Admissions and Aid

Along with your application you will need:

• 2 Letters of Recommendation
• Official Transcripts
• Personal Statement
• No GRE is required

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.

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