grad admissions - what are y'all doing?

At my large astronomy department, there currently isn't any plan to change the expected yield of 8 - 10 matriculated students from 12-14 accepted students this year. The total number of applicants was up 30% though. However, the final number of accepted students is in the Dean's hands and the department has to negotiate for more students. Last year, some competitive places accepted far fewer students, and there was a fear (that didn't materialize) that we would have a much higher matriculation rate.

At the same time, there are rumors swirling around that the faculty would like to see the number of students shrink a bit back down 20% to 7-8 students per year.

Rumor is business as usual here.

Boy was I wrong. It looks like they will be accepting 4 to 6 more students than in previous years.

(I have no information on our department.) From the perspective of applicants, I recall from the early 90s recession that when the economy goes south, more domestic undergrads/recent grads apply to grad school.

Harvard (astronomy) is increasing admissions, 18 accepted, and a few extra wait-listed

pseudo-u meet pseudonym

Can someone explain the reasoning behind increasing admissions? It seems that given the dearth of mid-career jobs this year, increasing the PhD pool seems like a bad idea in the long run.

There are several contributing factors:

1) local supply and demand - more students apply, the people considering admissions see more applications and approximately a constant fraction strikes them as "yes, lets admit";
there is also local excess demand at some institutional level because of ARRA funding providing extra grad RA slots - though these are mismatched in timing for current admissions they are still psychologically impeling

2) a "catastrophe of the commons" paradox: it is better for any given institution to admit more students, especially if other institutions are cutting admissions, because having more (good) students is reputation enhancing and increases local research done.
This is especially true when time are hard

3) Time scale for careers - current class being admitted will graduate on 5-7 year time scale, and be ready for mid career jobs on 10-12 year time scale; that gets into demographic shifts.
If the economy still sucks in a decade, the the students are better off being in grad school. The danger is in a postdoc crunch in 2-4 years, as stimulus funded positions terminate - if the economy is still depressed then, there will be massive dislocation for that cohort - something like factor of 2-3 decrease in those which can get any long term position

Countering the pressure to take on more students are: loss of state funded positions, TAs are easy to cut when universities get sudden cuts from State or endowment pools;
fear of structural changes in institutional funding (see above, but permanent, not emergency one-offs); and uncertainty in research funding on 2-5 year time scale - being stuck with a big class cleared for candidacy just as the RA funding evaporates.

It is an interesting problem.

JohnD - Because the ones making the decisions are past the hump and future demographic issues won't affect them much anyway? Which is why I expect the decadal survey will be filled with which shiny new toys are in jeopardy and not on prickly demographic issues.

I'm not exactly sure what is up here at Harvard. Last year the deans were real worried about getting too many students in the graduate school. This year, I heard, they were much less worried if too many people showed up. They just want to ensure that 8 students will enroll.

The faculty in the physics department estimated the net cost of a graduate student to the university. They found that additional students tend to bring more money into the university, although not necessarily very much money.

Overall, it seems that having more students benefits the university, the faculty, and the department. It doesn't help the overabundance of Ph.D.'s in the field however. Unfortunately, it is hard to point to exactly who the problem hurts the most though.

Going to agree with what Steinn said and add:

Graduate schools should think about the problem of overpopulation at the mid-career level, but they should not drastically reduce admissions because they fear all the students won't get jobs in the field.

First, that just pushes the gate-keeping process to an earlier stage; taken to an extreme, only undergrads from the most elite programs or who did N REUs would get into grad school, while talented people with a less impressive undergrad CV would get shut out. (I just said "undergrad CV" which should give an idea of how absurd it is. It's hard to believe we can judge future research promise of 21-year-olds accurately enough to hand-choose only the select few who will grow up to be good professors.)

Second, (esp. during a bad economy) the students might as well be in grad school doing something productive, rather than beating the bushes looking for good jobs that are scarce. I think it's also true that undergrad enrollments increase during a bad economy, so there is more need for teaching.

The field (and academia in general) should make entering grad students aware of the demographic problems, and entering grad students should not have unrealistic expectations. Finally, doing a PhD and then leaving the field is understandably disappointing but not something to be ashamed of or avoid at all costs. The people I know whp've done that weren't necessarily happy about it at the time, but on balance they may be happier now than the people who stayed in.

Ben, I think I can live with what you're saying, especially your last points--grad students just need to have their eyes open, and plenty of support in looking for things beyond a postdoc, something I usually see very little of.