Financial pressures across the higher education sector have necessitated a closer look at the various incomes and associated costs of the research, teaching and operational streams. For years, larger institutions have relied upon the cross-subsidy of their research, primarily from overseas student fees – a subsidy that is under threat from changes in geopolitics and indeed our own UK policies on immigration and visa controls.
The UK is now between a rock and a hard place: how can it support the volume and focus of research needed to grow the knowledge-based economy of our UK industrial strategy, while also addressing the financial deficits that even the existing levels of research create?
Several research leaders have recently been suggesting that a more efficient research system is one where higher education institutions focus on their strengths and collaborate more. But while acknowledging that efficiency savings are required and the relentless growth of bureaucracy – partly imposed by government but also self-inflicted within the HEIs – can be addressed, the funding gulf is far wider than these savings could possibly deliver.
Efficiency savings alone will not solve the scale of structural deficits in the system. Furthermore, given that grant application success rates are systemically below 20 per cent and frequently below ten or even five per cent, the sector is already only funding its strongest applications. Fundamentally, currently demand far outstrips supply, leading to inefficiency and poor prioritisation decisions.
Since most of the research costs are those supporting the salaries and student stipends of the researchers themselves, significant cost-cutting necessitates a reduction in the size of the research workforce – a reduction that would fly in the face of our future workforce requirement. We could leave this inevitable reduction to market forces, but the resulting disinvestment will likely impact the resource intensive subjects upon which much of our future economic growth depends.
We recognise also that solutions cannot solely rely upon the public purse. So, what could we do now to improve both the efficiency of our state research spend and third-party investment into the system?
What gets spent
First of all, the chronic underfunding of the teaching of UK domestic students cannot continue, as it puts even further pressure on institutional resources. The recent index-linking of fees in England was a brave step to address this, but to maintain a viable UK research and innovation system, the other UK nations will also urgently need to address the underfunding of teaching. And in doing so we must remain mindful of the potential unintended consequences that increased fees might have on socio-economic exclusion.
Second, paying a fair price for the research we do. Much has been made of the seemingly unrestricted “quality-related” funding (QR, or REG in Scotland) driven by the REF process. The reality is that QR simply makes good the missing component of research funding which through TRAC analysis is now estimated to cover less than 70 per cent of the true costs of the research.
It ought to be noted that this missing component exists over all the recently announced research buckets extending across curiosity-driven, government-priority, and scale-up support. The government must recognise that QR is not purely the funding of discovery research, but rather it is the dual funding of research in general – and that the purpose of dual funding is to tension delivery models to ensure HEI efficiency of delivery.
Next, there is pressing a need for UKRI to focus resource on the research most likely to lead to economic or societal benefit. This research spans all disciplines from the hardest of sciences to the most creative of the arts.
Although these claims are widely made within every grant proposal, perhaps the best evidence of their validity lies in the co-investment these applications attract. We note the schemes such as EPSRC’s prosperity partnerships and their quantum technology hubs show that when packaged to encompass a range of technology readiness levels (TRL), industry is willing to support both low and high TRL research.
We would propose that across UKRI more weighting is given to those applications supported by matching funds from industry or, in the case of societal impact, by government departments or charities. The next wave of matched co-funding of local industry-linked innovation should also privilege schemes which elicit genuine new industry investment, as opposed to in-kind funding, as envisaged in Local Innovation Partnership Funds. This avoids increasing research volume which is already not sustainable.
The research workforce
In recent times, the UKRI budgets and funding schemes for research and training (largely support for doctoral students) have been separated from each other. This can mean that the work of doctoral students is separated from the cutting-edge research that they were once the enginehouse of delivering. This decoupling means that the research projects themselves now require allocated, and far more expensive, post-doctoral staff to deliver. We see nothing in the recent re-branding of doctoral support to “landscape” and “focal” awards that is set to change this disconnect.
It should be acknowledged that centres for doctoral training were correctly introduced nearly 20 years ago to ensure our students were better trained and better supported – but we would argue that the sector has now moved on and graduate schools within our leading HEIs address these needs without need for duplication by doctoral centres.
Our proposal would be that, except for a small number of specific areas and initiatives supported by centres of doctoral training (focal awards) and central to the UK’s skills need, the normal funding of UKRI-supported doctoral students should be associated with projects funded by UKRI or other sources external to higher education institutions. This may require the reassignment of recently pooled training resources back to the individual research councils, rebalanced to meet national needs.
This last point leads to the question of what the right shape of the HEI-based research-focused workforce is. We would suggest that emphasis should be placed on increasing the number of graduate students – many of whom aspire to move on from the higher education sector after their graduation to join the wider workforce – rather than post-doctoral researchers who (regrettably) mistakenly see their appointment as a first step to a permanent role in a sector which is unlikely to grow.
Post-doctoral researchers are of course vital to the delivery of some research projects and comprise the academic researchers of the future. Emerging research leaders should continue to be supported through, for example, future research leader fellowships, empowered to pursue their own research ambitions. This rebalancing of the research workforce will go some way to rebalancing supply and demand.
Organisational change
Higher education institutions are hotbeds of creativity and empowerment. However, typical departments have an imbalanced distribution of research resources where appointment and promotion criteria are linked to individual grant income. While not underestimating the important leadership roles this implies, we feel that research outcomes would be better delivered through internal collaborations of experienced researchers where team science brings complementary skills together in partnership rather than subservience.
