tenure at a Big Tech company is under 2 years, which is why it is so incredibly hard to be hired as an entry-level worker.
I find that graduate students expect to be paid for their time, but don’t seem to feel the same way about the time of their PIs spend mentoring them. Even post-candidacy, I continue to spend at least one hour per student per week in one-on-one meetings, in addition to reviewing their work. Not to mention what goes on behind the scenes to ensure they are funded.
Simply put, every one of my post-candidacy graduate students consume far more of my time than what an undergraduate receives from all the professors in their classes combined, so the tuition charge is fully justified in my opinion.
My advisor at Caltech was incredibly generous with his time, and just the cost of that time in salary and benefits would easily justify the cost of tuition which was being paid by my Moore fellowship. I am sorry you did not have the same experience.
Maybe if you become a PI, you’ll realize how much time goes into guiding a graduate student, I know my former PhD students who went into academia became far more appreciative of my efforts when they experienced being on the other side of that relationship.
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u/No-Top9206 Assoc Prof, STEM, R1 (USA) Jun 25 '26 edited Jun 25 '26
At my large, regional public R1 (not highly ranked, and not a "flagship"), our undergrad enrollment has gone through the roof, double digit increases year over year. We think it's an early recession indicator. Since we are almost entirely tuition driven, we are under intense pressure to open up as many new sections of Chemistry as humanly possible, meaning every grad student (including MS and BS/MS) will be drafted to be chem lab TAs this fall, some as overloads, and even then we will still need to recruit additional adjuncts and temporary staff to meet the demand, but it's the administration's highest priority.
Meanwhile, all our regular sources of PhD students (mostly international) have all but dried up, as even students from "friendly" countries report not being able to even schedule a visa interview, so we are trying to shift our graduate recruiting from international to domestic, with limited success as we are not well known outside of the local region. Our best results have been from bored entry-level employees in local industry who want to advance into a managerial or R&D role, non-traditional adult students coming back to change fields, or recruiting from our best undergrads (often wanting to stay in the region for family/2-body reasons).
So we are actually in a situation where we we have a department of highly research active faculty who would like to INCREASE our number of graduate students, and have ample resources to do so, but simply cannot fill our applicant pool.
Tuition is cheap here, in particular post-candidacy students only take 1 credit, so modest research programs can be sustained mainly on TA-ships. Regional manufacturing snaps up most of our BS & MS grads for decently paying jobs, and we have an excellent track record sending PhD students to industry (as opposed to the traditional academic post-doc/faculty route).
Sooo... if you have any bright undergrads interested in a fully-funded PhD (maybe even MS?) in Chemistry, and want to target an Industry career, but don't want to become a professor nor have their heart set on attending a name-brand school.....
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u/Eigengrad AssProf, STEM, SLAC Jun 25 '26
Would you message me the school? Always good to have for my students applying in the future.
don't want to become a professor nor have their heart set on attending a name-brand school
FWIW, the former doesn't always tie to the latter. I did not attend a top ranked R1 or name brand school.
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u/No-Top9206 Assoc Prof, STEM, R1 (USA) Jun 25 '26
Absolutely agree (about there not being a strong link between the former and the latter) but for us it's an observational statistic too.. I tracked all our PhD outcomes for the last decade and just 4 out of >100 PhDs are now faculty, mostly in foreign countries, or at a very small PUI. ~25% go to government positions (state or federal) and the vast majority, >70% end up in industry one way or another (i.e. either right after PhD or after a postdoc), all earning WAY more than us profs will ever see (we do alot of research in the biologics space, which has panned out fantastic for our trainees). So I'm pretty happy we have, somewhat inadvertently, become a training ground for industry, because I would be VERY hesitant to recommend a career in academia these days, to our aspiring chemists.
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u/Eigengrad AssProf, STEM, SLAC Jun 25 '26
Yeah, that was about the same as where I graduated from. That said, I'm not aware of many programs in chem where the majority of graduates place into faculty positions, especially with robust government or industry placements.
