Acceptances for biomedical graduate students and postdoctoral scholars are being cut back at some universities and medical centers across the country as many grapple with the potential impact of the Trump administration’s order to cut National Institutes of Health research funding.
The cuts come even as the proposed reductions to funding for overhead expenses, set to start Feb.10, were temporarily halted last week by a federal judge, at least until a court hearing this Friday. Universities appear to be exercising caution, with some freezing positions and not taking new applications, or accepting fewer students than normal, according to interviews, public announcements, and internal emails obtained by STAT. The abrupt narrowing of training opportunities is leaving many future researchers at the start of their scientific journey in limbo.
The academic calendar runs to the rhythm of its own seasons; right now is typically the time of year when offer letters for Ph.D. programs and postdoc positions in labs start hitting inboxes. Universities and academic medical centers were in the thick of that process when the NIH policy about overhead costs, known as indirect costs, landed.
“This couldn’t be worse timing for doing this,” said Waverly Ding, an associate professor at the University of Maryland who studies the biomedical sciences workforce. “It’s creating a jolt in the market that is going to be disabling for labs, especially the smaller ones, because they won’t have the human capital to do their science. It’s also going to create chaos for Ph.D.s; It’s going to be a cascading kind of chain effect through the entire ecosystem.”
The slowdown is happening at some universities and not at others; some students may be unaware of the issue as they anxiously await acceptance letters without fully understanding the role national politics is playing in those decisions. Some faculty are grappling with admissions that are paused and then unpaused, while others say they are receiving little information or guidance from leadership.
At the University of Southern California, faculty in some departments were told last week to pause admissions, and not formalize offers to students — even those who had visited and been given verbal acceptances. “The awkward part is that we already told these applicants that they were provisionally accepted and invited them to an in-person recruitment day; many have already purchased flight + hotel reservations,” one professor said in a faculty discussion list-serve observed by STAT. That pause on admissions, in psychology, was lifted this week, STAT was told.
Jennifer Unger, a professor who runs a doctoral program in health behavior research in the department of population and public health sciences at the University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine, said Wednesday she was still not able to admit the six graduate students her department had accepted after a visit day on Feb. 3.
“We had just flown them out, we told them we love you, we want to admit you, and then everything just stopped,” Unger said. “On the day Trump announced they were cutting indirect costs [Feb. 7], USC paused all Ph.D. admissions.”
“I just don’t know what to tell them,” Unger said of the students. “Some of them have other offers and will likely go somewhere else. We’ve probably lost them.”
Despite USC’s “unpausing” of admissions in many departments, Unger said Wednesday she was still not able to admit students. She hoped her portal to admit students would open soon, but said the disruption was coming at a time when her field, public health, was already reeling from the actions of the Trump administration, something affecting potential graduate students as well.
“It’s very stressful for them, this is a major life decision,” she said, adding they were already worried about their futures. “They were asking, ‘Do you think we’ll be able to get a job in this environment? Do you think we’ll get grants?’”
Some schools were continuing to accept students or had accepted graduate students before the recent turmoil and said those offers are intact.
“We have no knowledge of any disruptions to graduate student admissions in the science fields within the UC system,” Rachel Zaentz, senior director of communications for the University of California Office of the President, told STAT in an email.
In some cases, the pauses to hiring and admissions were implemented ahead of the NIH policy change — evidence of how quickly the Trump administration’s threats to withhold federal research dollars over diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts are shifting the financial footings of universities.
On Feb. 6, faculty at Vanderbilt University were instructed to reduce graduate admissions by half across the board, according to an email obtained by STAT.
On the same day, faculty at the University of Washington School of Public Health received an email to pause offers to doctoral students as well as offers of financial support to graduate students. Faculty hiring was also frozen, the email said. This Tuesday, the public health school sent out another email informing the community that some faculty hiring and Ph.D. student offers would continue, but at a greatly diminished level.
The school is also planning to take more “cost containment measures,” including hiring freezes and reappointment freezes for staff and postdocs, through the end of the academic year due to the volatility caused by the Trump administration. Existing offers will be honored, wrote Hilary Godwin, dean of UW’s school of public health.
Marion Pepper, chair of UW’s immunology department, said she was instructed by university leadership to keep her program’s next graduate cohort smaller than the usual five to nine students admitted each year. That’s easier said than done, because the proportion of students who accept offers of admission varies year-to-year. Pepper told STAT that while she expects the incoming class to be slightly smaller than normal, she has spoken with program heads at UW and elsewhere who are reducing class sizes by half or more.
“I know for other programs, they’re feeling very bleak about how they’re going to keep labs running without funding or students,” Pepper said. “It’s pretty overwhelming.”
Medical schools hit hard
It’s unclear how many other universities are taking similar preemptive belt-tightening measures, but schools of public health and medical schools are particularly vulnerable, because they tend to have many faculty, postdocs, and graduate students supported by grants.
Boston University School of Public Health has also ordered an across-the-board hiring freeze on all new faculty and staff positions — including student workers and postdocs. In a campus-wide announcement, Dean ad interim Michael Stein said the move was being made due to “the uncertainty of the moment.” A spokesperson for the school told STAT that graduate admissions are unaffected by the freeze and are not being reduced or rescinded.
