The country’s more than 300 research universities are defined by their ability to produce research doctorates and collectively receive $65 billion from the federal government each fiscal year. The Trump administration, however, has made attempts to lessen the federal government’s financial support for American higher education. The response from higher education institutions has been to reduce the size of many Ph.D. programs — by a factor of around 15 percent, based on data from a group of Association of American Universities member institutions.
When Rebecca Weinstein, Graduate Arts and Sciences student and president of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Council, entered the University to pursue her Ph.D. in Environmental Sciences, she said she did not anticipate that she or her peers would need to remain teaching assistants as they completed their dissertations or need to share money among their lab groups.
“I came in during a time when I never would have thought that my position at U.Va. would be uncertain,” Weinstein said.
Funding shortages and a worsening postdoc job market are the causes of the uncertainty Weinstein and other doctoral students at the University, and across the nation, have said they feel. The availability of federal funding that sustains the nation’s research institutions is also in doubt.
While agencies such as the National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation have seen little change in their Congressional-approved budgets, research grants have still been terminated en masse and funds have been slow to arrive from the agencies to research institutions.
The NIH is the largest provider of federal funds for academic research. According to Science, the NIH is unlikely to award as many grants as the previous year, as it awarded fewer grants in 2025 than in 2024.
NIH grant data also shows how funding challenges can vary across related fields. Grant tracking by the Association of American Medical Colleges shows that some institutes like the National Human Genome Research Institute have seen notable increases in funding over this time last year.
Phil Trella, associate vice provost and director of the Office of Graduate and Postdoctoral Affairs, confirmed that preliminary data shows that, after a period of climbing Ph.D. enrollment, fewer students are applying to the University’s Ph.D. programs, and the programs themselves are becoming smaller.
“Between 2022 and 2025, we had several years of pretty significant increases in terms of both applications and the number of students — I think we saw about a 15 percent increase in our graduate enrollments between [20]22 and [20]25,” Trella said. “For 2026, it looks like we’re going to be going back down to where we were prior to those several years [after] 2021.”
Preliminary enrollment data for fall 2026 provided by University spokesperson Bethanie Glover shows that 2,213 doctoral students are expected to be studying at the University — down about 5 percent from the 2,332 doctoral students enrolled in fall 2025. The data shows that master's enrollment, at 3,962, is also down from a year ago but slightly higher than in fall 2024.
Glover told The Cavalier Daily that the data includes all master's students at the University but excludes M.D. and J.D. degrees from the doctoral count. The data also shows how research-based programs are being disproportionately damaged by federal funding uncertainty, with master's programs experiencing a smaller enrollment drop of around two percent over the past year — Glover noted that all Ph.D. students at the University engage in some form of research, while master’s students engage with research on a program-to-program basis.
Not all doctoral programs at the University and beyond have been impacted equally by federal policy. For instance, a report published by Nature demonstrates that in 2025, some cancelled or frozen grants were for clinical trials, cancer centers and infrastructure. Similarly, Trella said that it is hard to predict how all of the University’s many doctoral programs will be impacted by federal policy.
“The University has upwards of 50 different Ph.D. programs [and] they all operate a little bit differently in terms of the numbers of students they have enrolled, in terms of the disciplines that they are learning [and] where the funding comes from,” Trella said. “In the aggregate, we can definitely look at changes that are happening both nationally and at the University, but sometimes what’s happening in a specific program runs contrary to those trends.”
Weinstein’s program, Environmental Sciences, has seen declining cohort sizes since she entered the University in 2023. The Environmental Sciences department relies on funding from the NSF, Department of Energy and NASA, she said.
According to Stephan De Wekker, Environmental Sciences professor and graduate studies director, the 2026 cohort is the smallest of the past four years, with six students. The 2023, 2024 and 2025 cohorts had 11, seven and 12 students, respectively. The department’s decline in total graduate matriculation — including M.S. and M.A. students — were even more linear, going from 21 to 19 to 17 and finally to 14 in 2026.
“This year I believe we are at 10 to 12 [Ph.D. students] — it's definitely not anywhere near the numbers I entered in, which was 20 to 30,” Weinstein said.
Many smaller Ph.D. programs mean more competitive admissions and could place more pressure on applicants. Weinstein said she believes undergraduates planning to apply to graduate school can still take steps to stand out.
“[Undergraduates can] really hone in on specific interests or specific research abilities that they have that will make them stand out to certain advisors more than a typical application,” Weinstein said. “[Prospective] graduate students are going to have to be a little more specific as to what they want to do with their research.”
Once doctoral students are admitted to the University, they receive funding for a set number of years, which includes work as teaching assistants or graduate research assistants. Trella said that the University remains committed to its current students, but it can be a double-edged sword, hurting prospective graduate students with some smaller incoming cohorts.
“I don’t know of any case in which we have said ‘oh no, there’s a lack of funding in this department so despite the fact that we offered the student five years of funding we’re only going to have to provide them three,’” Trella said. “If we’re uncertain about funding moving forward, maybe we’re going to be a bit more conservative with the number of students we admit. The biggest lever we have to address [uncertainty] is to make sure that we are not making commitments that we cannot fulfill.”