This change in emphasis requires institutions to consider their team structures and HR processes. It also requires funders to reflect these changes in their assessment criteria and selection panel working methods. Again, this rebalancing of the research workforce would go some way to addressing supply and demand while improving the delivery of the research we fund.
None of these suggestions represent a quick fix for our financial pressures, which need to be addressed. But taken together we believe them to be a supportive step, helping stabilise the financial position of the sector, while ensuring its continuing contribution to the UK economy and society. If we fail to act, the UK risks a disorderly reduction of its research capability at precisely the moment our global competitors are accelerating.
UKRI has two functions. The first is to coordinate the work of seven research councils to improve research quality, impact, and infrastructure. The second is to use this convening power to achieve social good such as economic growth. The National Audit Office criticised the impact of UKRI against both of these missions.
The standard approach of UKRI has been to fund blue-sky research, things that universities and others do that push the boundaries of accepted knowledge, and to fund a portfolio of other projects, buildings, and people, to achieve a broader set of missions shaped by DSIT.
The forever tension is that this approach can lead to a great sprawl. The internal competition to establish grants underneath each research council requires a great degree of internal coordination. The bidding process for these grants is even sprawlier still. And there is no guarantee that blue-sky research will produce the kinds of things the government wants in order to achieve its mission of economic growth.
Until now, research funding has been the story of nudges toward the things government wants through bodies it influences but does not control, and through setting the legal and reporting guardrails for the train of unrestricted and unhypothecated research funding largely allocated through QR. This is now going to significantly change.
Bucketing down
UKRI’s budget allocation process is the single most powerful tool it has to shape the research ecosystem.
Today’s new settlement for the next four years of research investment has gone all in on developing cross-disciplinary funding to meet government priorities such as the industrial strategy, targeted investment in key technologies, protecting curiosity-led research, and significant increases to skills and infrastructure. It is funding that follows a government’s plan, and it’s also a marked shift in how the funder operates as an organisation.
One instructive way in to what’s going on is to compare the newly published allocations explainer to the one covering 2025–26. That previous document was a slim six-page, 1000-word canter through how much each of the funding councils was getting, in essence. UKRI’s new allocations for the rest of the spending review period are a very different beast.
First up, we’re told that it is “not possible to directly compare these allocations to previous budgets,” such is the nature of the overhaul. And while this sounds like it could be spin to distract from subtle cuts in less politically trendy areas, it is basically true – the whole budget process has been reimagined. It’s also worth observing from the get-go that the generous overall R&D spending review settlement makes it much easier to get away with these big and potentially thorny changes – compare the prompt announcement here with the ongoing wait for news about how the Office for Students’ strategic priorities grant will be reformed.
In headline terms, it should come as little surprise to see the “bucket theory” front and centre – this had already been established by the Liz Kendall and Ian Chapman speeches last month. To recap, though, overall across the four years there is £14.5bn for curiosity-driven, foundational research (Bucket 1), £8.3bn for targeted R&D addressing strategic government and societal priorities (Bucket 2), and £7.4 billion to support innovative companies’ growth (Bucket 3), as well as £8.4bn for what is basically a fourth bucket, “enabling and strengthening UK R&D”.
What we see today is that while Bucket 1 will be the largest part of the overall settlement, the increases on offer are located elsewhere – the exact figures are tricky to definitively pinpoint, given how certain elements are slowly moved from one bucket to another over the four years.
Most surprising is how fundamentally the new way of thinking about what UKRI funds translate into research council settlements. The only per-council announcements we get are for applicant-led research, where each council is seeing increases over the period. It’s tempting to try to draw lines back to previous settlements – but it fundamentally doesn’t work like this.
For buckets 2 and 3, there is no breakdown by funding council. Rather, each industrial strategy area gets its own separate item (in fact, for the digital and technologies sector, it’s split into four: engineering biology, AI, quantum, and the other stuff). The majority of the investment in bucket 2 for these areas “will be delivered by research councils,” we are advised – but this will be a separate process. Aside from specific investments such as the R&D Missions Programme and the Edinburgh supercomputer, this will flow via programmes, each led by an executive chair but described clearly as cross-UKRI.
Over in bucket 3 we can find HEIF, but much of the rest will be run through Innovate UK, with a growing focus on industrial strategy sectors. After plenty of debate within the sector about where QR should sit, it’s firmly in bucket 1 despite some suggestions that this would both misunderstand its role as a flexible fund and leave it more at risk to future cuts. The UKRI thinking is that basically QR is not government-directed, and therefore it goes in the first bucket.
Elsewhere we see a substantial investment in the collective talent doctoral funding line item (up to more than £800m next year and over £900m by 2028–29). And we understand that other doctoral funding could come from, for example, bucket 2 cash where linked to industrial strategy priorities.
A single mission
UKRI chief executive Ian Chapman describes the budget as being aligned to a “single mission”. He’s talking about the mission of advancing knowledge, improving lives and driving growth – but there’s also a clear sense that the way in which the funding landscape is being restructured gives a much firmer central UKRI steer regarding what gets spent and why, with the role of the funding councils, and Research England, more focused on delivery and detail.
The role of the industrial strategy in choosing what research investment will be made is even more prominent than many will have expected. Predictably, it’s also very lopsided – AI-related programmes will swallow £400m a year by the end of the decade, while other areas see much less frugality.
