“Oxford and Cambridge will come through this OK because they have other sources of funding for studentships. But we may well see a serious contraction of humanities postgraduate research training…That would be devastating for the vibrant national system that we’ve built in recent decades.”

That is the verdict of Andrew McRae, a former head of the University of Exeter’s Doctoral College, on major changes to how the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funds PhDs – changes��that��could be followed by at least some of the other six research councils now gathered under the UK Research and Innovation umbrella.

A dramatically reduced number of studentships are being directed to fewer universities, and a much higher proportion of the AHRC’s awards are being reserved for projects on specific challenges that the research council stipulates. Some observers fear that the changes will��alter the nature and diminish the value of a UK doctorate – and, in doing so, erode the country’s international academic reputation.

Currently, the AHRC provides most of its doctoral funding via block grants to “”��(DTPs): regional consortia of universities to which would-be doctoral students can apply for studentships “across the breadth of the AHRC’s subject remit”, for topics they develop themselves, in collaboration with their supervisors.

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From next year, the AHRC is replacing its 10 existing DTPs with “”��to 50 individual universities, selected on the basis of a formula that takes into account research volume, excellence and geography. Hence, while DTPs were self-organising regional clusters, led by a large research-intensive institution that received extra funding (and prestige) to coordinate the networks, the doctoral landscape universities will simply be assigned into regional “hubs”, charged with collaborating “to improve training support and offer further opportunities for cohort development both across and between geographic regions”.

Moreover, not all of the 73 institutions involved with the existing DTPs have been allocated landscape funding. Only 50 have been selected, meaning that 23 will no longer have any AHRC studentships. is the Courtauld Institute of Art, which more than 100 research students on its website. Another is traditional arts powerhouse Goldsmiths, University of London. A third is Aberystwyth University: Cardiff and South Wales are the only Welsh universities to receive an allocation. Keele and Surrey universities also miss out.

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Those omissions may seem all the more surprising given the inclusion on the awardees list of such relative research minnows as De Montfort, Birmingham City, Westminster, Hertfordshire and Sheffield Hallam universities (though the first three are members of current DTP consortia).

Even more surprising to scholars is the fact that all 50 selected universities will receive the same number of studentships regardless of their size or research intensity: just three each.

“UCL has more than 50,000 students and 6,000 research students, but it’s only guaranteed three AHRC awards a year – that seems crazy,” said a London-based professor involved in doctoral training.

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And while some may welcome the egalitarianism of such a distribution, it ignores the important financial and institutional investments in doctoral study that have been made by larger research universities, explained a doctoral college head.

“You might not like how some Russell Group universities have taken the lion’s share of (DTP) awards, but these institutions have committed a lot of money to PhD funding and education,” they said, adding that their institution – a large research-intensive – would typically receive 12 or 13 AHRC studentships a year and offer the same number through its own funding.

In addition, spreading PhD awards more thinly across the country risks undermining the aim of DTPs when they were established by several UK research councils around 15 years ago: to build mutually supporting cohorts of doctoral candidates, whose critical mass made it viable to offer them additional training, employment and pastoral support, in recognition that many would go on to careers outside academia. While landscape award recipients have been assigned into regional hubs, “there is not much incentive to run these hubs or clarity on how they’ll work”, the doctoral college head said.

Campus resource: Arts and humanities scholars can engage with policy, too

And while larger universities might feel undersupported, mid-sized ones, with fewer alternative sources of funding, might feel the pinch even more if entire faculties are limited to three PhDs a year, said McRae, who is professor of Renaissance studies at Exeter. “Research students are vital to research culture, and they learn as much from each other as from their supervisors. How do we sustain the quality of experience with these numbers?” he asked.

Then there is the overall number of landscape studentships now being funded by the AHRC:��only 150 across the entire UK. The research council courted dismay almost two years ago when it announced that the number of students it would fund via DTPs would fall from 425 to 300 a year by 2029-30 – compared with just over 1,000 in 2018-19.

