Nearly 20 million students have returned to America’s college campuses. Those of us who have spent our lives inside universities never tire of it. Back to school is one of the most exciting times of the year.
This year, though, campuses are quieter.
Universities have admitted 15% fewer doctoral students this fall, the second consecutive year of decline, according to the Association of American Universities.
That is not because students lost interest. Some grants have been canceled midstream. The rest, approved by Congress, is being held in Washington for political review.
It is tempting to file this under campus problems, of interest mainly to academics like me. That would be a mistake. This touches all of us.
Federal research funding is the spark that fuels American innovation, something both political parties have supported for decades.
So much of what makes America the envy of the world began in a university lab. The computer, the phone, the tablet each trace back to a campus lab.
Medicine tells the same story. In the mid-1970s, only about half of Americans diagnosed with cancer were alive five years later. Today, it’s 70%, and 92% of children with the most common childhood leukemia survive, gains from federally funded university trials.
It reaches the farm and the storm cellar, too. Agricultural economists estimate every public dollar put into farm research returns roughly twentyfold — in higher yields and hardier crops, which means cheaper groceries. The radar that warns a family before a tornado grew out of the same research.
Economists have found that federal investment in nondefense research has paid for itself many times over since the Second World War.
Congress can’t agree on much these days, but it did pass this funding, with votes from both parties. Now the White House budget office wants to change the rules for how research money gets awarded, another layer between the funding and the campuses it is meant for. This was supposed to be the era of cutting red tape.
We can all agree it’s good to have rules to make sure money is spent well and not wasted.
But this is different. The current proposal would permit grants to be canceled midstream without a hearing or appeal.
Any new rule must go through public comment. The docket swelled toward half a million responses over the summer, and of those made public, more than 90% opposed it. Even in this hyperpartisan environment, Congress blocked the rule — 90 to 6 in the Senate, 370 to 48 in the House, and signed into law. But the block lifts in December.
None of that moves this year’s approved funding.
While research waits, cancer does not. Neither does Alzheimer’s. The National Science Foundation has made more than 40% fewer new grants this year than last. Roughly 50 medical trials at universities are frozen awaiting review, leaving some 7,500 patients unable to enroll.
The deeper damage is still to come. A research grant is a promise stretching across years: a student admitted against five years of support, a patient enrolled in a trial that must finish to mean anything. When institutions cannot trust that promised money will arrive and stay, they do not just decline to finish projects. They decline to begin them. No one decides to lose a generation of American scientists, but that is what is at risk.
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America leads the world because of what its universities discover and what those discoveries inspire. That lead is no longer uncontested: in 2024, China out-invested us in research for the first time, $1.03 trillion to $1.01 trillion. That lead was built by patient, bipartisan investment, and it can be lost the same quiet way it was won: a canceled trial here, an unmade offer there. A delayed grant can fund a lab by winter, but a student who walks away rarely walks back.
Students have already shown up this fall. The funding Congress approved should, too.
E. Gordon Gee served as the president of West Virginia University, University of Colorado, Vanderbilt University, The Ohio State University, and Brown University.