Whether this focus on the IS-8 sectors will translate through to choices about where funding gets invested, as we looked at earlier this week, remains to be seen. But the other issue with the industrial strategy lens, one that as the decade progresses will come into ever sharper focus, is what this will mean for the year after the spending review period, when a new government is likely and other priorities will suddenly have to be accommodated.
For now, it’s a big ambitious reordering of how research money gets invested, which will have to be reflected within UKRI and its component parts, as they are being asked to work in different ways and pursue fundamentally different goals.
As Labour eyes reshaping the higher education sector, it risks reviving a binary divide that history shows would weaken UK research.
While there is much to admire in the post-16 education and skills white paper regarding the vision for upskilling the population, there are some more difficult proposals. There in the shadows lies the call for HE institutions to specialise, with the lurking threat that many will lose their research funding in some, but perhaps many, areas, in order to better fund those with more intensive research.
The threat resides in the very phrasing used to describe research funding reform in the white paper, the “strategic distribution of research activity across the sector” to ensure institutions are “empowered to build deep expertise in areas where they can lead.” What is the benchmark here for judging whether someone can lead?
It raises once again the question: should non-intensive research institutions – by which I largely here mean post-92 universities – undertake research at all?
Since the paper came out, both Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology Liz Kendall and science minister Sir Patrick Vallance have stressed that this “specialisation” will not privilege the traditional elite institutions, with Sir Patrick describing as “very bizarre” the idea that prioritisation necessarily means concentration of power in a few universities.
Liz Kendall echoes this logic, framing strategically focused funding as akin to a “no-compromise approach,” similar to investing more intensely in select Olympic sports to win medals rather than spreading resources thinly over many.
Yet for many post-92 institutions, this re-engineering of UK research funding spells very real danger. Under a model that favours “deep expertise” in fewer, strongly performing institutions, funding for more broadly based teaching and research universities risks erosion. The very students and communities that post-92 universities serve – often more diverse, more regional, and less elite – may find themselves further marginalised.
Moreover, even where teaching-only models are adopted, there is already private concern that degrees taught without regular input from research-active staff risk being perceived as inferior, despite charging similar fees. Pushing these providers towards a “teaching-only” role risks repeating a mistake we thought we had left behind before 1992, when polytechnics undertook valuable research but were excluded from national frameworks.
Excellence and application
When I wrote earlier this year that so-called “research minnows” have a vital role in UK arts and humanities doctoral research, the argument was simple: diversity of institutions, methods, locations, and people strengthens research. That truth matters even more today.
Before 1992, polytechnics undertook valuable research in health, education, design and industry partnerships, amongst other things. But they were structurally excluded from national assessment and funding. In 1989, Parliament described that exclusion as an “injustice,” now it appears it may be seen as just. Yet it’s not clear what has materially changed to form that view, beyond a desire to better fund some research.
The 1992 reforms did not “invent” research in the ex-polytechnics. They recognised it – opening the door to participation in the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), quality-related funding and Research Council grants. Once given visibility, excellence surfaced quickly. It did so because it had always been there.
In the 1996 Research Assessment Exercise – only the second in which post-92s could take part – De Montfort University’s Built Environment submission was rated 4 out of 5*. That placed it firmly in the category of nationally excellent research with international recognition, a standard many established pre-92 departments did not reach in that assessment panel. Indeed, the University of Salford topped the unit of assessment with 5*, just as City did in Library Studies. In Civil Engineering, the 5s of UCL and Bristol were also matched by City.
In Physics, Hertfordshire with a 4 equalled most Russell Group universities, as did their score in Computer Science. In the areas of Linguistics and in Russian Thames Valley (University of West London) and Portsmouth earned 5s respectively, equalling Oxford and Cambridge. In Sports Liverpool John Moores and Brighton topped the ranking alongside Loughborough with their 5s.
And it wasn’t just the ex-polytechnics that shone in many areas; the universities formed from institutes also did. The University of Gloucester outperformed Cambridge in Town and City Planning with their 4 against a 3a. Southampton Solent received a 4 in History, equalling York.
The RAE 1996 results are worth recalling; as new universities who had previously not had the seed funding monies of the older universities, we certainly punched above our weight.
Since their re-designation as universities, and even before, post-92 universities have built distinctive and complementary research cultures: applied, interdisciplinary, and place-anchored. Their work is designed to move quickly from knowledge to practice – spanning health interventions to creative industries, curriculum reform to urban sustainability.
Applied and interdisciplinary strength was evident in 1996 in the high scores (4) in areas of Allied Health, (Greenwich, Portsmouth and Sheffield Hallam), sociology (4) (City), Social Policy (4) (London South Bank and Middlesex). Art and Design was dominated by post 92s, as were Communications and Cultural Studies (with 5s for Westminster and University of East London). In Music, City (5), DMU and Huddersfield (4) saw off many pre-92s.
This is not second-tier research. It broadens the national portfolio, connects directly to communities, and trains the professionals who sustain public services. To turn these universities into “teaching-only” providers would not only weaken their missions, it would shrink the UK’s research base at the very moment that the government wants it to grow.
Learning history’s lessons
Research, which as we know universities undertake at a loss, has been subsidised over the last decades through cross subsidy from international student fees and other methods. Those who have been able to charge the highest international fees have had greater resource.
