Welcome to the Incoming Freshman Class of Project 2025 (Science and Research Options Now Limited or Unavailable)
If successful, ongoing efforts to slash federally-funded research mean parents should expect to pay more even as students have fewer options for career-relevant training.
The Bottom Line Up Front.
If the White House is successful in slashing federal funding for US research, the impacts will be felt in universities and colleges in all 50 states. Student opportunities to address real-world challenges will diminish as research projects are shuttered and experts are laid off or leave. Reduced federal funding will drive up costs. Parents should expect to pay more even as students have fewer options for career-relevant training. Not what you want or expect? Take a read. Perhaps by the end you might decide to ask your Congressional Representative how much NIH and NSF research dollars flow to your state and/or college of interest. And then you might wonder: what are elected officials doing to ensure that America can train the next generation of students (yours and mine alike) to build lasting and meaningful careers.
Attacks on Higher Education or Attacks on America’s Future
The Trump Administration’s DOGE initiative has initiated a systematic attack on higher education and the innovation ecosystem in the United States – targeting grant agencies, programs, and the operational capabilities of universities and research institutions. But let’s face facts. This attack means different things to different people.
Some will celebrate the news as a deserved comeuppance for a what they perceive as an out-of-touch educational system that has strayed from its mission. Others will see harbingers of doom, with good reason – attacks on intellectuals and claims that ‘professors are the enemy’ come straight from the autocrat’s playbook.
I think it’s fair to say that most folks don’t know yet what to make of these changes and the majority might even applaud the sense that ‘things are changing’ without knowing the specifics (if you don’t believe me, look at this poll).
Why should we expect folks to know the specifics?
Parents with children and teens at home or in college who aren’t employed by a university or research institute have worries of their own: doing (and keeping) their jobs, paying the mortgage/rent and bills, putting food on the table, getting their kids off their damn cellphones, planning a vacation, taking care of loved ones, and making time for worship, working out, and occasionally seeing friends and family.
Question: Who has time to follow the nuances of a *niche* battle for the future of higher education?
Answer: Not many people.
Yes, I am a scientist working in a field I love and that I view as a calling. The problem is, this is not a niche battle in my profession. It is the start of something far bigger, with stakes for everyone. But if we talk about grandiose ideas or frame the attack as one on universities alone, we are sending a particular message: the problems are that of principles and world views, not outcomes. If that’s the case, folks will and should tune out.
Which is why, in this post, I am going to focus on a particular group of impacts to a particular group of people: parents of teenagers who are deciding whether or not to go to a research active university and parents of teenage and 20-somethings that already attend a research active university. These 200+ “R1” and “R2” universities (and many research-intensive undergraduate colleges) include colleges and universities in America in all 50 states. Sure, Harvard, Princeton, Stanford and MIT are on this list, but so are Penn State, U of Maryland, Georgia Tech, U of Georgia, U of Alabama, Texas A&M, CUNY City College U of Florida, Howard University, Northern Arizona University and dozens upon dozens more.
For these parents – and their children – the college experience is about to change.
A Threat to the College Return on Investment
Going to and completing a college degree matters. Educational attainment is linked to civic engagement, financial success, and marital outcomes. This is not say that college is right for everyone. There are many good careers that don’t require a college degree. But, the training, interactions, and preparation students receive in college makes a difference. Deciding to go to college makes a tangible & substantial impact on lifetime expected earnings – whether starting a career in business, law, medicine, science, computing or beyond.
Which is why parents and children decide to go on college tours, trying to learn how to balance the increasing financial costs of 4-year undergraduate degree programs with some sense of the perceived benefits: living in a small town or big city, attending a small liberal arts college or a large, land-grand state university, focusing on schools with a large range of majors or those that offer limited but high-quality specializations. And of course there is far more at play – the quality of the food at the dining hall, the presence (or absence) of Greek life, the sports teams, the climbing gym, access to nature or culture or both.
Yet these comparison points are often disconnected from the practical link between the money that parents and students pay and the money students earn down the road.
College can train young adults to reason about complex problems, expose them to ideas and possibilities that they may not have imagined, and connect them to peers and opportunities that kick-start meaningful lives and careers. For many, college represents the start of something that can lead to a significant return on investment.
