To be considered for admission to the Ph.D. program, all applicants must have a bachelor's degree, or its equivalent, from a recognized institution of higher education, or have received a bachelor's degree before they matriculate in the program.

Applicants should have a minimum undergraduate grade point average of 3.2, or its equivalent, a minimum grade point average of 3.5 for all combined graduate work, and verbal and quantitative portions of the Graduate Record Examination (GRE). International graduate student applicants whose native language is not English are required to submit a score for the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) or for the International English Language Testing System (IELTS). A total score of 90 on the iBT TOEFL (equivalent to 575 on the paper-based version of the Test of English as a Foreign Language) or 6.5 overall on the IELTS is required.