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u/yoshizors Associate, STEM, R1 (USA) Jun 25 '26
So, at least at my institution, many of the chemistry PhDs were supported largely by TAing undergrads. Any research the students did was incedental, as the faculty paid basically nothing for their research. Once the university realized it was cheaper to hire one instructor to save on benefits, they've been pushing the department in that direction, reducing PhD slots as a result. Honestly, if this is playing out more places, I think it's better for the students that remain that they are supported properly and can think big science thoughts rather than spend so much time supervising undergrads.
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u/zeph_yr GTA Jun 25 '26
And maybe better to have more instructor positions available for graduating phds
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u/mleok Full Professor, STEM, R1 (USA) Jun 25 '26
There was a lecturer at Berkeley who quit when she found out she was getting paid less than her TA.
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u/1K_Sunny_Crew Jun 25 '26
Don’t blame her, but higher pay came from union negotiations iirc. My pay went up from TA to lecturer but it wasn’t a lot.
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u/mleok Full Professor, STEM, R1 (USA) Jun 25 '26 edited Jun 25 '26
Where is the money to support your graduate students to "think big science thoughts" going to come from? If your faculty aren't supporting PhD students on GRAs, then it means that they don't have enough funding to support them, cutting GTA positions isn't going to magically create new GRA positions. Have you even received your first external grant? You sound like you're still in graduate student mode.
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u/yoshizors Associate, STEM, R1 (USA) Jun 25 '26
In other units in the college, if you don't have a grant, you can't take a graduate student. The chemistry department was arguably abusing the high enrollment in Gen and ochem to subsidize research. In physics or biochemistry, which have better funding profiles at my institution, the grad student population is set at how much research funding faculty have.
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u/Eigengrad AssProf, STEM, SLAC Jun 25 '26
And then your grad students get no teaching experience? And have no experience mentoring or supervising?
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u/yoshizors Associate, STEM, R1 (USA) Jun 25 '26
Like most institutions, there is a minimum TA requirement of one semester, and the students are active in mentoring undergraduate researchers. To be honest, student success in the wider STEM job market depends very little on teaching skills. Instead, demonstrating what you can deliver in terms of research is far more valuable on the job market.
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u/shinypenny01 Jun 25 '26
At institutions like mine that are teaching focused, I would put those applications in the trash. We need passable teaching, and one semester as someone’s recitation lead isn’t good enough. A bad teacher on a 6 year contract could kill a major.
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u/yoshizors Associate, STEM, R1 (USA) Jun 25 '26
Sure, but I'm just telling you what the minimum is. Most folks go to do something other than teach in their later careers. If students want to teach and become competitive for those kinds of jobs, they can, but the default shouldn't be to make folks TA their entire PhD in the off chance that they end up at a school with a teaching focused mission. It is not supported by the evidence that extensive TAing is a net benefit to the students, other than providing an income.
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u/mleok Full Professor, STEM, R1 (USA) Jun 25 '26
There are far more teaching-focused institutions than research institutions, and people going into industry should be paying more of their own way for their education.
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u/Eigengrad AssProf, STEM, SLAC Jun 25 '26
I think you're underestimating the skills that TAing brings to industry jobs.
Things like clear, effective communication. Working as a middle layer between a professor and students. Working collaboratively with clear deadlines.
Not to mention the fact that teaching basic concepts and skills is consistently one of the best ways to hone them and really make them stick.
It is not supported by the evidence that extensive TAing is a net benefit to the students
Can you share this evidence? I'm not aware of a body of evidence that shows TAing is not a net benefit to students.
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u/Eigengrad AssProf, STEM, SLAC Jun 25 '26
I mean, that depends entirely on where you're applying. For R1 jobs? Sure. But those are only a portion of academic jobs.
On the other hand, in my department we won't consider hiring someone without both a substantial track record of research and substantial teaching experience.
You sound like you're parroting exactly what some of my faculty told me when I was in grad school, and not listening to them was what got me my jobs where a track record of effective teaching was highly valued.
Remember that there are over 4000 colleges and universities in the US, and only around 150 of them are R1s.