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In addition, the full impact of the latest changes is not yet known. That is partly because universities will no longer be required to self-fund an equal number of PhD awards – potentially allowing them to scale back on how many studentships they offer or the generosity of awards. That is a particularly likely scenario in a cash-strapped environment, in which doctoral provision loses institutions about £1.8 billion annually.

“The hope is that universities will provide additional funds for PhD studentships to ensure that arts and humanities research not only survives drastic cuts to AHRC provision, but also remains accessible to students from lower-income backgrounds,” said Rebecca Harrison, senior lecturer in film and media at the Open University, who has campaigned against the AHRC’s previously announced studentship cuts.

“However, with so many senior management teams implementing financial cuts across the sector – resulting in mass redundancies, course closures and loss of research resourcing for remaining staff – it’s hard to imagine that closing the PhD funding gap will be a priority,” she said.

The result, according to another figure involved in doctoral education, will be a “serious retrenchment” in PhD funding opportunities, with some universities set to offer “multiples fewer” scholarships than they used to.

The available awards listed by DTPs on their websites – which typically include those they match-fund – offer some clues��to the scale of the reduction. For example, the Open-Oxford-Cambridge DTP has awarded “”��between 2019 and 2023, yet this could fall to��only nine if they don’t choose to fund any studentships themselves. The London Arts and Humanities Partnership, meanwhile, that it awards “up to 90 studentships per year”, but only three of its eight members (King’s, UCL and Queen Mary University of London) will pick up landscape awards.

“For the institution that I applied to, it looks like, even if they are able to fully co-fund and offer six PhDs a year, that is still a cut in the region of 75 per cent on how many PhD students a year they currently fund via AHRC,” said a PhD applicant who contacted THE after learning about the reduced number of studentships on offer from next year.

The student had only found out about the drastic cuts through their own investigation and they criticised what they saw as a “conspiracy of silence” about how many studentships will actually be on offer next year, particularly given the uncertainty over match-funding. The student’s concern is that would-be doctoral students who could have applied this year but decided to defer are now “very unlikely” to get funded.

“There’s no excuse for the lack of transparency, both from the AHRC and from universities…One can argue all day about what the right level of PhD funding in the arts should be, but I think it’s indisputable that a massive cut on this scale should have been warned about in advance.”

Yet while the cuts may not have been shouted from the campus rooftops, the AHRC has about the reasons for them: a static budget and rising costs (from October, UKRI is by 8 per cent, to £20,780). At the same time, however, it has also chosen to allocate a higher proportion of its awards to themes likely to excite politicians and taxpayers.

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And AHRC spokesman said its approach was "driven by a need to make the best use of our allocation in the context of the rising costs of postgraduate research, to ensure that we are supporting outstanding research training while targeting our funds at the areas of greatest need...Our doctoral investments are designed to provide a sustainable, balanced PhD portfolio which is affordable, long-term and designed to address skills shortages​, with a particular emphasis on widening opportunities and welcoming innovative and diverse routes to doctoral training."

The spokesman added that the changes are informed by the findings of a 2023����that the AHRC commissioned "to outline both the opportunities and the challenges we face as a funder", and the research council had��“engaged extensively with our community throughout planning changes to our doctoral programme and will continue to do so as we announce the award of our focal awards in the near future”.

At present, 85 per cent of AHRC funding goes to DTPs, which mostly fund projects proposed by the doctoral candidate themselves, rather than the funder or the institution. However, landscape awards will account for��only 50 per cent of AHRC studentships. From October 2026, 20 per cent of its PhDs – about 60 a year – will be “” – formerly known as , which recruited��its last cohort in 2018-19. These will fund arts and humanities research focused on the creative economy or “a healthy planet, people, and place”.

A further 20 per cent will go to collaborative doctoral partnerships, via which universities work with non-academic institutions such as museums and national collections, and 10 per cent will go to cross-council PhDs focused on topics such as artificial intelligence.

Even though the AHRC funds less than 15 per cent of all arts and humanities PhDs in the UK, this rebalancing of funding away from student-initiated projects has prompted concerns that the very nature of an arts and humanities PhD is shifting in the UK as candidates’ ability to follow their interests and develop their own research topic is diminished.

