US chemistry graduate programs scale back

This year has been a tough one for chemists who want to go to graduate school in the US. Driven by uncertainty in federal funding and the rising cost of supporting graduate students, US chemistry graduate programs are taking significantly fewer students than they did just 2 years ago. Many students who had been hoping to pursue PhDs have been denied admission to programs they likely would have been accepted into just a couple of years ago and are now uncertain about what their next steps should be.

Graduate school is not for everyone, but Connor Doran, Nicolle Pino, and Rebecca Turay want to pursue doctorates in chemistry. These three young chemists shared their graduate school application journeys with C&EN, checking in over the course of several months as they awaited the fate of the applications they had submitted for programs beginning in fall 2026.

Doran, who recently graduated from Worcester Polytechnic Institute, knew he wanted to work toward his doctorate not long after starting undergraduate research as a sophomore. He says research has been among the most fun things he’s done at college, and he also enjoyed doing research at a pharmaceutical company during the summer of 2025. Going into the lab every day, he says, “didn’t really feel like a job to me.”

Pino’s experience is similar. During her second year at Miami Dade College, she started doing research with her general chemistry professor. “He introduced me to the world of inorganic chemistry, and I just fell in love with it,” she says. She continued working with him even after she transferred to Florida International University, where she graduated this spring.

As a high school student, Turay says, she asked a lot of questions—so many that some might have considered her annoying, including, she suspects, her high school chemistry teacher, who she felt was dismissive. But as a student at CUNY Brooklyn College, where she graduated in December 2025, that curiosity was encouraged, and she did undergraduate research for 2 years. One of her professors told her it would be a shame if she didn’t go to graduate school. “I had to really sit down with that and think,” she says, and she eventually decided that graduate school seemed like an excellent opportunity to capitalize on her curiosity.

For these prospective graduate students, and many like them, the graduate school application process has been frustrating this year. Some programs have taken an unusually long time to respond to applicants—sometimes more than a month longer than they have in years past. In many cases, these programs haven’t let applicants know when they’ve been denied admission, which has made it hard for students to plan.

The shifting US graduate school landscape

Chemistry graduate programs in the US started contracting more than a year ago, with a chaotic admission process for graduate students starting in fall 2025. Many students found their offers of admission had been rescinded after solid federal grant funding became tenuous under the Donald J. Trump administration. Many hoped it was an aberration that would resolve itself the following year. Signs suggested otherwise.

In October, the Harvard Crimson reported that Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences would be making dramatic cuts to the number of PhD students they would admit in 2026 and 2027. One professor told the publication that the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology would be admitting only four or five new graduate students to the PhD program—a shockingly low number of students for a department that currently lists 20 faculty members accepting graduate students on its website.

Harvard had come under intense pressure from the Trump administration, but the following month the blogger Chemjobber, who follows the chemistry job market, wrote that he suspected the reduction in grad school admissions was more widespread. Students applying to start graduate school in 2026, he warned, should have alternate plans in case they didn’t get in.

Doran, Pino, and Turay had heard about the chaos of 2025, as well as murmurs that 2026 might be a tough year. But they still applied: Doran to 10 schools, Pino to 5, and Turay to 3. By early February, a time when most departments have started to make offers to students or invite them to campus for interviews, Doran had heard back from only three schools, all denials. Pino had been accepted at one and hadn’t heard back from the other four. Turay had yet to hear from any school. Her mentor encouraged her to apply outside the US because of the funding situation.

Doran said at the time that he felt a little blindsided by the slow response. “I knew that the number of people admitted would be lower, but I wasn’t expecting it to be as low as some people are saying,” he said.

“The waiting time might eat you alive, but it’s just a matter of waiting and just being patient,” Pino said when she spoke with C&EN in February. Not long after, she learned she’d been accepted to a second school.

Funding concerns force chemistry programs to slim down

The pressures forcing chemistry departments to shrink their incoming classes boil down to money: uncertainty in federal funding and the rising costs of supporting graduate students.

Typically, graduate students in US chemistry PhD programs don’t pay to earn their advanced degrees. Instead, their tuition is paid for, and they earn a small stipend to cover living expenses. For graduate students in their first and often their second years, the chemistry department pays for tuition and for the stipend, and in return, the students work as teaching assistants, or TAs. For more advanced graduate students, their research mentors usually cover the expenses with research grants, and the students work as research assistants, or RAs.

