What will happen to grad school? Research universities face tough choices.
American colleges and universities are facing hard decisions this spring after the Trump administration cut billions in research dollars.
The White House announced hundreds of millions of dollars in cuts to prominent research powerhouses such as Columbia University, Johns Hopkins University, and the University of Pennsylvania. Columbia was threatened with the loss of $400 million in grants and contracts due to the school’s response to protests of the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza. Several dozen other schools are being investigated for perceived antisemitism.
Cuts have come in many forms, including billions of dollars being slashed from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). For academia, the billions cut from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) might hurt the most.
Why We Wrote This
Universities are reckoning with cuts of billions of dollars of in grants by the White House. Their research can lay the groundwork for what the private sector delivers to the marketplace – and its loss could have lasting consequences.
Research from institutions like NIH affects the sciences, business, education, health care, and more. It lays the groundwork for what the private sector then picks up and delivers to the marketplace. Money used from those grants helps establish labs to conduct research, augment career training and development, fund conferences where information is shared, and pay salaries of small, medium, and large research operations, including the work of master’s degree and Ph.D. students at universities.
“American higher education is the absolute envy of the world. And America’s elite institutions of higher education contribute so much, to not just American society but to the world, that it’s really a self-inflicted wound for the federal government to be going after these kinds of institutions,” says Morgan Polikoff, professor of education at the University of Southern California’s Rossier School of Education.
Universities and students have three choices, Dr. Polikoff says. They can file lawsuits, capitulate to government demands for changes, or resist, protest, and vote.
The case of Columbia
This past Friday, Columbia’s trustees opted to make concessions. The university agreed to many of the Trump administration’s demands, including adopting a formal definition of antisemitism, adding three dozen special security officers with the power to remove people from campus, and banning masks at demonstrations. It also appointed a senior vice provost to conduct a “thorough review” of its regional studies programs, “starting immediately with the Middle East,” according to an unsigned letter from the trustees.
“We have worked hard to address the legitimate concerns raised both from within and without our Columbia community, including by our regulators, with respect to the discrimination, harassment, and antisemitic acts our Jewish community has faced in the wake of October 7, 2023,” the trustees wrote. “All of these steps have been underway and are intended to further Columbia’s basic mission: to provide a safe and thriving environment for research and education, while preserving our commitment to academic freedom and institutional integrity.”
It is unclear whether the grant money will be restored. On Sunday, when pressed by CNN in an interview, Secretary of Education Linda McMahon wouldn’t say whether the money for the school will be unfrozen. “We’re working on it,” she said. She and Columbia’s interim president, Katrina Armstrong, have had “great conversations,” Ms. McMahon said. “We are on the right track now to make sure the final negotiations to unfreeze that money will be in place.”
President Donald Trump has made good on his threats to punish and investigate colleges. Sixty colleges and universities, including Yale University, American University, and the University of Massachusetts Amherst, are being investigated over alleged antisemitism on campus. Advocacy groups and politicians have praised his actions. ”Columbia let antisemitism run amok,” Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman, a Democrat, wrote March 7 on the social media platform X. “Now, Columbia pays for its failure and I support that.”
The Trump administration has also pulled $175 million funding from Penn, his alma mater, for allowing a transgender athlete to participate in women’s swimming. That action is in keeping with the president’s promise to protect female athletes, and falls in line with his executive order banning trans athletes from participating in women’s sports.
Perhaps no university has been threatened with the loss of more funding than Johns Hopkins – the largest beneficiary of NIH funds in the United States. It stands to lose $1 billion in awarded grants from USAID and NIH, and announced that more than 2,000 employees globally will be let go in May.
UMass Chan Medical School, in Worcester, Massachusetts, rescinded offers to prospective graduate students at its Morningside Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences because of loss of funding. Iowa State University also rescinded offers. Vanderbilt University has paused graduate school admissions. Harvard instituted a hiring freeze.
USC’s Rossier School of Education still offered 11 candidates admission into its Ph.D. program for this coming year, but not before thinking twice about it. “We have not rescinded any offers, but I can tell you that we did discuss it,” says Dr. Polikoff.
“I think there’s a tremendous sort of anti-science, anti-intellectual thrust behind this. There’s some concept that universities are somehow not American enough for the current administration,” says Dr. Judith Feinberg, a professor at West Virginia University and nationally recognized doctor for her clinical research on HIV.
“I can’t explain it because none of it makes any logical sense to me, but I think it makes political sense to the people doing it,” Dr. Feinberg says. She characterized as “rank cruelty” examples such as slashing funding at a cancer research center at Columbia.
The lasting consequences of lost research
The loss of research projects, many worry, could have lasting consequences.
“As I’m thinking about admitting students, I often have to think about not just ‘Do I have research needs on a particular project?’ but ‘Do I really want to be bringing someone into this field?’” Dr. Polikoff says. “Can I, in good conscience, say that you will be able to get a good job after, and that this is a good investment for you? It starts to get harder and harder,” he adds.
One of the problems with the administration’s current actions is that it leaped ahead of other steps, Dr. Polikoff says. For instance, he says he believes that the academy does award too many Ph.D.s in fields that aren’t needed, and that that needs to be changed. He also says there are schools where conservative thought is not apparent, which is a problem. He doesn’t believe that draining research and funding coffers was the way to address those issues.
The grant money cannot be easily replaced, even at institutions with large endowments, such as Columbia ($14 billion) and Harvard ($50 billion). There are strict legal requirements governing endowments. For example, donors mandate specific purposes for their gifts. Presidents cannot spend money donated for scholarships on construction. Typically, a school spends 4% to 5% of its endowment for operational costs annually.
A Ph.D. student from Penn reached for this article was fearful of political retribution for speaking up. But at West Virginia University, a senior named Gracie Hines posted on her Facebook page on March 6 that her offer to join the WVU biomedical studies Ph.D. program had been rescinded.
“I got my dream taken away from me today. All because you guys wanted cheaper groceries and gas,” Ms. Hines wrote. She posted a picture of the letter that she got from the school.
“The West Virginia University Health Sciences Office of Research and Graduate Education is limiting admission to its Ph.D. programs due to the unforeseen budgetary challenges resulting from proposed cuts to federal research funding,” school spokesperson April Kaull wrote in an email to the Monitor. “We communicated with students who had not yet signed and returned WVU’s acceptance letter – a relatively small percentage of the total cohort.”
Ms. Kaull said that costs to support university research programs need financial support, and that schools can’t do the work without it. She also said that the school has met with affected faculty and students. The university will continue to support its ongoing programs, but will have to reevaluate admissions if circumstances change.
“Our leadership teams continue to work with key constituents and policymakers to seek reconsideration of these proposed federal cuts,” Ms. Kaull says.
For Dr. Feinberg, who has spent almost 45 years conducting research, the potential loss of future researchers and problem-solvers is hard to take.
“This is like a generation of young people with enthusiasm and excitement, intelligence and maybe ideas that are going to be world-changing, and we’re going to lose them,” she says. “It’s never good to have that kind of loss in continuity for any field.”