But I wonder what the UK research and economic landscape would look like now if thirty years ago national centres of excellence were created following the 1996 RAE, rather than letting much of our excellent national research wither because there was no institutional cross subsidy available? Had that been undertaken we would have stronger research now, with centres of research excellence in places where the footprint of that discipline has entirely disappeared.
There is a temptation to concentrate funding in fewer institutions, on the assumption that excellence lives only in the familiar elite. But international evidence shows that over-concentration delivers diminishing returns, while broader distribution fosters innovation and resilience. Moreover, our focus on golden triangles, clusters and corridors of innovation, can exclude those more geographically remote areas; we might think of the University of Lincoln’s leadership of advancing artificial intelligence in defence decision-making or agri-tech, or Plymouth’s marine science expertise. Post-92 research is often conducted hand-in hand with industry; a model that is very much needed.
If the government wants results – more innovation, stronger services, a wider skills base – it must back promising work wherever it emerges, not only in the institutions the system has historically favoured.
The binary divide was abolished in 1992 because it limited national capacity and ignored excellence outside a privileged tier. Re-creating that exclusion under a new label would repeat the same mistake, and exclude strong place-based research.
If Labour wants a stronger, fairer system, it must resist the lure of neat hierarchies and support the full spectrum of UK excellence: theoretical and applied, lab-based and practice-led, national and local. That is the promise of the so-called “minnows” – not a drag on ambition, but one of the surest ways to achieve it. Sometimes minnows grow into big fish!
Fund wherever there is excellence, and let that potential grow – spread opportunity wide enough for strengths to surface, especially in institutions that widen participation and anchor regional growth. The lesson is clear: when you sideline parts of the sector, you risk cutting off strengths before they are seen.
The Budget and the introduction of DSIT’s new bucket framework mark a shift in how government wants to think and talk about research and innovation. With growth now central to the government’s agenda, it is a clear attempt to answer Treasury’s perennial question: what does the public get for its money?
At the centre of this shift sits the idea of R&D “buckets”: a four-part categorisation of public R&D funding into curiosity-driven research, government priorities, innovation support and cross-cutting infrastructure.
The logic behind the buckets is easy to understand. The UK system is complex, with budget lines stretching across a maze of research councils, departments, institutes, academies and government labs. Even seasoned insiders need a cup of coffee before attempting to decipher the charts on one of UKRI’s much-valued budget explainers.
From the Treasury’s perspective, the lack of clarity is a barrier to the value of government investment. DSIT’s response is the bucket model: a clearer way of presenting public investment that moves the conversation away from budget lines and towards outcomes that matter to citizens. If this helps build broader support for R&D across departments and with the public, as CaSE’s latest research suggests is needed, it could be hugely valuable.
The outcomes challenge
One consequence of an outcomes-driven model, however, is that different types of research will find it easier or harder to demonstrate their value. Basic and curiosity-driven research can be difficult to evidence through simple KPIs or narrow ROI measures.
In contrast, some forms of applied R&D lend themselves more easily to straightforward metrics. The Higher Education Innovation Fund (HEIF) is a good example. It can demonstrate a return on investment of £14.80 to £1 in ways that are simple to communicate and easy for officials to interpret. In a system that places a premium on measurable outcomes, this kind of clarity is powerful.
If outcomes become the dominant organising logic, there is a risk that bucket one, which covers curiosity-driven research, could appear on paper to be the least “investable” – especially under a future minister who is less supportive of blue-skies research. The danger is not deliberate neglect, but an unintended shift in perception, whereby discovery research is viewed as separate from, rather than essential to, mission-led or innovation-focused work.
The challenge becomes even clearer when we look at quality-related research funding (QR). Few funding mechanisms are as versatile or as important to the health of the research ecosystem. QR supports discovery research, helps universities leverage private investment, underpins mission- and place-based activity, and fills the gaps left by research council and charity grants. It is the flexible connective tissue that keeps the system functioning.
Trying to code QR neatly into a single bucket, as bucket one, doesn’t reflect reality. It may make the diagrams tidier, but it also risks narrowing Whitehall’s understanding of how QR actually works. Worse, it could make QR more vulnerable at fiscal events if bucket one is cast as the “future problem” bucket, the category that can be trimmed without immediately visible consequences.
The trap of over-simplification
That brings us to a wider point about the buckets themselves. The intention with buckets is to draw a much more explicit line between priorities, investment and impact. This is a reasonable goal. But the risk is that it invites interpretations that are too neat. Most research does not sit cleanly in any one category. The system is interdependent, porous and overlapping. Innovation depends on discovery research. Regional growth depends on long-term capability. And capability only exists if the UK continues to invest in talent, infrastructure and basic research.
Rather than accepting a model that implies hard boundaries, it may be more helpful to embrace, and actively communicate, this interdependence. A Venn diagram might be a more honest reflection than three or four boxes with solid walls.
The aim is not to relabel the buckets, but to strengthen the narrative around how the types of research we fund reinforce each other, rather than competing for space in a zero-sum system. This kind of framing could also help government understand why certain funding streams look costly on paper, but yield value across a wide range of outcomes over time.
One argument is that by identifying curiosity-driven research as a distinct bucket, it will be harder for future governments to cut it without doing so publicly. There is some truth in this. Transparency can raise the political cost of reducing support for basic research. But the counterargument is also important. Once bucket one becomes a visible and discrete line of spend, it could also become more vulnerable during fiscal consolidations. Ministers looking to free up resources for missions or innovation-focused interventions may see it as an easier place to make adjustments, especially if the definition of “impact” narrows over time.