Under the current administration, the main sources of federal grants—the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the National Science Foundation, and the Department of Energy—have become unreliable. Even when grant applications are funded, there is uncertainty about whether the money will actually make it to the research group via the appropriations process. The changes to funding mean there’s less money for everything that’s needed to run an effective research program, including graduate students.

Jiwoong Park, chair of the Chemistry Department at the University of Chicago, says the anxiety about future funding means universities are now much more cautious than they have been in the past about how many graduate students they admit.

“When we hire graduate students, we are hiring them for 5 or 6 years, and almost no grant funding is for 5 or 6 years,” Park says. In the past, universities might have been able to make up any shortfalls in grant funding by paying senior graduate students to be TAs from the school’s own funds. But, Park says, universities are under considerable financial stress, and it’s not clear if they have the money to pay TAs that way anymore.

Cathy Murphy, head of the Chemistry Department at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, says, “With the craziness in federal funding, do we know in 3 years that we’ll even have any money for students at all, given how things were slashed?”

In a worst-case scenario, Murphy says, shortfalls would have to be made up by having all graduate students be TAs. If that situation were to happen, the Chemistry Department would be responsible for paying them, she says, “and we do not have that budget.” Fortunately, that scenario hasn’t happened yet, Murphy adds.

Carlos Baiz, associate chair for graduate studies in the Chemistry Department at the University of Texas at Austin, says it’s not just the rate of funding that’s the problem for departments. “It’s the uncertainty—the fact that a lot of agencies don’t have their full appropriations.” What’s more, Baiz says, the timeline for getting a grant now is much longer than it used to be. He was awarded an NIH grant last year, and it took a year and a half for the money to come in.

Baiz also says that graduate student unionization has changed the financial picture for many chemistry departments. Unionization has bumped up graduate student stipends so that the cost to support a graduate student is nearly on par with the cost to support a postdoctoral fellow.

The result may be a change to the makeup of chemistry research groups. “I think that faculty members are going to work with fewer students, maybe more postdocs, since postdocs tend to be a little bit more productive, and it’s a shorter-term commitment,” Baiz says. Postdocs typically work in a research group for 2 to 3 years, instead of the 5 to 6 years for a graduate student.

Kyle Crabtree, vice chair for graduate affairs and chair of the graduate program in chemistry and chemical biology at the University of California, Davis, says it’s become challenging to get faculty to commit to taking new graduate students into their research groups, which means that schools are simply taking fewer students. “Every admission decision for a PhD student, since you have higher costs and more uncertainty, it’s a big gamble,” he says.

Crabtree says his department used to guarantee financial support for graduate students for 4 years, but now they guarantee it only for the first year of the program—a change they made 2 years ago. Crabtree says if that 1-year guarantee had been the case back when he was looking at going to graduate school, he probably wouldn’t have applied. “I think I would have just gone and found a job,” he says.

Prospective graduate students feel the pinch

To get a handle on how widespread the cuts to the incoming graduate school class of 2026 would be, C&EN sent surveys to the 31 US chemistry graduate programs that produced the most PhDs, according to the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics’ Survey of Earned Doctorates in 2020, the most recent year for which this type of data are available. C&EN asked these departments to compare the number of incoming graduate students in 2024 with 2026. Twenty departments replied under the condition that the data would be reported anonymously.

All 20 chemistry departments reported that their incoming classes for 2026 would be smaller than for 2024—an average 37% fewer students than they took in 2024. There were 2,738 PhDs awarded in chemistry in 2024 in the US, according to the most recent Survey of Earned Doctorates. A back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that if there were to be a 37% cut in PhDs across the board, there would be more than 1,000 fewer chemists earning their doctorates in just a few years. What’s more, all the schools that responded to C&EN’s survey said they did not expect their incoming classes of graduate students to increase in the foreseeable future.

Chris Vanderwal, vice chair of graduate affairs for the Chemistry Department at the University of California, Irvine, says the program size has averaged 250 students during his 20-plus years on the faculty. But over the course of the past 2 to 3 years, the number of students has dropped to under 200.

“That’s a massive decrease, and I really hope we can come back,” Vanderwal says. He says smaller enrollments mean there aren’t enough students to sustain the department’s research groups.

