“We want to support merit,”
a new pilot program pairs top universities with defense contractors and industry giants, aiming to steer doctoral training away from pure academia and toward “national scientific goals”
The Trump administration is pairing top universities with corporate giants in an effort to steer traditional PhD programs toward national scientific priorities.
Today, the White House and National Science Foundation are announcing a $47 million pilot program to fund around 250 four-year doctorates in technical fields, starting this fall. Students in the pilot will be placed at an industry partner, where they will spend at least one year doing “practical research” that can go towards their dissertation. NSF’s investment will fund three years of these PhDs, with 31 universities and 20-plus companies funding the rest.
“About the same amount of basic research is done today in academia as in the private sector,” Michael Kratsios, the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, told Pirate Wires. “Over time, while the ecosystem has changed and different players have emerged where important scientific work is being done, the institutions which train our next generation of scientists have not really been updated.”
Essentially, the administration says they want to correct the mismatch between PhD programs’ academia-focused pedagogy and the large proportion of graduates who take industry jobs.
The administration’s move is a signal that despite its general scrutiny toward legacy institutions of higher education, it is still open to collaborating with them — including with elite schools that have borne the brunt of research funding cuts and civil rights investigations. The pilot spans a wide range of public and private universities across the country, from state schools like the University of Texas at Austin to the Ivy League, including Columbia, Dartmouth, and the University of Pennsylvania, according to an initial list.
“We want to support merit,” Kratsios said. “We want our interactions with academia to reflect the realities of the scientific ecosystem today.”
