Trump’s attacks on higher ed could provide a chance to reimagine the university

On Monday, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) posted on X that it would terminate over 400 grants, adding up to some $250 million in funding, to Columbia University over its response to pro-Palestinian protests. The following day, the Trump administration pulled $800 million in USAID-related grants from Johns Hopkins University, academia’s biggest research and development spender.

These cuts come on top of last month’s announcement of major rollbacks to what are known as indirect costs — money the NIH gives research institutions on top of project-specific grants to cover necessary expenses like building maintenance, utilities, and administrative staff salaries. Many universities — both large and small, public and private — rely on the NIH to sustain a lot of their day-to-day operations.

Any threat to that funding poses an existential threat to higher education. Without the jobs, medical research, and technological developments made possible by these institutions, people outside of academia could miss out on breakthrough treatments for diseases like cancer, and will be more vulnerable to public health crises. As a result, the US will likely lose its technological competitiveness on a global scale, which could damage the economy in the long run.

The indirect cost cuts have been temporarily blocked by a federal judge, but the chaos still compelled many universities to preemptively tighten their belts. Some institutions are paring back on graduate programs: freezing new faculty hires and PhD student applications, accepting fewer students than usual, or even rescinding existing offer letters. The UMass Chan Medical School pulled back on all of its admissions offers for the fall 2025 term, blaming funding uncertainty for biomedical research.

Why exactly has the Trump administration seemingly declared war on academic biomedical research? In theory, depriving future researchers of places in academia could push them toward the private sector, which potentially aligns with a conservative pro-business approach. But the antipathy goes deeper than that.

Vice President JD Vance has said that “the universities are the enemy.” Attacking science and higher education, whether under the guise of reducing taxpayer waste or punishing antisemitism, was always part of this administration’s plan. But its haphazard destabilization of the scientific enterprise won’t automatically funnel would-be biomedical PhDs into pharmaceutical or biotech companies, especially when there already aren’t enough jobs in those industries now to absorb the flood of highly educated people applying for them. If turned away from grad school, it’s more likely that young scientists will take their talents to other countries, or leave the field altogether.

While the headlines have been about STEM funding, academic departments that fall far outside the NIH’s purview — like history, or comparative literature — are also being affected. That’s because research groups in STEM departments bring in the big federal grants universities depend on, while arts and humanities research largely rely on money the university pulls from endowments, tuition, and state funding. Without the NIH’s money, universities may be forced to divert funds from humanities to STEM departments, where research facilities and equipment are way more expensive.

As a result, when well-resourced STEM departments fall, they take humanities down with them. And when graduate programs downsize, universities lose the PhD students that keep research and undergraduate education afloat. And without grad student labor, the whole academic system crumbles.

Academics are terrified, and they should be. There’s only so much instability that young scholars can stomach to chase careers that the government is actively destroying. We risk losing an entire generation of future experts, and the potential harm that could cause is incalculable.

And yet, even academia’s stoutest defenders would acknowledge there were serious problems with STEM graduate education even before Trump took office again. If done intentionally, downsizing PhD training programs could be a good thing. While the way these sudden funding cuts are being carried out cause far more chaos than positive change, universities do need fewer PhD students — and to take better care of those they admit.

For most of American history, higher education was limited to the privileged few. That changed after World War II, when the GI Bill made universities dramatically more accessible. Cold War-era investments, many of them motivated by post-Sputnik competition with the Soviet Union, subsidized the growth of PhD programs in STEM fields, all aiming to advance the nation’s strategic interests in science and military readiness. And those fields kept growing.

Today, the pool of potential PhD candidates across all disciplines is much larger than it was during the Cold War. Roughly 40 percent of Americans over 25 are college graduates, and over 8.5 million of them have a doctorate or professional degree. Earning a medical, law, or business administration degree often equips students for high-earning careers (and, in many cases, hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt).

But the academic job market is bleak for newly minted PhDs, and it has been for decades. In STEM fields, it’s not uncommon for PhD grads to spend at least five years in postdoctoral positions, earning under $60,000 annually, all with no guarantee of ever landing a faculty job. And while STEM grads who can’t find a home in academia can often turn to jobs in biopharma or engineering, humanities graduates are much more dependent on academic employment — and those jobs are increasingly scarce. In 2020, fewer than half of new humanities PhDs had a job lined up at graduation.