Shovel ready
This is why the narrative around the buckets matters as much as the buckets themselves. If they are understood as three separate spaces competing for limited resources, the system loses coherence. Discovery becomes something distant from growth, rather than the engine that drives it. Missions appear disconnected from the long-term capability required to achieve them. Innovation emerges as a standalone activity rather than as part of a pipeline that begins with public investment in fundamental science.
The bucket framework is not going away. It will shape how government talks about R&D for years to come. This makes the next phase critical: there is an opportunity now to influence how the buckets are interpreted, how they are used in practice and how the narrative around them is constructed.
If treated as rigid boundaries, the buckets risk weakening the case for long-term investment in capability. But if used as a way of telling a more coherent story about the interdependence of discovery, missions and innovation, they could help build stronger cross-government support for R&D. The challenge is to make sure the latter happens.
President Donald Trump agreed to a critical minerals deal with Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. Picture: Imago.
There has been much excitement since Australia signed a landmark agreement with the United States last month to expand cooperation on critical minerals and rare earth elements.
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What funding recommendations or approaches have shifted? What has stayed the same? Find out in How to Get Research Funding with Dr. Julia Barzyk on The Social Academic podcast with Jennifer van Alstyne.
3 Reasons for Hope in 2026
Quotes from the interview with Dr. Julia Barzyk
Community Resilience “We’ve seen in this past year: the resilience of the research community. We’ve seen the shared values that we all have and there’s too many of us, there’s too much good work going on for that all to just be washed away.”
You Have Value “The work that you’ve done is important… Even if some people now are telling you that it doesn’t have value, you know it has value, other people are going to recognize it has value.”
For Your Future “We will come to a different equilibrium or a different state at some point in the future… there’s still a light at the end of the tunnel I believe.”
Interview
Jennifer van Alstyne: I’m back with Dr. Julia Barzyk of Wise Investigator, and this episode of The Social Academic is all about how to get research funding in 2025, in 2026. Things have changed and some things are the same too. Let’s start there. Julia, would you introduce yourself?
Julia Baryzk: Yeah, thanks Jennifer. I’m Julia Barzyk. My business is Wise Investigator. We help university researchers get funding from their research. Prior to doing what I do now, which I’ve been doing for going up on three years, but I was a program manager at the US Army Research Office, which is a major funding organization. I took what I learned over all of those years and applied that to create a program that helps faculty learn the hard and soft skills or the hidden curriculum of what they need to know to be successful in winning funding for their research.
Jennifer: Julia came on The Social Academic a couple of years ago where we talked about that hidden curriculum. For those of you who are catching the replay, check that out. But today, gosh, things have changed and the feelings about research funding this year are a little bit more fraught than in previous years. And so I’m curious, what changes are you seeing in the new funding landscape?
Julia: Well, like you said, it is more challenging. A lot of programs have been cut and there’s a lot of uncertainty about the future of programs that still exist and what direction the investments could go. One thing that I have been encouraging faculty to do, which I encourage them before this year as well, but is to consider a broad range of funders. So not to stay tied to a certain idea of, “Okay, I get funded by NSF,” or “I’m funded by NIH.” It’s always a good idea to consider a range of options and to reconsider those year to year or every six months. And so now we’re really seeing that payoff for people who’ve kept an open mind and for those who maybe had a little or more narrow view for them now to consider, “Okay, maybe it’s time to take a step back and try to get a wider view of what my opportunities could be,” because it is more challenging.
Jennifer: I’ve met a lot of faculty researchers who are like, “All of my funding is NIH,” or “All of my funding is NSF.” And so I’m curious if you’re one of those people who’s been in that kind of continued funding trajectory, how do you start to branch out? Where do you even look if you’ve always thought that this is the place where your funding will come from.
Julia: At your institution, they should have some search tools. One could be called Pivot, another is Grant Forward. There’s many other tools out there, and so you can do a basic search there. Now that sounds very straightforward and basic, but a lot of people haven’t gotten to that in recent months. It’s just one of those things we know we should be doing, but it is important but not urgent. It doesn’t necessarily happen on a regular basis. Use your keywords, do a search there, click and see what’s available to you. And when you do a search like that, think broadly also there too because you might be scrolling through some results and you say, “Oh, that’s for a postdoc fellowship. I’m not going to click on that because I’m an assistant professor. I don’t want to apply for a postdoc.” But keep that open mind and maybe click on that anyway because you might learn something useful about, “Oh, this organization is doing work in this area.
They do have money to hire a postdoc. Yes, I’m not going to apply for a postdoc position, but there may be useful contact information in there.” Really do click on those results rather than go through and say, “Oh, that’s not me. That’s not me.” Another thing too after you do use a tool like that is just to go onto a regular search through Google or Chat GPT and just start entering in your terms and look for things that had been recently funded and look and see what comes up because you can get results there that are very helpful that may not be showing up on another search. It’s not really anything super sophisticated, it’s more just making sure you’re using the tools that you have on a regular basis.
Jennifer: Oh, okay, so a regular basis. Is there, every three months or every six months kind of thing that you recommend?
