Harvard Crimson: Harvard Chemistry to cut entering grad student class to 4 to 5 students in 2026

Via Jon Ben-Menachem on Bluesky, this news from the Harvard Crimson (article by William C. Mao and Veronica H. Paulus, emphasis mine): 

"The Faculty of Arts and Sciences slashed the number of Ph.D. student admissions slots for the Science division by more than 75 percent and for the Arts & Humanities division by about 60 percent for the next two years.

...The Organismic and Evolutionary Biology department will shrink its class size by roughly 75 percent to three new Ph.D. students, according to two professors. Molecular and Cellular Biology will reduce its figure to four new students, and Chemistry and Chemical Biology will go down to four or five admits, one of the professors added.

The reduction in admissions slots puts a figure to FAS Dean Hopi E. Hoekstra’s announcement in late September that the school would be admitting Ph.D. students at “significantly reduced levels.” Hoekstra cited uncertainty around research funding and an increase to the endowment tax — which could cost Harvard $300 million per year — as sources of financial pressure."

Well, add this to the list of things that I did not accurately predict on January 20 of this year. While I do feel that this may be unique to Harvard (due to the direct attention that has attracted from the Trump Administration), it is very clear that PhD admissions will be significantly reduced to chemistry programs in Fall 2026 and likely for the foreseeable future. That is very bad news for the long run of the American chemical enterprise, both academic and industrial.

Perhaps I am overly optimistic, but you can perhaps imagine a scenario where this is simply a one to two year blip at Harvard and not a widespread crimp on forward research in academic chemistry in the United States, but I would not bet next month's mortgage payment on that one. 

Obviously, this will have odd and stochastic short-term impacts throughout the academic pipeline. It appears that class sizes are in the 30ish range for Harvard CCB; this means that 25ish students will have to find homes somewhere else in academia or industry. If this is a ripple simply in Cambridge, that is one thing - if it is larger (i.e. I estimate that the entering class in the United States in normal times is somewhere around 3300 students per year in PhD programs in chemistry) and we're looking at the system cutting students by some very large percentage, this will definitely have impacts for years to come. 

Best wishes to the affected students, and to all of us.