Kurt Gottfried, chairman of the physics department at Cornell University, has called for physics departments across the country to reduce the number of graduate students and to use the savings to fund postdoctoral positions [Gottfried, 1994]. Cornell has reduced the number of students accepted into its program from 40 to 19, and about a dozen of the top physics departments are taking similar steps [Gibbons, 1994].
Others advocate more drastic measures. David Goodstein, provost of Cal Tech, William Bowen, president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and former president of Princeton University, and Neil Rudenstein, president of Harvard University, say that the number of Ph.D. programs must be reduced. In their 1992 book, In Pursuit of the Ph.D., Bowen and Rudenstein call for universities to shut down programs producing fewer than 4 Ph.D.'s a year [Gibbons, 1994]. Dartmouth's program, while very successful, is not far from this threshold.