Julia: Definitely every three months. And if you can set up an alert through some of those software tools where they’re going to send you something every week or every month and just make sure that interval is deliberate. What’s going to work for you? Are you going to be overwhelmed if it’s sending you things daily or weekly? Might you prefer to get it once a month? So that’s just for you and your work style. Whatever works for you, do it more than once every six months, but check it regularly.
Jennifer: There are so many people who’ve lost their funding or maybe they received it, but the funds aren’t actually coming through. And so I’m curious for the people who are really feeling the anxiety, the frustration, the worry, the kind of stress that maybe they haven’t experienced when it comes to their funding before, what do you recommend for people who are feeling all the feelings?
Julia: Well, if they have experienced a loss of funding or an actual negative consequence rather than just having that fear because people can fall into either category. But to remember that they haven’t done anything wrong, first of all. They were in a research area or they are in a research area that they chose because that meant something to them. They also could have been driven towards that area because of previous calls, because in past years, certain applications were prioritized. People usually go into these areas for a variety of reasons or a confluence of reasons, something they care about, there’s a call for it. They were doing all the right things and they find themselves in women’s health. We hear many people who were driven to a career in that area throughout their lives because of something even in their childhood, etc. They haven’t done anything wrong, and it can feel discouraging of course, and even a person can question, have I done something wrong?
Like if they’re laid off from a job. Because it’s just such a traumatic experience really, that it’s only natural to feel like maybe we’re at fault in some way, but that’s not the case. That’s the first thing I think for those people who are discouraged and maybe facing some real consequences. Now to keep in mind beyond that, I can say this now that I’m in my late forties. This too shall pass. It’s definitely not to minimize anything that’s happening right now, but it will pass. We will come to a different equilibrium or a different state at some point in the future. We’ve seen in this past year the resilience of the research community. We’ve seen the shared values that we all have and there’s too many of us, there’s too much good work going on for that all to just be washed away. Certainly it is, it has been impacted, continue to be impacted, but there’s still a light at the end of the tunnel I believe.
So keep that in mind and that can be difficult if you’re early in your career and you haven’t had too many ups and downs and you feel like this is a really critical point of my career. Perhaps I’m on the job market for a faculty position, or I just got into one and I really need to ramp up. These things never come at a good time and it’s not going to be a good time for anybody, but keep in mind that it will pass and the work that you’ve done is important. Make sure you’re documenting that and recognize its value. Even if some people now are telling you that it doesn’t have value, you know it has value, other people are going to recognize it has value. Document your work, take the opportunity, share what you can about it through your own channels like we’re doing right now. We do have access to an audience or future colleagues, et cetera, collaborators that we can access ourselves. And you and I are both big advocates for taking advantage of the opportunities that social media and the internet, et cetera allows. While you may not have the success you’re looking for in winning funds for those topics right now, it doesn’t mean that you have to drop those topics completely.
Jennifer: I guess that was really, you just answered the question that I think I was really wondering: do I need to change what I do? Do I need to pivot? Do I need to not just change my wording but change my trajectory? And it sounds like there’s a number of things that we can do now and documentation of what we have completed and what was important to us and what we care about and have shared with the world in various ways is something that we can do to advocate for the work that has already been done. But for people who are like, I have a sensitive research subject. Maybe it’s women’s health, maybe it’s trans health, maybe it’s something that’s really, the administration here in the United States is not funding. What kind of recommendation do you have for what’s next?
Julia: Well, two different ways it can go is, and this is not going to fit for everybody, but it would for some perhaps, is to think about what is the fundamental science, say we’re talking science here, or really fundamental question, to speak more broadly, that I want to address here. Because you may have been thinking about it in terms of the application because you care about the application, because the application area was a priority in the past, and there may be a more fundamental question that you can still work towards. For example, my career in geoscience, I saw all the different waves of, oh, we care about climate science now and now we don’t so much and now we care about it again. I got very used to encouraging researchers to say, “Hey, what is the fundamental question that you want to ask here? Keep the focus on that when you write your proposals.” And when you publish your papers later, of course you may want to highlight that this work has implications for what we know about climate change, but you could also write a paper that’s just more focused on, well, how is this surface absorbing heat and keep it more limited to that.
And without doing anything misleading, without misrepresenting your work, it’s just fundamental research that could stay more fundamental rather than focusing on the application. Because there were often people who understandably would read about, “Oh, the army cares about climate change now, so I’m going to come in and put these keywords in my proposal thinking that’s going to help me.” And when people do that, on the flip side you say, “Well, okay, does this person really know this topic? Are they just dropping in these buzzwords?” And if someone had gotten the habit of maybe leaning a bit that way, consider can I dial it back and just focus on the core of what I want to do? Now for some people that’s not going to be possible because the applications may be very intrinsically linked to the research, but for some it could be, so at least it involves or it should deserve some consideration. Also, going to the research office staff at your institution. They are going to be an excellent resource because they are keeping up on everything, the current climate and the current guidance and policies, et cetera, that they’re going to be able to guide you better than really anybody else in terms of a strategy of, ‘how I’m going to talk about my work.’
Jennifer: I guess that brings me to my next question, which is about talking about it. I have clients and there’s so many researchers around the world who are like, I am not only doing the research, but I’m wanting to advocate for it. I’m wanting to be more public about the way that I speak about it or to even speak on behalf of research funding here in America. How do you kind of find your comfort level, or are there mistakes to avoid when you are sharing more publicly?