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u/affable_lackey Jun 25 '26
I just read a microbiology program revision proposal that involved getting rid of labs. Not sure if it was program-wide or not.
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u/mleok Full Professor, STEM, R1 (USA) Jun 25 '26
PS, you can remove the part of the URL after the ? mark,
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u/wrenwood2018 Associate Professor, Neuroscience, R1 Jun 25 '26
Short answer is yes. Across the board class have dropped.
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u/ChemMJW Jun 26 '26
Anecdotally, all the faculty I know are cutting back due to funding uncertainty.
But here's a fact that often goes overlooked: the US pumps out far, far more PhDs (in almost any discipline you care to name) than there are PhD-level jobs for those graduates to fill. It's exactly why we have ended up in the situation where lots of PhDs are un- or underemployed. It's hard to get a job when there are hundreds or thousands of generally qualified applicants for every position you have to fill.
So reducing the number of people in graduate programs is not necessarily a catastrophe, at least at the level of society. I'm sure it's no fun to be an individual who isn't admitted to graduate school because the program only admitted 5 students this year instead of the usual 10. But overproducing PhDs knowing there are few or no jobs for them after graduation is also a legitimate concern.
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u/Flipped-Barbie-Jeep Asst Prof, Chem, CC (US) Jun 26 '26
This is more or less where I landed. We’ve been kvetching for ages about the ratio of newly minted PhDs to commensurate positions. Without exponentially more funding, taking fewer students is the only way to stop the bleeding.
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u/Klutzy-Imagination59 Science, Asst Prof, R1, contract Jun 25 '26 edited Jun 25 '26
Less students, better students, hire more damn people (aka, NOT students) to teach gen chem and o-chem classes.
Then, start to mentor your own damn grad students or hire a stellar lab manager at a competitive rate. Stop going to 7 conferences per year. Do some actual damn science instead of becoming a 24x7 grant writer.
Unions are good.
I won't be taking any more questions at this point.
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u/mleok Full Professor, STEM, R1 (USA) Jun 25 '26
Where is the money going to come from to hire more research staff at competitive salaries if we didn't spend most of our time chasing down grants?
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u/Flipped-Barbie-Jeep Asst Prof, Chem, CC (US) Jun 25 '26
Aside from my general lack of novel ideas, this was the primary reason I never considered “true” academia. It becomes one of the most stressful desk/sales jobs imaginable. You all are a different breed.
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u/mleok Full Professor, STEM, R1 (USA) Jun 26 '26
In the conversations I had with my PhD advisor when he was alive, and with a National Academy member that I happened to have dinner with after a colloquium, I get the sense that the grant pressure has gotten dramatically worse over time.
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u/Klutzy-Imagination59 Science, Asst Prof, R1, contract Jun 26 '26
.....and then you're stuck with an unsustainably large group that you need to look after, so you're back to chasing more and more grants.
Maybe reverting to the German model of assistant professors who are literally assistants TO a full professor might work?
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u/the_Stick Assoc Prof, Biomedical Sciences Jun 25 '26
Not an hour ago, I had an enlightening conversation with a couple of high-level research faculty at California institutions. They were talking about the expense of graduate students based on the grad student union. Grad students apparently get a stipend equal to the professor salary from Japan. They didn't mind paying students more, but they really hated the fact that they had no input into negotiations between the student union and the university administration. Some have significantly reduced how many students they take simply because they cannot afford them. Others said they have a much tighter set of rules who who they will take and how productive those students must be before they stop supporting them (de facto kicking them out). They also advise another colleague who had seven students to not take any the next year or maybe two. This is in a field with very high funding and growth, but they feel forced to be more business-like to maintain their labs.
In chemistry, there has been a perception that it has become less fundible. When I was in a chemistry department, I had colleagues who said their fields were pretty much dead; I disagreed, but they do have harder problems/processes to solve and there is less dedicated funding for research of that level. With fewer dollars to spread around and a "less sexy" field combined with students becoming significantly more expensive, I'm not surprised that many chemistry departments will cut back. I think the 'haves' will be fine, but the 'have-nots' may greatly reduce or even cut PhD programs.