Admissions and Aid

Completed applications must include the following: 

• An applicant statement

• 2-3 letters of reference from current or former professors or others familiar with your work

• A CV

• A writing sample

• Transcripts:  undergraduate (and masters, if applicable)

• Test Scores: The GRE is not required (or considered). Either the TOEFL or IELTS is required for international students.

The Admissions Committee is made up of ten professors and four doctoral students.

Admission to the EES Program is extremely competitive. The Admissions Committee considers completed applications throughout January and February, and admitted students are notified of their admissions status from February through mid-April. We admit an incoming cohort of approximately fourteen students each year.  Every admitted applicant receives a five-year tuition fellowship, and a variety of additional five-year funding packages and other opportunities are available. 

Please visit The Graduate Center’s Admissions Office for directions to apply.

For more information on Funding and Fellowships, please visit the Graduate Center’s Office of Fellowships and Financial Aid.

The Admissions Committee considers each element of your application to evaluate your past accomplishments.  Your transcripts offer a clear record of your grades, but you may also wish to highlight an aspect of your past record or experience--not evident in your transcripts--in your applicant statement.  We accept students with Bachelors degrees, as well as those with Masters degrees, with no priority placed on either group. 

A doctoral program offers rigorous training to become a professional research scholar. Each element of your application dossier provides us with crucial information that helps us determine your potential for success in this regard.  In assessing your potential for doctoral study, the Admissions Committee puts considerable weight on your applicant statement, letters of recommendation, and writing sample.  In that light, be sure to obtain letters of recommendation from current or former professors, or others, who can speak knowledgeably and frankly about your scholarly achievements and potential.  And be sure to craft your applicant statement very carefully, as it is central to your application dossier. Your writing sample is also an opportunity for you to demonstrate your critical and analytical acumen  and ability to synthesize data in a coherent fashion. You can submit a paper you wrote for a course, a lab report, a published conference abstract, a published article, book chapter, or essay; or a chapter from your thesis. Please do not submit anything longer than 15-20 pages.

In a Ph.D. program, a good fit between an applicant and the program is essential.  Prior to assembling your application materials, be sure to identify several faculty members in the EES program who share your research interests and with whom you would be interested in taking courses. It is very helpful if you contact those faculty directly as you are assembling your application, to gauge their interest in your work.  Please also mention those faculty members in your applicant statement, and discuss why the EES program and the CUNY Graduate Center would be an appropriate place for you to pursue your doctoral training.

Each student will be billed for a Graduate School student activities fee, a University student senate fee, a University consolidated services fee and a technology fee. These fees are not refundable.

Every applicant to The Graduate Center’s doctoral programs will automatically be considered for five-year institutional funding packages. The aid we offer — including fellowships, tuition awards, and assistantships — is based on merit. 

Learn more about institutional aid for doctoral students »

Federal aid for doctoral students includes:

• Need-based Federal Aid
• Federal Work-Study
• Non-need-based Federal Direct Loans.

New York State also provides the Tuition Assistance Program (TAP) for eligible graduate students who are New York State residents.

Students applying for admission are encouraged to apply at the same time for external aid for which they might be eligible, including National Science Foundation and Ford Foundation Fellowships. Applicants from outside the U.S. should apply for their own government programs where they exist.

Additional funding may be available to incoming students from underrepresented populations through offerings from the Office of Educational Opportunity and Diversity, including several fellowships and the CUNY Pipeline Program for undergraduate CUNY students.

Learn more about funding opportunities from OEOD »

• The Early Research Initiative offers summer fellowships for exploratory research in archives, museums, field sites, special collections, laboratories, and research centers across the globe. These fellowships aim to support students at the pre-dissertation proposal stage in order to help them refine and develop more advanced individualized research agendas.
• The Futures Initiative organizes workshops, team-taught interdisciplinary courses, and workshops aimed at empowering the next generation of intellectual leaders with bold, publicly engaged teaching and learning. One of its goals is helping interested students produce world-class research that is presented in a form outside of the box of the conventional monograph-style dissertation.
• The GC Digital Initiatives provides training in digital pedagogy, supports working groups devoted to training in Python, Text Analysis, and GIS, and offers fellowships and grants in videography, in social media, and in digital innovation.
• The Office of Career Planning and Professional Development offers individual career advising to students, including advice on CVs, résumés, and other job search materials, assistance with preparing for interviews, and discussions of career planning strategies. The office also hosts a substantial amount of career-related programs and workshops, including sessions with GC alumni. 
• The Teaching & Learning Center prepares new college teachers for their entry into the classroom. The TLC provides training in the use of educational technologies, the praxis of writing across the curriculum, and the teaching of quantitative reasoning. In addition to workshops and seminars, the TLC also fosters focused inquiry groups on such topics as museum education and environmental justice. 
• The Quantitative Research Consulting Center provides resources and support for research in quantitative and empirical research. The Center complements existing statistics coursework by bridging the gap between the classroom and implementation in researchers’ own work.
• Over thirty interdisciplinary research centers and institutes are located at the Graduate Center. A number of them, including the Advanced Research Collaborative, The Center for Place, Culture, and Politics, The Committee on Globalization and Social Change, The Committee for Interdisciplinary Science Studies, and The Committee for the Study of Religion offer mid-career and dissertation level fellowships that enable students to join interdisciplinary working groups.
• The Graduate Center has established internships and collaborative partnerships with the Morgan Library, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the New-York Historical Society, the New York Botanical Garden, the Vera Institute for Justice, the Center for Court Innovation, The Brooklyn Rail, the Global Fund for Women, and Open House New York.

Our career support is provided by staff and faculty who are actively involved in the national conversation on doctoral education and post-PhD careers. The offices and initiatives mentioned above also organize varied programming that supports, challenges, and excites GC graduate students. Recent events and series include:

• Twitter for Academics
• Intro to Tools for Collaborative Research
• Working in Archives and Special Collections
• Still Share: Data Viz, Where Data Meets Design
• Teach@CUNY
• Writing Next: Pitching to Broader Audiences (NEH Next Gen Phd Seminar)
• Careers in Research outside of Academia
• Careers in the Arts and Cultural Production
• Behind the Scenes with a Faculty Search Committee
• An Alt-Ac/Industry Job Search Timeline
• A Faculty Job Search Timeline
• Futures Initiative (FI) Dialogues From Dissertation to First Book