Jennie Bromberg was somehow still exuberant last weekend about her future career in public health. In January, she interviewed for a competitive Ph.D. program in epidemiology at the University of Washington, one of several to which she has applied. “I loved them. It was amazing,” she told me by phone while on a walk with her Australian shepherd. But the email that arrived from UW shortly after she got home was not the acceptance letter that she’d hoped for. Nor was it even a rejection. Instead, it said that she’d been placed in grad-school purgatory. All new offers of admission were being put on hold “in response to the uncertainty we are facing because of the rapidly changing financial landscape.” The email finished: “We appreciate your patience as we navigate through these uncertainties and disruption.”
Those words euphemize a cascade of traumas that have befallen higher education since Inauguration Day. The Trump administration has frozen, slashed, threatened, and otherwise obstructed the tens of billions of dollars in funding that universities receive from the government, and then found ways around the court orders that were meant to stop or delay such efforts. In the meantime, new proposals to raise the tax on endowment income could further eat away at annual budgets. And all of this is happening at just the time when graduate admissions are in progress. Future researchers such as Jennie Bromberg are caught in the middle.
The University of Washington is not alone in putting things on hold. The University of Pennsylvania, the University of Pittsburgh, and the University of Southern California have also paused or cut their graduate admissions, at least temporarily. Ilya Levental, a biophysicist at the University of Virginia, told me that his program in biomedical sciences reduced the size of its incoming class by 30 percent. In other words, grad school is in trouble. And because grad school trains the next generation of academics—those who will be teaching students, discovering knowledge, and translating science into practice—this means the future of the university itself is in trouble too.
Doctoral students typically do not pay for their advanced degrees. Instead, they work in research groups or labs, or sometimes as classroom instructors. In exchange for this work, universities usually pay them a modest salary and waive or cover their tuition. In engineering, the sciences, and medicine, the cost of that support comes mostly from faculty research that is in turn paid for by grants received from the federal government.
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Once it became clear, in recent weeks, that this grant money was in jeopardy, schools began gaming out contingencies. Reducing the number of graduate students they will have to pay next year is one way to lower near-term risk. It’s also an act that universities would want to take right now, before their offers of admission are sent out. “People are trying to be conservative, because the worst outcome is very bad here,” Aaron Meyer, an associate bioengineering professor at UCLA, told me. “A commitment to a Ph.D. student in the sciences is easily half a million dollars, over many years.”
Administrators’ choices on admissions are made even more complicated by a weird dynamic in play across higher ed. No one wants to overreact and cut new students without good reason, but they also have to hedge against the risk of others’ cuts. The situation is structured like a prisoner’s dilemma: If lots of programs start reducing their admissions, that means fewer total spots for applicants, which in turn could lead to greater “yields”—that is, a higher proportion of each school’s offers gets accepted. No school wants to end up with too many students, so if one expects a growing yield, it may decide to cut admissions offers on that basis—and thus exacerbate the larger trend.
The administration has also called for tightened scrutiny on visas of all kinds, including student visas. This could further muddy grad-school yields by making some applicants unable to accept their offers of admissions or enroll. Graduate-student unions, which now represent more than 150,000 students nationwide, add another layer of uncertainty. Organizing has allowed grad students, who can barely afford to live in many cities, to advocate for better pay and labor practices. But it also increased the cost of graduate education in a way that worried administrators even before the grant and overhead cuts arrived. Schools sometimes take graduate tuition, and normally pay student stipends, from the same grants that are now at risk. And some grants have already been canceled, leading to a scramble for money to cover current students. The whole system has been thrown out of whack.
Choosing to take fewer students forestalls or even ends the careers of future scientists. It also makes research harder. In most science, engineering, and medicine programs, students get accepted into specific labs or groups led by the faculty whose grants also fund those students. These faculty members take on students to help them carry out their research. “Ph.D. students make up the bulk of the academic-research workforce,” Levental told me. Without their labor, work on already awarded grants can’t be done—assuming the funds to carry out those grants continue flowing in the first place.
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The situation could deteriorate if current doctoral students start jumping ship. A Ph.D. student might make $35,000 a year, a sum they tolerate because “they are investing in themselves and are dedicated to the cause,” as Levental put it. But that investment might start to look foolish. Dallas McCulloch, a doctoral student who studies health and illness at Wayne State University with four years of supposedly guaranteed funding, told me that he is thinking of quitting and moving abroad to pursue his degree, because of “the grim prospects of any future funding, including for my dissertation.” McCulloch, an American who also holds a German passport, said he is worried that if he doesn’t act soon, he’ll end up competing with a “mass exodus” of researchers seeking to leave the United States.
Universities could decide to cover shortfalls in science and engineering by reallocating funds for graduate education from elsewhere. Some faculty and administrators I spoke with are worried that the humanities might become a casualty of such reapportionment. There, graduate students are typically paid for teaching, not research. Knock-on cuts to their admissions could follow, the effects of which might then reverberate into undergraduate education. If grad school in the sciences falters, the effects will not be contained.
For the moment, though, the whole system is in limbo. UW’s “pause” on graduate admissions was set to last at least two weeks, according to the email that was sent to Bromberg two weeks ago. No news was promised either way—and no news is what Bromberg has received so far. Given the chaotic and aggressive rush of new directives from the federal government, universities have no idea whether their financial outlooks will improve or worsen in the coming months. They don’t even know when they’re likely to find out. Over the weekend, Carolyn Ibberson, a microbiologist at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, created a shared spreadsheet to track the latest news. Its title sounds definitive, “Graduate Reductions Across Biomedical Sciences (2025),” but much of the information there is cited to private conversations and internal emails. In other words, academics face uncertainty about how universities are handling uncertainty.
Bromberg can only take things as they come. She lives in Columbus, Ohio, but plans to attend, at her own expense, Washington’s on-campus open house for prospective graduate students and is still waiting to hear back from other schools. She told me that she understands the pressures that administrators are feeling at the moment: “I just feel so bad for people who have to make these decisions.” And if Bromberg doesn’t get into a doctoral program—or if the research career she hopes the degree will unlock becomes unviable—she’ll just have to think of something else. Like McCulloch, she has wondered if she could flee to Europe. Even before the Irish journalist Fintan O’Toole urged his government to steal American scientists, Bromberg had already researched the cost of moving Gatsby, her 70-pound dog, from Columbus to Dublin: $8,000, or about one-quarter of a typical annual graduate salary. “I’ll be devastated if this is the end of everything I’ve worked for in my career,” Bromberg said. “But what am I going to do? I have to start looking into these things.”
