‘Completely shattered.’ Changes to NSF’s graduate student fellowship spur outcry

From ScienceMag:

After months of anticipation, the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) today released its instructions for the next round of applicants to its Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP). To the dismay of many, the prestigious program, which funds more than a thousand promising STEM graduate students each year, will now exclude a key group of students, as second-year Ph.D. students are no longer eligible. The students who are still able to apply—undergraduates, Bachelor’s degree holders, those in joint Bachelor’s-Master’s programs, and first year Ph.D. students—aren’t in the clear either, as some must decide whether to throw their hats in the ring with an unusually narrow timeframe to apply.

“I’m very upset and angry,” says Eric Foreman, a second year Ph.D. student in the biomedical sciences at Augusta University. He and others note that for the past decade, NSF has only allowed students to apply once during graduate school, and many are given advice to wait until their second year when their applications will be stronger.

Second-year students who had put in significant work on their applications prior to the solicitation release now feel abandoned. “I had already completed several drafts of my personal statement and research proposal,” says University of Chicago molecular engineering Ph.D. student Ben Broekhuis. After receiving an honorable mention when he applied as an undergraduate, he opted to sit out the application process the first year of his Ph.D. after being advised to wait. “Now, seeing from the solicitation that I’ve been cut out of my opportunity to apply, I’m completely shattered.”

There are no publicly available data on what proportion of GRFP applicants, who typically number more than 13,000 per year, are second-year Ph.D. students. But Susan Brennan, a former GRFP director who now works at Stony Brook University, says in her experience the bulk of applications come from people at that stage. “It’s completely unconscionable that NSF is pulling the rug out from under these students.” She adds that for students coming into graduate school from less well-resourced universities, having an extra year to get publications and other research experiences under the belt can be particularly important.

An NSF spokesperson told Science the changes are meant to “restore the program’s original emphasis on supporting students at the start of their research careers.”

Some researchers told Science they aren’t opposed to that shift in emphasis, but NSF should have given students a 1-year warning before changing the eligibility requirements. “We have a large cohort of incredibly competitive students … who now can’t apply” to one of the nation’s premier graduate fellowship programs, says Cynthia Reinhart-King, the chair of the department of bioengineering at Rice University who has served as a reviewer for the GRFP program and has mentored several fellowship winners. As one second-year Ph.D. student told Science on the condition of anonymity, “It feels like we are being punished for following the conventional advice.”

The change in policy now also puts unexpected pressure on first-year Ph.D. students, many of whom were planning to wait until next year to submit their applications but now may feel compelled to apply, assuming the requirements won’t change next year and this will be their last shot. “It forces many students to propose projects based on limited experience in a particular research domain, having only been in graduate school for a few months,” says Ryan Sochol, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Maryland. Some may not have even joined a lab yet, as some Ph.D. programs require students to complete lab rotations during their first year.

This year’s prospective applicants don’t have much time to make up their minds. Normally the program solicitation comes out in July, giving applicants at least 90 days to prepare their materials—a policy that’s clearly stated on NSF’s website. But this year’s applicants will have just over 6 weeks—and that’s only after earlier this week the agency extended the posted deadlines by about 2 weeks, from late October to early November, with no announcement or explanation. “This is a pretty tight timeline now for the students to prepare an application,” Reinhart-King says. (When asked by Science whether NSF’s 90-day policy has changed, a spokesperson wrote “I’ll look into that and get back to you.”)

The program faced criticism in the spring when this year’s cohort of winners skewed in favor of the computer sciences—a field that’s a stated priority of President Donald Trump’s administration. The instructions released today say “fellowships will be supported in all NSF-eligible research areas.” But it adds that the agency “will continue to emphasize high priority research areas in alignment with Administration priorities.”

Jason Williams, assistant director of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory DNA Learning Center, says he worries that the program has “become liable to outside influences that are not necessarily really aligned with the mission of NSF and the mission of the country to create the best STEM talent.” He and others submitted an open letter to NSF in 2020 expressing concern when, during the first Trump administration, the agency first began stating that artificial intelligence, quantum information science, and computationally intensive research would be considered high-priority research areas. Williams had a meeting scheduled today with colleagues, including Brennan, to decide how to proceed after they posted an open letter yesterday about the delay in guidelines, which quickly garnered hundreds of comments.

They may find a partner in Daniel Bolnick, an evolutionary biology professor at the University of Connecticut who spoke out on the social media platform Bluesky after seeing that NSF was revoking eligibility for second-year Ph.D. students without any prior warning. “This is so deeply unfair that it warrants a formal protest from the scientific community.”

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