CGS 2025 Year in Review
In 2025, the Council of Graduate Schools intensified its efforts to serve our members and articulate the critical role of graduate education in shaping research, innovation, and global economies. Below are some of the highlights that reflect this commitment:
Leading with Courage, Integrity, and Resilience
In 2025, we convened three in-person gatherings - our Summer Workshop and New Deans Institute, our 2025 Annual Meeting which wrapped up earlier this month, and our Global Summit, held in Quebec, Canada on AI and graduate education. At each of these events, we convened graduate education leaders from around the nation and the world to have critical conversations about graduate education.
We also convened our community digitally. This year, we held eight Presidential Office Hours, two town halls, and ten webinars on timely topics, the recordings of which are below.
CGS 2025 Webinars
- Healthy Research Teams and Labs
- Why Stories Matter: A Webinar with Story Collider
- Request-for-Proposals: Supporting Inclusive Graduate Research Environments (learn more about the resulting CLEAR Project here)
- The Value and Cost of Graduate Education
- Global Perspectives: Transdisciplinary and Transnational Research in Latin America
- Fundraising for Graduate Education
- Global Perspectives: Transdisciplinary and Transnational Graduate Research in Africa
- Black Graduate Deans: Views and Experiences at PWIs
- The Changing Landscape of Graduate Recruitment and Marketing
- Training Webinar: How to Complete the Annual CGS/ETS Survey of Graduate Enrollment and Degrees
Policy Powered by Purpose
Our advocacy efforts continued in 2025. CGS signed onto 20 letters to Congress and the Administration and a further 11 on federal graduate education funding. Additionally, we convened 26 conversations between graduate deans and Members of Congress at our Advocacy events and kept you up-to-date on the first 100 days of the new administration with the Graduate Policy Monitor.
Our newly released Federal Policy Agenda provides a roadmap for our efforts in 2026 and 2027.
Exceptional Ideas with Lasting Impact
We know you turn to us for graduate-education-specific insights you can’t get anywhere else, and 2025 was no different. We released five full-length reports this year on pressing topics in graduate education:
- Master’s Education: A Guide to Creating and Sustaining Student-Centered Programs
- Understanding and Supporting PhD Careers: A Resource for Universities
- Supporting Fair and Inclusive Graduate Programs
- Controlling Costs and Optimizing the Value of Graduate Degrees
- Graduate Enrollment and Degrees 2025 Report: Findings from the 2024 Survey and Insights on the Evolving Graduate Education Landscape
Additionally, this year we reimagined how we share knowledge, embracing shorter-form content and interactive methods of communicating insights to you. We released three standalone briefs:
- Insights into Post-baccalaureate Certificates
- Pathways of Master’s Degree Recipients to and through the STEM Workforce
- Insights into American Indian and Alaska Native Doctoral Students
Two infographics:
- Status of 2025 International Student Admissions (plus an associated brief and annotated survey)
- Fall 2025 Graduate Applications and Enrollment Preliminary Data
And three data dashboards:
- Master’s Exit Survey Data Dashboard
- PhD Career Pathways Data Dashboard
- Graduate Enrollment and Degrees Data Dashboard
These shorter, more interactive tools help you get the insights that you need right when you need them, providing tools that you can take back and use on your campuses.
Every Voice, Every Path, Every Graduate
Finally, in 2025 we did more than ever to support graduate students. In the spring, we relaunched GradSense.org, a student-facing interactive web resource designed to help prospective and current graduate students make smart financial decisions about graduate school. This site is freely available; use our associated toolkit to promote it to your graduate students!
The National Name Exchange (NNE) had another strong year, enrolling over 8,000 students with 115 institutions participating. CGS also invited experts to speak to NNE students as part of a series of three webinars that each addressed a key part of the process of getting to graduate school:
- Getting Started with Your Graduate School Application
- Money Matters: Financial Basics Every Prospective Graduate Student Should Know
- REUs and You: Why Research Experiences for Undergraduates Matter for Graduate School
As part of our ongoing work to tell the stories of graduate students, we also published four student profiles in our GradImpact series:
- Master’s Degrees at Work: Bridging Law Enforcement and Mental Health
- How Joseph Trujillo-Falcón is Reshaping Weather Communication for Multilingual Communities
- Creating Safe Spaces: A Researcher’s Journey for Improving Black Maternal Health
- From the Bronx to a PhD: How a Lifetime of Transit Advocacy Turned into a Movement
Looking Forward
We have even more planned for 2026. Stay tuned for more information about the 2026 Summer Workshop! If you’re already a member, we’d love to connect, answer questions, or help your institution take advantage of your member resources – please contact us. If you’re not yet a member, we’d love to have you. You can learn more about membership here.
From all of us to all of you, a very happy holiday season, and we’ll see you in the new year!