AHRC cuts funded PhDs by 30% after loss of income

The Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) has announced that it will cut the number of PhD students it funds by almost a third amid cost pressures caused by reduced funding and higher doctoral stipends.

The number of funded students supported via doctoral training partnerships will be reduced from 425 to 300 a year by 2029/30 to enable “strategic investments” in other areas, the council announced.

The AHRC, which has a budget of £82m this year, will funnel funding into maintaining PhD entry levels in collaborative doctoral partnerships – in which museums, libraries and other organisations work with universities to support around 50 students a year.

It will also reintroduce 'centres for doctoral training', which allow groups of universities to bid for doctoral funding relating to the creative economy or environmental issues.

The new approach means that the council will support fewer studentships, acknowledged Executive Chair Christopher Smith.

“We fully appreciate that this will be a major change for many institutions and it is not a decision that we have taken lightly,” he said.

“However, we believe that our new approach will, crucially, ensure that our doctoral training provision is sustainable, scalable and equitable,” he said.

The PhD stipend was raised by 5% to £18,622 for 2023/24, following a 10% increase by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) in 2022/23.

Smith said that amid rising PhD costs “our funding does not stretch as far as it used to”.

The decision follows a substantial reduction in the council’s operating budget this year, primarily caused by the loss of around £9m in non-core income streams including the government’s Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund, the Strategic Priorities Fund and the Fund for International Collaboration.

By 2024/25, it will receive only about £3.8m from these cross-UKRI strategic programmes, compared with £20.5m in 2022/23, Times Higher Education reported.

The changes to AHRC’s funding model have been designed with “future sustainability” in mind, Smith said, following a report published in February that highlighted “challenges to our current approach, such as an inequality of participation and lack of diversity”.

The council “will remain the UK’s largest strategic funder of postgraduate research in the arts and humanities, and also continue to have the highest proportionate spend on postgraduate research of UKRI’s councils”, he added.