Funding cuts drive away young scientists
The gist
New Ph.D. enrollments at 27 top US research universities fell about 18 percent in engineering between 2024 and 2025.
Foreign universities are recruiting US-trained researchers, and the effects may last a decade.
How it unfolded
- 2025Established researchers and students faced terminations and delays of thousands of N.I.H. grants and sluggish N.S.F. funding; the N.S.F. graduate research fellowship had its smallest cohort in more than a decade.
- 2025The N.I.H. issued nearly a thousand fewer grants for early-career scientists than in recent years, and biology Ph.D. programs at MIT and Duke cut admissions by 20 percent.
- Mar 2025Early-career biomedical scientists were about 20 percentage points less likely to say they would stay in the US than they recalled feeling six months earlier.
Key terms
- Ph.D.
- A terminal research degree, the highest academic qualification awarded in a discipline after graduate study and original research.
- N.I.H.
- The primary U.S. federal agency responsible for biomedical and public health research.
- N.S.F.
- An independent U.S. federal agency that supports fundamental research and education in non-medical science and engineering.
Source: Wikipedia