When C&EN caught up with Doran, Pino, and Turay in early March, they had received a few denials, and they still had not yet heard back from all the schools they had applied to, despite the fact that accepted students were required to commit to a program by April 15—a little more than a month away.

“I’m not really expecting to get into any of the four schools that I’m waiting for,” Doran said at the time about his remaining prospects. “I thought I’d be pretty devastated about it, but honestly, I feel pretty good.” He had a plan: in addition to working as an intern at the same pharmaceutical company where he worked last summer, he hoped to publish his undergraduate senior thesis work and speak at some conferences, which would make him a stronger candidate when he applies for programs that start in fall 2027. “I do want to pursue my PhD regardless, so I will definitely reapply to schools next year,” he said.

Turay had received two denials and was still waiting to hear from one PhD program she had applied to. She was considering applying to a master’s degree program. “I am not discouraged because I know that sometimes rejection is redirection,” she said. “All I know is I’m going to get a PhD eventually.”

Although Pino was still waiting to hear from three of the schools she applied to, after campus visits to the two schools where she had been accepted, she was close to making a commitment.

A future with fewer chemistry PhDs

Many of the faculty that spoke with C&EN for this story said that talented senior undergraduates in their research groups weren’t getting admission offers to graduate school.

That lack of an offer was the case for one of Alshakim Nelson’s students. “I did not see this coming,” says Nelson, chair of the Chemistry Department at the University of Washington. In a typical year, he says, he would have expected this student to get into several programs.

Nelson says the decline in chemistry PhDs will impact the US’s position of leadership in global science. “We benefit from generating PhD students from a wide variety of backgrounds with different ideas and thoughts that lead to innovations and advances in fundamental science,” he says. “I think it’s a great tragedy that this is happening now.”

With fewer PhDs, there will be fewer experts, says the University of Chicago’s Park. “People think that PhDs are just people who learned one thing deeply,” he says. “It’s not that. PhDs are the kind of people who can think creatively, who can come up with creative solutions. And I would say that the world needs more of that.”

Others are less worried about fewer chemistry PhDs. Illinois’s Murphy wonders if employers will look into hiring chemists with bachelor’s and master’s degrees for positions they previously opened only to PhD holders. Murphy says she’s had students who want to go to graduate school because they’ve found bachelor’s level positions to be boring. “If it turns out that jobs are actually more interesting for bachelor’s and master’s holders, then that could be a win-win,” she says.

At the University of Pittsburgh, the Chemistry Department recently decided to start a 2-year master’s degree program. Although the department had been contemplating the program for a few years, looking at this year’s applicant pool clinched the decision, says Geoff Hutchison, director of graduate studies for the department.

“We’re well aware we can’t accept everyone we might want into our PhD program. And we’re also aware, because we have lots of undergrads applying to grad schools, that there are going to be some really talented students that want to do a PhD, that are not going to get PhD offers this year,” Hutchison says. Students in Pitt’s master’s program would take graduate school classes and do research, but they would not be TAs. They would also not receive a stipend and would have to pay tuition for the program.

By April, it was clear that Doran and Turay weren’t going to be admitted into any graduate programs in this cycle. While both said they had considered doing master’s programs, neither decided to pursue that option.

Turay had taken a job in February working with CUNY Brooklyn College’s environmental health and safety department. She planned to continue this work, in which she’s responsible for disposing of chemicals from retired faculty members’ labs. Thinking of the past few months, she said, “I know this is a tough cycle for everybody, not just for chemistry.”

Doran echoed those sentiments. “It’s not just me going through this, which makes me feel a bit better about it,” he said. He hopes he can extend his internship at the pharmaceutical company beyond the summer or return to work in his undergraduate research lab as a postbaccalaureate student while he applies for graduate school again.

Pino committed to joining the graduate program in chemistry at the University of Texas at El Paso, where she will be an Alfred P. Sloan Scholar. She said it’s bittersweet because she’ll be leaving her family, her research group, her mentor, and the South Florida environment that’s shaped her for 20 years. “It’s going to be a big change,” she said.

Reflecting on her graduate school journey, Pino said that despite the dire news about shrinking PhD programs, she still thought it was important for students who want to go to graduate school to apply. “You will never know if you got accepted or rejected if you don’t apply.”