While Weinstein echoed Trella and said she believes that the University will not remove any current Ph.D. students, she noted she is still worried that the funding slowdown will cause doctoral students to spend more time as TAs to fund their education and less time conducting research, possibly even causing students to take longer to graduate. Funding shortages also mean the research graduate students do will have fewer opportunities for enrichment, such as conference travel, Weinstein added.
“I think [there are] many benefits to TAing, [but] it obviously takes up a great deal of graduate students’ time and because of that it can actually delay a graduate student’s program progress,” Weinstein said. “This can create issues as to how this graduate student is going to remain a student if they need to take on a couple more years.”
With a poor academic job market and fewer government research jobs, research funding uncertainty will follow students even after they finish their doctoral program. According to Trella, less conventional paths for Ph.D. graduates may take on a more important role than ever, which the Ph.D. Plus all-University initiative helps students achieve. Since beginning his current role at the University in 2011, Trella has spearheaded the initiative, which supports students' professional development and provides work experience, no matter their desired postdoc career.
“About half of Ph.D. graduates go into careers within academia, [both at U.Va. and nationally], either as faculty or research scientists, but about half of them go on to a wide variety of careers that are outside of the University,” Trella said. “We provide an opportunity for students who have done some training within P.h.D. Plus to apply for funding that would allow them to spend some of their time working either with an internal host or an external host.”
The Ph.D. Plus program has a variety of partners through its internship program. Some partners are within the University, such as the Miller Center of Public Affairs, while others are outside employers such as the American Academy of Religion.
Trella said Ph.D. holders can contribute in many ways to solving societal problems without working in academia, especially in a quickly changing world.
“The thing that we’re really passionate about in our office is opening the Ph.D. more generously to society,” Trella said. “When we see the challenges society is facing, one of the things we know is that Ph.D.s who are trained in research-based doctorates are really, really excellent at solving the very kinds of problems that we see around us every day.”
Beyond the Ph.D. Plus program, Trella said, the Office of Graduate and Postdoctoral Affairs provides students with additional support beyond the funding they receive from the University — which comes in the form of grants and from their departments. He also said that the office provides career planning, coordinates policies and procedures between schools and offers some fellowship and internship funding.
Several student-run organizations on Grounds also support and represent graduate students’ interests.
Weinstein said the Graduate Arts and Sciences Council, made up of representatives from each department in Arts & Sciences, holds events for students such as research symposiums and advocates for and directs students to resources.
As president of the GSASC, Weinstein said she hopes to create a database of Arts & Sciences Ph.D. graduates, providing current students a glimpse at possible job paths and “hidden” research funding opportunities. The GSASC also plans to send out an anonymous survey for graduate Arts & Sciences students this fall.
The Graduate and Professional Council, or the governing body that oversees all graduate students at the University, has also been forced to react to the changing landscape of higher education. However, a former GPC member who is a doctoral student at the University — who wished to remain anonymous — questioned if the GPC has done enough to advocate for the graduate student community through the myriad of crises in higher education over the last few years.
The student said that the body’s leadership refused to offer any support for international graduate students, even as many student visas were under threat. In April 2025, one international student at the University had their visa canceled before ultimately being restored the next month as a result of lawsuits from hundreds of international students and emergency court orders in 23 states.
“Anytime I tried to bring up anything to do with [finding] more resources for international students [or] maybe host[ing] someone to talk in a bigger group for international students, it was always met with a lot of resistance,” the former GPC member said. “Every time it was put to a vote, all of the professional schools like the medical school, Law School and Darden [School of Business] would veto any effort.”
The former GPC member made it clear that they do not fault Trella and the University administration, but rather the lack of a unified graduate student front in advocating for themselves.
“If it's not just [one school’s council] but all of GPC behind something, things can happen a lot more quickly or easily,” the former GPC member said. “Every graduate student saying we are having a distinct problem and writing an open letter to the University is a lot more powerful.”
In a statement to The Cavalier Daily, Allison Schilling, graduate Nursing student and chair of the GPC, said that the council was never presented with specific workable solutions to address the former GPC member’s concerns.
“The council invites both agenda items for discussion and solutions for change. Further, the council votes on position statements or other business, and follows the majority,” Schilling wrote. “As far as this particular issue, such as visa revocation of international students, I welcome this student or any others to bring their facts, concerns, and solutions to an upcoming GPC meeting.”
Weinstein said she foresees damage not only to graduate students but to the entire University ecosystem as long as the federal government deprioritizes academic research, and she said the GSASC remains pledged to do its part in mitigating the damage.
“I think this is going to affect entire universities and beyond — graduate students play a very big and impactful role at universities whether we’re TAs, mentoring undergraduates or helping our own advisors and colleagues with research,” Weinstein said. “We continue to remain positive, [the] council is here to help students as best we can.”
Nicolas Biernacki is a staff writer on the news desk. He is a fourth-year Government student from Ashburn, Va.
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