Impacts of Funding Restrictions on Graduate Mathematical Sciences Programs

May 2025. Prepared by Sarah Bryant, PhD and Skylar Homan

Graduate Enrollment and Admissions Trends

The American Mathematical Society (AMS) conducted an exploratory survey in April 2025 to understand how departments are experiencing changes in graduate student admissions and enrollment. The brief survey was deployed to 326 mathematical and statistical sciences departments on April 22 and closed May 2 after one reminder to all contacts without complete responses. After removing duplicates, we received 93 responses, resulting in a 29% response rate. Below we summarize our findings on departmental projections of graduate enrollment and postdoctoral appointment/employment trends.

• Most departments expect stable or reduced overall graduate enrollment for Fall 2025 compared to Fall 2024.
• 23 departments (25%) observed higher yield rates in first-year students—indicating a greater proportion of admitted students are accepting offers.
• 24 departments (26%) also reported higher application rates, potentially signaling growing interest or earlier commitment.
• Five departments reported significant adjustments or constraints affecting planned enrollment. Examples include restrictions on second-round offers, rescinded financial offers (only two programs indicated rescinded admissions), and program deactivation. One department was explicitly forbidden from re-allocating declined offers.

Many department chairs cautioned that the full picture for Fall 2025 had yet to emerge. Departments with large international student populations expressed concerns about students securing visas; other departments felt that institutional changes such as graduate student unionization were likely to cause change due to reallocation of resources.

For us, the largest driver of change has been graduate student unionization and dramatically increased graduate stipends. This has led to a small decrease in the number of students, and a diversion of resources away from postdocs to cover the increase in grad stipends.

Postdoctoral Appointments

Expectations for postdoctoral appointments diverged by department type, thus data is shown only for departments that have either math or statistics PhD tracks, not both. Mathematics departments anticipate a slight overall decline, while statistics departments foresee stable or modest growth.

• The most common response among both department types was 'Stable' for expected postdoc appointments.
• Mathematics departments show signs of contraction, with fewer departments forecasting increases than declines.
• Statistics departments lean more neutral to optimistic, with almost half expecting no change.

Department chairs noted that cuts to department budgets had impacts beyond graduate and postdoctoral funding, with nearly one-third of respondents indicating faculty appointments would be likely to decline in the next year.

Our department has faced significant reductions this past year, not only in the number of PhD fellowship packages but also in faculty numbers, with a loss of five members.

MathJobs.org Postdoctoral Listings

Data posted on mathjobs.org show that during the three hiring cycles captured below, trends are overall down. Even before the news of federal funding instability, postings were down approximately 22% in the most recent cycle.

Post-PhD Employment Expectations

Departments were asked to estimate the distribution of career placements for their graduating PhD students across three categories: academia, business/entrepreneurship/government/industry/nonprofit (BEGIN), and unemployment.

Mathematical Sciences Departments all combined (n = 93)

• Academia: 45% (for statistics and applied math departments this value ranged from 20-50%)
• BEGIN: 47% (for statistics and applied math departments this was typically higher, closer to 70%)
• Unemployed/underemployed: 8%

While most respondents noted that it was too early to tell final placements for those graduating in Spring/Summer 2025, the overall landscape is discouraging. As was depicted in the graph of postdoctoral positions, responses varied by department type. Mathematics departments are especially concerned about decline in employment opportunities next year compared to this one.

Voices from the Field

Respondents were invited to share open-ended comments about departmental impacts of funding challenges.

Concerns about employment

The job market is terrible; most of our Ph.D. graduates are not graduating with a position, unlike in past years.

There is much uncertainty about employment for the coming year.

National Labs and Industry seem to be on stand-by, so information is coming later and later on hiring. Market seems unstable.

Impacts on postdocs

It has been hard for us to secure College approval for departmental postdoc positions, it highly depends on the administration views and budget situation. We experienced hiring freeze in the last 2 years so some positions were not renewed.

Funding of postdocs has become increasingly difficult

Postdoc positions have all but evaporated due to the federal funding stop. Our students are looking for postdocs abroad, which they would not have done in previous years.

An overall climate of uncertainty

The main issue is decreased grant funding. If needed, there are additional teaching assistantships available to our students, but this is not ideal from the students' academic progress perspective.

The funding disruptions have been massively harmful to our program, as all funded students are funded by project-based assistantships.

Reduction in science funding resources would affect a large number of our grants and research work, resulting in less opportunities for financially supporting our PhD students (among the many other effects cutting research funding can cause).

Applied Math and Statistics & Data Science have been significantly affected by a reduction of funding, especially for students later in their programs who are regularly funded by grants. This filters down to earlier years since TA-ships are less available for them.

About 10% of our doctoral students are supported by faculty grants from federal agencies. About 20% of our Statistics PhD students are supported by internships whose initial funding source is likely a federal agency. We are certainly concerned about the stability of that support.

The uncertainty has been damaging. The future reality may be more damaging.