Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Will Deny All Waitlisted Candidates Amid Financial Uncertainty

Updated March 12, 2025, at 2:00 a.m.

The Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences will reject all waitlisted candidates across its graduate programs — the University’s latest response to federal funding cuts threatened by the Trump administration.

The FAS will honor “existing formal offers” of admissions and its financial aid commitments to graduate students, but it will deny all applicants who are currently on the waitlist “within the next few weeks,” Faculty of Arts and Sciences Dean Hopi E. Hoekstra wrote in an email to all FAS faculty on Tuesday afternoon.

“Given the pressures placed on the University due to the uncertain financial landscape, this is a prudent and necessary step to take and one that will enable us to focus on our current and already admitted students,” Hoekstra wrote in the email, which was also signed by GSAS Dean Emma Dench and the FAS’ divisional deans.

Directors of graduate studies did not receive early notice of the change and found out about the announcement alongside all Harvard faculty in the Tuesday afternoon email, according to Organismic and Evolutionary Biology professor Michael M. Desai, who also serves as an OEB DGS.

Harvard Medical School professor Peter J. Park ’94 — the DGS for Bioinformatics and Integrative Genomics, a program in GSAS’ medical sciences division — wrote in an email that the announcement came just one day before admitted and waitlisted students were scheduled to visit Boston for his program’s “recruitment day” to learn more about what their lives could be like at Harvard.

But with the Tuesday announcement, Park had to inform waitlisted students — including one applicant who had already begun travelling from Australia — that they were being rejected effective immediately.

“This will damage our reputation,” Park said, calling the situation “a stunning turn of events.”

Tuesday’s announcement comes as the University institutes a flurry of cost-cutting measures to shore up its finances. On Monday, Harvard imposed a University-wide hiring freeze for all faculty and staff, cutting short hiring processes across multiple FAS departments.

And at least two Harvard graduate programs — the Biostatistics and Population Health Sciences Ph.D. programs at the Harvard School of Public Health — reduced their planned admissions offers in response to stalled federal funding. But no admission offers were revoked.

The waitlist cuts follow similar measures taken at other universities in the past weeks. The University of Pennsylvania directed its department chairs in February to significantly reduce graduate graduate admissions, forcing departments to rescind several informal acceptances that had already been sent to applicants.

Though eliminating GSAS’ waiting lists does not immediately shrink the number of slots available for graduate students, the move could ultimately leave programs with smaller student bodies.

Each year, a portion of accepted students decline their offers — reopening slots that are usually filled with applicants on the waitlist. But with Tuesday’s announcement, those declined slots would remain unfilled.

The number of students pulled from waitlists varies widely across departments and programs. Some departments — including Astronomy, OEB, Systems Biology, Physics, and Biophysics — typically admit no students off their waitlists, according to Astronomy professor Abraham “Avi” Loeb and Desai.

Others, however, pull a significant share of their class from the waitlist. Harvard Medical School professor Shiv S. Pillai, the DGS for Immunology, said 25 percent of his program’s typical 15-person class comes from the waitlist.

If only 11 of the 15 accepted students take their spots this year, “we will just end up at 11,” Pillai said.

Still, Pillai said he viewed other challenges facing Harvard, especially Trump’s attempted cuts to indirect funding rates, a “far bigger” issue than the new policy that rejects waitlisted GSAS applicants.

History professor Allison Frank Johnson, who chairs the German Languages and Literatures department, similarly said that other concerns, including students being detained by ICE agents, were “so much higher” on her list of worries.

But Frank Johnson added that the move could leave departments with fewer graduate students who usually serve as teaching assistants, limiting the number of courses that all departments — though particularly smaller ones — could offer.

“I hope that we will not be in a situation where we are not offering courses because we don't have people to teach them,” Frank Johnson added.

HSPH lecturer Jarvis T. Chen — the DGS for the Population Health Sciences Ph.D. Program, an interdisciplinary program affiliated with GSAS — said the change could have “downstream impacts” on research by shrinking the number of graduate students who can serve as research assistants.

“It has an impact on student feeling of cohort cohesion and having a critical mass of fellow students who are taking courses with you,” Chen said. “This is going to have huge impacts on our pipeline of scholars and scientists.”

Park, who has been DGS for 15 years, said he had never experienced “anything like this.”

“I would have thought that of all the institutions that can weather the storm, Harvard could have been one,” Park said.

—Staff writer William C. Mao can be reached at william.mao@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @williamcmao.

—Staff writer Veronica H. Paulus can be reached at veronica.paulus@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @VeronicaHPaulus.