BOSTON — This fall, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where 95% of students are STEM majors, enrolled nearly 500 fewer graduate students — a 20% drop compared to 2024. The reduction is a direct result of a $100 million cut in federal research awards to the institution in that same timespan, MIT President Sally Kornbluth said at the STAT Summit Wednesday in Boston.
Graduate students are largely supported with these grants, and “if we admit someone, we don’t want them to be partway through their Ph.D. and run out of funding, so we tend to be conservative on the front end,” Kornbluth said. “I wish I had a crystal ball and knew when things were going to turn around, but for now we’re just being cautious.”
It’s not just MIT. Universities across the country have suspended or shrunk admissions to graduate programs in response to a tumultuous 18 months that have included unprecedented grant terminations, funding delays, and policy changes to how science is supported at the federal level. Even if the upcoming midterms usher in a power shift in Congress, it will do little to change the uncertainty faced by academic institutions regarding the reliability of the U.S. government as a science funding partner, particularly in light of a recently revealed plan for political appointees to gain more control over National Institutes of Health grantmaking decisions.
“We will go toe-to-toe with the best of them based on merit. If there are other elements that lead to being funded or not, we don’t have control of that and that concerns me,” Kornbluth said. “I think we just have to do our very best science and feel like that in the end will win the day, and the country needs that.”
Kornbluth was joined by Holden Thorp, editor-in-chief of the Science family of journals, to argue for the model of American research that for the last 80 years propelled the U.S. to global dominance in science, technology, and medicine. First articulated by Vannevar Bush in his 1945 report “The Endless Frontier,” it involved sustained public funding of science at research universities and federal laboratories and a commitment to open inquiry.
While that model was showing signs of stagnation before the second Trump presidency, the last 18 months have shredded the social compact at its foundation. In its place, the administration has proposed a new blueprint for American innovation — one that is focused more narrowly on national priorities and a smaller role for the federal government in science funding.
At the White House’s Science: A New Golden Age summit last week, the Trump administration announced $6 billion in new national research investments, including support for the buildout of advanced computing facilities and autonomous laboratories, the development of nuclear powered spacecraft and next-generation quantum computers, and the creation of accelerated training programs in artificial intelligence and engineering. White House Office of Science and Technology Policy Director Michael Kratsios described the funding announcement as “the most transformative day for the American scientific enterprise since the reshaping of the federal research ecosystem following World War II.”
The investments mark the administration’s first steps to implement its vision for advancing U.S. innovation. Laid out in an OSTP report over the summer, it calls for a dramatic shift of hundreds of billions of research dollars from universities to industry — primarily AI and technology companies.
While there are roles for commercial entities as well as national labs to play in propelling science and innovation, Kornbluth said, what has very uniquely flourished at universities is the very basic end of the pipeline — the unpressured curiosity-driven research that has led to revolutionary discoveries including CRISPR gene editing, microRNA, and this year’s Nobel-winning work underlying the exploding field of optogenetics. “I worry that all of these moves, while they’ll have short term gains, are going to result in a serious drought in the pipeline … for us maybe five, 10 years down the line, but certainly for our children and their children’s children,” Kornbluth said.
It’s too soon to see the effects of these shifting priorities in research output indicators like top-tier journal publications, Thorp said. But he doubts the Trump administration’s push will do much to reverse the ongoing trend of the U.S. falling further behind its geopolitical rivals.
Even before the last 18 months of disruptions and delays to government investment, the U.S. was on its way to losing its place of prominence as the world’s largest public funder of science. Forecasts have put China on track to surpass the U.S. on research spending in the next two to three years. On the ground, that means buildings going up, more people going to graduate school, and a tangible sense of momentum.
“The atmosphere is just so much more pro-science there than it is here,” Thorp said, recounting a recent trip to China in which he sat down with presidents of several universities.
It’s getting results. Nine out of the top 10 academic research institutions are now in China, according to the latest data from the Nature Index, with Harvard University as the lone U.S. representative. A decade ago, American universities held half of the top 10 spots.
“Submissions from China continue to increase, not just in number but in quality,” Thorp said of the Science family of journals. To the point that, Science Advances, an open-access journal that is slightly less competitive than the flagship, is now publishing an equal number of papers from the U.S. and China. He expects the same to be true for Science within the next four to five years. “That’s the competitive effect that I don’t think the administration has very good answers for,” Thorp said. “At least when I write to them and ask them if they want to comment about it in my column, they never respond to me.”
How these dueling visions of research in America play out will in some ways be shaped by the outcomes of the next few elections. But science happens on a longer time scale, and both Thorp and Kornbluth pointed to the need of scientists and academics everywhere, regardless of who holds power in Washington, to confront the underlying political reality of rising populism and cratering trust in institutions.
Kornbluth highlighted a new initiative launched this month — MIT for America — which sends students and alumni out across the country to help under-resourced high schools teach math, computer science, and other STEM classes often required for admission into the kinds of college programs required to move ahead in the increasingly AI-centric U.S. economy. “We want to both meet people where they are, give their kids the opportunity, and also make them understand us as people who care about their communities,” she said.
Thorp urged universities to follow MIT’s lead on getting rid of legacy admissions policies that give children of alumni an edge (which the university did decades ago). “It’s a huge part of why people are suspicious of higher education,” Thorp said. But he acknowledged that there’s only so much that institutions of all types can do to reverse the tide of populism, which has been growing for close to a century.
“My view is we have to accept the fact of what modernity has given us,” Thorp said. “Some people come to me as the editor of Science and think I have a big platform, and I’m sure they go to STAT and think STAT has a big platform, but compared to Mr. Beast, we’re off by three orders of magnitude. I can put all the cool videos and explainers and everything I want to on the Science social media accounts, which are the largest in academic publishing, and it’s not going to move the needle.”