When much of what you’re producing can’t find a market, it’s a good sign you’re oversupplying. But while the glut of PhDs is bad for recent graduates, it is convenient for universities that use grad students as a cheap, talented, and highly motivated workforce. Because they are often defined as “trainees,” universities often get away with treating early-career academics like apprentices, rather than workers.

More grad students means more research and teaching for a fraction of the cost of hiring full-time professors to do the same. (Perhaps unsurprisingly, unionization efforts among grad students are generally met with hostility from administration and faculty, who fear stalled scientific progress and undergraduate education.)

As universities are forced to pare down on graduate admissions in light of Trump’s attacks on science and higher education, they’ll have to reckon with the consequences of losing the people who do the bulk of academia’s dirty work. With fewer junior scientists, research groups will produce less data and publish fewer papers, potentially jeopardizing the careers of young professors who rely on trainees and publications to earn tenure. Fewer graduate student instructors will also mean inflated class sizes for undergraduates.

It’s easy to dismiss cuts to PhD programs as problems confined to ivory towers. I spent six years earning a neuroscience PhD, and it’s difficult to garner sympathy for someone who voluntarily sacrificed the bulk of her twenties studying the intricacies of the orbitofrontal cortex. But the truth is that academic research lays the groundwork for virtually every innovation and advancement that comes from private corporations. Fundamental research — even that which doesn’t have any obvious market value — drives progress. When universities lose part of their academic workforce, the costs extend far beyond campus.

The question isn’t whether we need researchers — we do. It’s how we can sustainably support knowledge production while treating academic workers with the dignity they deserve.

“As long as I’ve been in the profession, science has run on a series of strange cultural practices that rely on uncompensated labor,” C. Brandon Ogbunu, an assistant professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Yale, wrote in Undark last week.

Generations of researchers have accepted these conditions as part of the job, but they’re not. Exploitative systems can — and should — be dismantled and rebuilt. Not through the chaos and confusion of Trump’s cuts, but through gradual admissions reductions and strategic cuts to brand-boosting money pits (like sports).

There is an opportunity to envision a better academia — one that values, adequately trains, and fairly compensates young scholars. When researchers aren’t scrambling to make ends meet or anxious about their career prospects, they can devote more mental energy to their work. Properly supported scholars take bigger intellectual risks, and are more likely to pursue ambitious, potentially groundbreaking work. And, quite simply, all workers deserve a living wage.

Ranking systems, which are used to recruit students and establish a reputation, often include ratios of doctoral students to total students or faculty in their calculations. NIH grants also require applicants to prove they’ve trained and retained PhD students, incentivizing universities to produce more PhDs — whether those graduates have job prospects or not. One potential fix: admit fewer grad students, pay each student more, and measure success in terms of individual job placements, mentorship quality, and research impact. Long-term positions for senior scientists and lecturers can pick up the slack, and maintain institutional memory better than a transient workforce-in-training ever could.

Without these incentives, departments won’t be punished by funders for reducing graduate program admissions or for supporting students in leaving if grad school ends up being a poor fit. With fewer students to support, universities could afford to increase PhD stipends, many of which currently fall well below the cost of living, especially in humanities departments. (PhD stipends usually range between $20,000 and $45,000 per year, with many universities paying humanities and social science students thousands less than that.)

As the foreign aid community comes to terms with the fact that it needs to be ruthless about prioritizing what it can do with fewer resources, academia may need to do the same. As devastating as these cuts to higher education are, it may be the shock the system needs to make much-needed changes. Pulling the rug out from under hopeful PhD applicants was not the way to downsize academia — but we do have too many PhDs. On the other side of this chaos, if there’s anything left at all, could be a pared-down system that prioritizes quality over quantity.

The Economist published a cynical take on grad school back in 2010: “Many of those who embark on a PhD are the smartest in their class and will have been the best at everything they have done,” they write. “Few will be willing to accept that the system they are entering could be designed for the benefit of others, that even hard work and brilliance may well not be enough to succeed, and that they would be better off doing something else.”

But producing specialized knowledge creators and expert researchers is a good deal for any country trying to solve big societal problems, and devaluing it risks driving smart people out of the US, where their work is under attack. While PhD programs often fail to teach students how to teach, communicate with regular people, or navigate corporate politics, they do train people to read deeply, plan challenging projects, and execute them with discipline. We need that now more than ever.