About fourteen students will be accepted each year for the Ph.D. program. The goal of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences is to move, over the course of the next year or two, to a model in which the majority of incoming students and most continuing students will receive full funding, including tuition and stipend. Students are very often successful in obtaining further support from competitive traveling and finishing fellowship offered by Columbia, as well as from the various national fellowship competitions. Degree is awarded. At this point the program is flexible and admits travel for research, or a combination of teaching and research at Columbia.
Many students spend between one and three years pursuing thesis research outside the United States.
Time to degree should be seven years. Columbia retains the older academic custom of the thesis defense, which allows constructive feedback from faculty outside the department as well as from art historians within it. Students committed to the doctoral degree should apply directly to the Ph.D. program. However, there are also several independent M.A. programs, of approximately two or one and a half year's duration. They are described elsewhere on this web page.