I won’t go down the rabbit hole of college rankings (from meaning to manipulation), but I will point out that some have tried to evaluate college through the lens of a ‘return on investment’. Do I agree with this one-dimensional ratio of financial return? No, there is more to life than ROI, but it would be foolish to think it doesn’t matter. The list is also revealing for who is in the top 10: military academies (or adjacent institutions) and technical universities and colleges. The top 20 has a similar flavor rounded out by Princeton, Harvard, and Stanford.
A return on investment index links the cost of going to college with the expected financial return over a 20-year window. The expected return depends, in part, on the extent to which students are trained to reason logically, to build, to explore, and to link their classroom training with real-world immersive experiences for high-paying jobs. These immersive experiences begin in laboratories and research centers located throughout the US system of higher education. Why is MIT ranked #2 and Cal Tech ranked #10? It’s not just because they are selective. It is because these institutions have attracted some of the brightest and most creative professors, researchers, and scientists who have dedicated their lives to solving hard problems (and the same goes for dozens upon dozens of universities deeper down this list). University labs are where Nobel Prizes are made.
Why would we break this system? Ask the architects of Project 2025.
Welcome to the College Class of Project 2025
If you are a parent on a college tour, you might want to know whether your teenager can get a head start on their career training by doing research or working on independent projects with professors outside the classroom. For R1 and R2 classified higher-ed institutions as well as a long list of liberal arts colleges, the answer should be yes. This is why the administration’s plan to drastically cut taxpayer-funded research will reverberate beyond the few ‘elite’ institutions it claims to have targeted. Instead the impacts will be felt by parents and students nationwide.
The National Science Foundation has a $9B budget and supports research and STEM education throughout all 50 states. The White House reportedly intends to cut the annual budget to $3B per year. The National Institutes of Health has a $48B budget of which it distributes approximately $40B annually in ‘extramural’ grants. The White House intends to reduce the amount of money used to support research infrastructure (aka ‘indirect costs’) by more than 70%. If implemented this would cut total NIH extramural grant awards by an estimated $10B.
Where does this money go?
Federal research funds flow to colleges, universities, medical centers, and research institutions across all 50 states (e.g., here are the publicly available impacts for NIH). The money invested has knock-on effects. For example, NIH funding generated an estimated $93B in economy activity in fiscal year 2023. More broadly, the money catalyzes new discoveries that span the fundamental to the applied. The next advances in cancer drugs, renewable energies, advanced materials, quantum computing, robotics and more often start with university research. These discoveries are made possible by teams – and these teams bring in undergraduates for internships that help them train, contribute to research, and take the next step in their careers.
If the White House is successful in dismantling federally funded research in universities nationwide then they will have diminished America’s ability to innovate and short-circuited training opportunities for undergraduates to find and start their career. Parents and students will pay more for less as budgets and programs shrink. Imagine the headline:
White House Attacks Flagship Universities in Alabama, Iowa, and Pennsylvania –
Budget Cuts Loom as Students Face Reduce Opportunities for Career Development
Is that what folks really want? Is that a comeuppance? And if so – for whom?
Excellence is found across blue, purple, and red states. Yet, the headline above is what the White House appears to want folks to believe they are doing to the Ivies and the Ivies alone.
As but one example, the University of Alabama-Birmingham received over $300M in NIH funds alone in 2022. Yet the White House directed NIH to immediately shift a key billing rate for support costs in federally negotiated contracts that could cost the UAB $100M in losses in a single year — and they are not alone.
Innovation doesn’t have a hidden agenda. I am proud to have worked for more than 16 years as a faculty member at Georgia Tech and now for a year and half at the University of Maryland, College Park. What has changed in the past month? A diminishing of imagination. The US has the resources to continue to support a research system pipeline that is the envy of the world. If we don’t, that’s not efficiency, that’s a choice that will hurt us all.
For parents whose teenagers are about to start or already attend college, consider picking up the phone and calling your representative to ask how much money your state higher ed system receives in NSF and NIH funding and how much will be left by the time DOGE is done slashing and burning. Instead of thoughtful reforms, the US is penalizing researchers for their success and mortgaging future opportunities for students to flourish in what is – and still could be – the best higher education system in the world.