MIT Cuts 20% of Grad Admissions Over Federal Funding Loss — SkimNews
Get the Health newsletter
Daily health & science — research, biotech, public health, the studies worth knowing. Free.
- MIT enrolled roughly 500 fewer graduate students this fall — a 20% drop from 2024 — after losing $100 million in federal research awards, President Sally Kornbluth said at the STAT Summit Wednesday in Boston.
- The Trump administration announced $6 billion in new research investments last week targeting advanced computing, autonomous labs, nuclear-powered spacecraft, and next-generation quantum computers; OSTP Director Michael Kratsios called it the most transformative day for U.S. science since the post-World War II reshuffling.
- A separate OSTP report lays out a blueprint to shift hundreds of billions of dollars in research spending from universities to industry, primarily AI and technology firms.
- A newly revealed plan would give political appointees more direct control over National Institutes of Health grantmaking decisions, which Kornbluth said leaves universities facing deep uncertainty regardless of midterm outcomes.
- The Nature Index now ranks nine of the top 10 academic research institutions in China, with Harvard the lone U.S. representative — a decade ago American universities held half the top 10 slots.
- Science Advances is now publishing an equal number of papers from the U.S. and China, and journal editor-in-chief Holden Thorp said he expects the flagship Science to reach that parity within four to five years.
- The newly launched "MIT for America" initiative sends students and alumni to teach STEM at under-resourced high schools, an effort Kornbluth said is meant to rebuild public trust in higher education.
Why it matters: Kornbluth and Thorp argued the administration's blueprint trades long-term curiosity-driven research — credited with CRISPR, microRNA, and this year's Nobel-winning optogenetics — for short-term AI and quantum gains. With midterms unlikely to reverse the funding shift and China on track to surpass U.S. research spending within 2-3 years, U.S. science leadership is on track to slip away within a generation.
Ask SkimNews