Julia: Well, there’s not going to be a wrong answer, so it’s going to be very individual. And that’s just going to depend on how somebody feels personally about the issue, where they are in their career, how vulnerable of a situation they may be in, and they may feel one way on one day and then another way on the next day or the next week. And that’s totally fine. I think it’s wise for all of us to keep in mind how much we want to share that leans over into personal, and there’s not a wrong answer here, but for example, speaking of myself, I really want to help PIs, I want to help faculty. I feel that for me to put out on social media a lot of personal content, it’s not that I’m so shy or I don’t want to share, but I feel it detracts from the focus on the people that I’m trying to help.
So that’s not a political reason or anything like that. It’s just another strategy to say, “How can I stay focused on what my main message, what I want that to be and be deliberate about that.” People could use that kind of framework too, to say again, it’s not right or wrong, but do they want to have a presence online that’s focused pretty narrowly on a research topic or maybe something more broad or something in between? Anything is fine, but I guess it’s just being deliberate about that. And again, you can talk to your research office. If you feel the need to, you could ask to speak to an attorney at your institution because there are people who will be able to give you guidance. You shouldn’t, if you feel like you may be doing something risky, then ask an expert is my advice.
Jennifer: Oh, I like that. And there are people at your university who will be able to help, even if they are not the right person, they can help you connect with the person who can maybe answer your questions. Do reach out and I would say that also the university isn’t always your friend. If you’re thinking that there’s something that is particularly controversial, you’re unsure whether it’s going to cause blowback or not, talk about it with some people that you do trust. Talk about it with some people that you feel comfortable telling you no or telling you what they think the consequences might be, because we don’t always consider that before something goes out. And I don’t want you to be on the flip side of a viral post that maybe wasn’t as important to you as you thought it was going to be when you first wrote it.
Yeah, intentionality is so important when it comes to sharing online. I’m also thinking about people who are like, “I’m happy to go on the news. I want to not just be a spokesperson for myself, but for research at my university.” And so reaching out to those offices, creating closer relationships with the people who work there could help you be the first person in line for opportunities like that because the university probably would love for more people who want to have that kind of platform and be a little bit more of, I want to say like a thought leader, but that’s not quite the right word, an advocate publicly. And so there’s ways that you can get training for it and support for it from those offices as well. That’s great. Thank you, Julia. I would love to hear more about Wise Investigator because it’s been a couple of years since we really caught up about all of the ways that you’re helping folks. And I know that you’re helping people with different types of funding as well. And so I guess my first question is, what types of funding are there for people to explore that they could maybe get support from you for?
Julia: Sure. The big one is the federal funders. That’s the one everybody thinks of first. And we have excellent coaches with expertise in a range of virtually all of the federal funders. The expertise is not limited to my expertise by any means, which is pretty heavy with Department of Defense, but we also have had clients win money from states and from foundations. The skills that we support the clients in acquiring are broadly applicable. We worked with a client in psychology and they won a foundation award. And that was from a foundation that none of us had ever worked with before, but we had success with that because once you acquire these skills and you know how to put a strong proposal together and you do the legwork on the front end of making the right connections. In this case, the client needed to find an official mentor to be part of that application and they did find someone using some of the strategies that we taught involving LinkedIn. And that was a success story from a client where we didn’t have experience with that particular funder. For anybody who’s looking to develop those foundational skills and they’re not coming in and saying, “I want to win this early career award.” They’re saying, “I want to have success with funding.” Then we’re going to take that step back with them. And of course we’re going to consider what have you tried, what’s worked, what’s not worked, what would be some good target opportunities for you? But it’s really stepping back, getting your vision straight, getting the lay of the land and just a really broad perspective on all the opportunities and then figuring out what’s going to work for me right now. Because for example, we sometimes have prospective clients or clients who are very interested in Department of Defense early career awards, and those opportunities are announced once a year, usually in the spring.
This time it was the summer, but during the time that we were waiting for the new announcement to come out, we had clients who submitted proposals to those funding organizations and got funded before the early career announcements came out. They didn’t get the early career award, but in both cases, well, in one case, the dollar amount was very similar to what the early career award offers and the other, I believe it was a tiny bit greater. These are big, big wins, and when you get a big win like that, nobody’s going to care, “Oh, it wasn’t the Young Investigator Program.” You got an award from a major funder for a lot of money, single PI. We don’t want to say, to just follow the guidance of someone who’s doesn’t really quite see the whole picture and say, “Oh, I’m going to wait until June to submit this proposal,” when there could be opportunities for you right now. You might even get a result before that announcement comes out in June, say.
Jennifer: That is beautiful. And so I am curious, is it ever too early to start working with you and is it ever too late? Because I meet people who are postdocs that are applying to grants that are winning grants, and so I’m curious, when can we start being intentional about research funding?
Julia: Oh yeah. Well, we actually we’re able to support a couple clients with a new program that’s not really offered, advertised on my website, but this was a very abbreviated engagement because when people are in a postdoc position, the problem is they usually don’t have access to professional development funding. But we were able to help these individuals who were in postdoc type positions prepare for their interviews when they had gotten as far on their own, they got as far as being invited to these interviews for faculty positions. And then we came in right before those interviews and said, let’s work together for a few hours on learning what you want to tell these people when you’re in the interview. So that frankly, you sound like you know what you’re talking about. Because if you just go in and you say, “I’m going to apply to National Science Foundation.” Well, so is everybody else, and we all know what NSF is, and even around the world, people know what NSF is.