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“Over the past decade we’ve seen a shift toward ‘challenge-led’ research across the sector, in part owing to the imperatives of the impact agenda,” reflected the Open University’s Harrison. “While no one is arguing with the UK’s need for culturally, socially or environmentally useful research, it’s alarming that so many funded studentships will be dictated from within institutions.”

That shift also raises important questions about equity and diversity, she continued: “Who gets to decide what matters, and according to what criteria? With marginalised academics (black or trans scholars, for example) being underrepresented in senior positions, what will that mean for the kinds of research question being asked, and the selection of candidates to provide answers? What about all the creative, original, critical research projects imagined by people whose communities face challenges currently unrecognised within the academy?”

Harrison also worries that the AHRC’s move risks undermining broader recognition of the inherent value of research by “buy[ing] into a myth that’s proved popular with the far right: that research only matters if it demonstrates usefulness according to prescribed outcomes”. By contrast, her view remains that “arts and humanities research can and should be funded on the sole basis of its intellectual and emotional contribution to our lives: thinking, critiquing, analysing, creating, and asking questions about the world are valuable endeavours on their own terms”.

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There is also a sense among arts and humanities academics that, not for the first time, changes in the arts and humanities are being driven by a misplaced conviction that research management should be standardised across the disciplines – and follow the model of the sciences, in which even scholarships that are not tied to a particular funder-defined challenge are primarily seen as an apprenticeship, rather than a stand-alone intellectual endeavour.

“When I was funded for my DPhil…the rubric sent to me stated explicitly that this funding was for ‘training in the methods of scientific research’,” recalled Douglas Kell, professor of systems biology at the University of Liverpool and a former chief executive of the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC). “It would have been inconceivable that I would dream up something really good [in terms of specific topic] at the start. That did happen later, and kicked off my career, but only after a year.”

But the PhD process works differently in the arts, humanities and social sciences, insist some academics.

“If we’re asking research students to work on an existing problem identified by another academic, perhaps on an existing pre-identified dataset, that’s more like being a research assistant,” said one DTP director, who did not want to be identified. “It’s very different from training a PhD student to find a research question and define the question that needs answering. [The former approach] is probably the kind of project that you can comfortably get done within three years, but it will be a very different PhD experience.”

Harrison agrees, and she worries that the “reduction in people’s ability to design their own projects” risks “disempowering” and “infantilising” doctoral candidates.

The drive to standardise research management, turbocharged by the creation of UKRI in 2018, might also be expected to push the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) in a similar direction. There is no sign of that so far: in 2023, the council , which offers 500 studentships a year across 15 partnerships, until 2027-28. But speculation is rife among social scientists that this could be the final renewal.

However, throwing away the expertise accumulated by DTPs in their decade-plus of operation would be careless, some believe, noting that they have fulfilled their remit to deliver a step change in how PhD students are supported, not just academically but also in terms of preparation for the non-academic graduate careers so valued by politicians in pursuit of potential sources of national growth.

“We feel this push to move students into non-academic careers,” said one DTP director, “both because university jobs are so scarce but also because research councils sense that government wants to see graduates’ skills translated into things that are economically useful. But it feels like universities are having a very prescriptive way of conducting PhDs thrust on us – one that doesn’t recognise our expertise or give us autonomy to train students.”

Moreover, the reduced studentship funding available overall means that academics may feel less inclined to direct their best students towards postgraduate study in the first place – particularly given the need to undertake master’s study before becoming eligible to apply for a doctoral studentship.

“If the student doesn’t have family money,” reflected Exeter’s McRae, “the current funding model [for master’s study, based on student loans] requires them to take on additional debt – with concurrent repayments in the future alongside their undergrad loans – in order to enter the AHRC lottery.

“That’s always been a risky route, and [these changes] spin the odds against them even further. It’s hard to see how academics in good conscience can advise bright students – and especially working-class students – to take that gamble.”

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jack.grove@timeshighereducation.com