Unger said USC had cut funding for some TAships in her department earlier this year before the new executive orders, which reduced the number of graduate students her program could accept from 10 to 6.
On Feb. 11, Columbia University’s medical school faculty were told that the school was putting a temporary pause on hiring as well as other activities like travel and procuring equipment, according to an email obtained by the Columbia student newspaper, the Columbia Spectator. A spokesperson for Columbia declined to comment on the pause.
In other cases, schools may accept fewer graduate students than they had planned, not because of an overt directive from university leaders, but because faculty feel unsure about future funding, given the Trump administration’s intent to cut billions of dollars in overhead funding.
At the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 25% fewer graduate students will be admitted this year, based on a survey of faculty members taking new students, said Mark Peifer, a professor of cell biology there. This means the school will admit about 75 students across the biomedical sciences. He noted the numbers of graduate students vary each year so the decline was not unprecedented.
In an interview with STAT, Robert Ferris, the director of UNC’s Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center, said that hiring freezes, fewer Ph.D. student offers, and other similar cost containment measures are being considered as the center is eyeing the same financially turbulent waters as other research institutions. “Every one of those things is on the table, unfortunately,” Ferris said. “There’s so much uncertainty. Can we hire this faculty member? Can we purchase this equipment?”
They just don’t know exactly what or how many measures the center may have to take, he said, as there are simply still too many unknowns — for instance, the outcome of the NIH indirect rate cut policy is still up in the air. “Not knowing how it’s going to shake out,” he said, “it just freezes everybody into inaction.”
Grants on indefinite hold
Adding to the uncertainty is disruptions to key parts of the NIH approval process for proposed research grants. Although some meetings of study sections — in which grant applications are reviewed — resumed at the start of the month, meetings of advisory councils have not. Each of the 27 institutes of the NIH has its own advisory council, which meets three times a year to issue final funding recommendations on new research projects. None of these councils has met since the Jan. 22 communications freeze was ordered across all federal health agencies.
A law called the Federal Advisory Committee Act requires that advisory councils post meeting details in the Federal Register 15 days prior to their scheduled date. But because submissions to the Federal Register have been put on hold indefinitely, these meetings can’t take place. And without these meetings, no new grants can be funded.
According to one NIH employee, at least one NIH meeting scheduled for this Friday to allow an institute director to provide updates that could proceed because it had been posted to the Federal Register was nonetheless canceled Wednesday. This was because the meeting specified it would include a session open to the public — but because a ban remains in place on any public communications, meetings with open sessions cannot be held. “And they can’t update the federal registry with a revised agenda stating no open session because the federal registry is closed,” the source said.
Principal investigators who had been counting on awards to pay the salaries of new graduate students and postdocs are now left wondering if their labs will be able to make it through the summer, let alone take on new members.
Referencing the hold on submissions to the Federal Register, MIT neuroscientist Nancy Kanwisher posted on social media Wednesday: “So much for the grant I submitted last September, which was supposed to be reviewed next week. Hardly the biggest tragedy on the current scale of things, but it will force me to severely downsize my already small lab.”
Fears were similar for one computational genomics researcher at a prominent East Coast institution who asked for anonymity for fear of being targeted by the new administration. “We have people coming to visit the lab next week, and these are students we haven’t made offers to yet because we can’t,” he said. “I don’t know what I’m going to tell them.”
Beyond the immediate harm to young scientists, he worries about the long-term damage to fields like computer science and biomedical engineering — areas where the U.S. has long been the world leader. “If we stop training students, we’re going to lose that lead very quickly,” he said. “It’s not clear anyone else is going to pick up the ball. We’re just going to be worse off and people won’t even be aware of it — it’s hard to notice when it takes 20 years instead of 10 to get a cure.”
Fewer training destinations
Cuts within NIH are also adding to the rapidly constricting pool of places prospective scientists can go to train. Since the 1960s, the NIH has provided opportunities for recent college graduates to spend one or two years in a full-time research position within one of the institute’s labs, which many scientists see as a key tool for recruiting young people into biomedical fields. On Feb. 1, a notice appeared on the NIH website announcing that all training programs had paused recruitment “pending guidance from Health and Human Services.”
The NIH’s Postbac Program, which provides recent college graduates with research positions and career advising and last year admitted roughly 1,600 people, will not be accepting any new applicants for 2025, according to an NIH employee who asked for anonymity for fear of repercussions. “It’s a vital link in the training of doctors and biomedical scientists in the country,” the NIH employee said. “You can’t find a medical school or biomed program that doesn’t have students from the postbac program.”
While the Trump administration may be hoping that the headwinds it’s creating for academic hiring may push recent graduates or newly minted Ph.D.s into private industry, it’s unlikely to play out that way because of the speed and scale of the disruption. “Pharmaceutical firms are not going to suddenly open up more jobs for graduates to adapt to this situation,” said Ding. More likely is that people will start looking for opportunities outside the U.S., or wind up without jobs altogether, she added.
At this point, it’s still too early to say if these are the first signs of losing a generation of American scientists. But even people like Ding, who track the data that could provide clues about how extensive the damage will be, are facing uncertainty about their ability to continue their own work. Her plans to hire a postdoc are currently on hold as she waits to find out if a grant she has through the National Science Foundation — which is facing its own drastic cuts — will come through.
Jonathan Wosen contributed reporting.