If you know about NSF and the couple programs that you may have even been funded by when you’re in grad school, yeah, that’s great, but when you can speak more deeply. In just a few hours by going through that search, which I told you about a little while ago, and not just kind of dumping that on the client, but walking through it with them to talk through it with them and say, “Okay, this is what this means.” Even for example, articulating an example of that timeline I just referenced with the early career award thing so that when these people go in for their interviews, they can say, “Well, I know this program usually runs on this type of timeline. It’s usually rolling. This one comes out around then, here’s the name of the program officer. I’ve already been in contact with them.” Then you’re sounding really mature in your knowledge and your view on things.
And compared to a candidate that might come in and just say, “I’m going to apply to NSF.” That person, the person who’s been briefed with all of this, it’s really just a couple hours of work because when you’re in that position, you don’t have to go through the whole process of applying for the funding. You’re just representing yourself as a knowledgeable participant in the process, which you are. So one of those people is still on the market. The other one was hired and started their new position and is a client in our full program. Because once they got into that role, they said, “Yeah, now I have startup funds. I want to do this program.” It is never too early. For the people who are still in a trainee position, I realize that funding can be an issue. It could be for the majority, it’s probably not,
but for some people there could be money within your institution to support you in a variety of different programs, including ours perhaps. It doesn’t hurt to start asking. Your PI could have money that they may be willing to support you on something like this. Just ask. And then of course, if you’ve been hired into a faculty position, then as soon as you can start learning this stuff, the better because why suffer for a few years in confusion and disappointment when you can, you know that you’re learning right from day one. I’m learning the information that I need and my career is worth it. I’m worth it to have this personalized support. it is never too soon or too late to get that support. We do support some clients who are tenured under a different kind of service arrangement, but the core are these assistant professors.
Jennifer: I think that is so powerful and an opportunity that I would say the vast majority of researchers just don’t know even exists or that it could be something that, especially for those on the job market, could benefit the way that they talk about the people in their field, the way that they’re going to engage with them and where the funding support for their research is already in their mind going to potentially come from. I think that is so fascinating. I’m really glad that we chatted about that because that program isn’t on your website, and I would love to do a blog post about some of the best uses for startup funds. I’m definitely going to include that. I love it. For the full program, I’m curious, most people it sounds like are getting university funds to cover that. Is that correct?
Julia: Yes. They either have their startup funds and if they’re coming in for engineering, they will have hundreds of thousands of dollars of startup funds. And at the time that we’re recording this, right now, the program is $6,500, which is a really excellent value because I work from a home office. Our team is working from their home offices. We don’t have any kind of real estate in the Washington, D.C. area or middle management or anything like that. All of the value goes right to our clients, and that’s why they get a very high value for the cost of the service.
Jennifer: I love it.
Julia: That can be covered easily if they have, say a typical engineering startup package. Now, if they’re at a teaching university, they may well not have that kind of a startup package at all. They may have a $5,000 startup package.
We’ve been able to help clients in that situation. They have gotten money from elsewhere in their institution. Even a smaller school will be able to foot the bill for something that’s less than $10,000 because that is a small amount of money to these universities, even to the smaller schools.
Jennifer: Can you repeat that for everyone?
Julia: Yeah. It’s a small amount of money for these institutions. It really is. And that’s not, again, to minimize that they are under some budgetary constraints. All the institutions right now, and they’re taking those circumstances very seriously as they should. But there is still money being spent. There is still money going out the door. And this is another important point too, is that when people come into these positions and they have access to money, either startup funds or some other professional development funds, my advice is to really spend that money.
That is not your money. That’s the university’s money. When I was managing a program for the government, it was easy for people to say, “My program, my program.” Well, that was not my money. It was the taxpayers’ money. Or you could say it was the Army’s money, but that money needs to be spent. And so if they have conferences they want to commit to or flights they can book or they can get a pay upfront for a package of editing services and any kind of professional development support like that, they could be setting themselves up so if the university says, “Oh, we’re going to put a hold on travel spend or we’re going to require some new approvals for you to spend these funds,” you might have already been able to secure some support. It’s definitely a different strategy than managing your personal finances where the more savings, the better. The money was meant to be invested in you. It’s not just meant to be stockpiled.
Jennifer: I really appreciate that. And I have received emails from so many people that are like, I have X number of weeks to spend the rest of my startup funds. Can I do website? And I’m always like, yes, but also usually that setup takes a little while, so let’s get started right now. And so thinking about that early, thinking about that when you’re accepting your position, thinking about that when you’re getting started and knowing that Wise Investigator is able to help you with the research funding aspect of your career. This is super powerful. lI’m so glad that we got to chat about all the research funding things. Any other tips or tidbits? Do you have a message to share with people who are seeking research funding this year?
Julia: Well, I would say that it’s always a good idea to get support, whether that’s from your research office, whether it’s from our business or another consultant. And one of the most interesting observations related to that I’ve made over the last couple of years is I may have, say on a given day, perhaps I have two calls with prospective clients, and one of them will be in a difficult situation and they might be describing a plan that from what I hear in those 30 to 40 minutes that we’re chatting does not sound fully on track to me, right? I’m saying, I don’t know. This isn’t really adding up. They’re talking about putting a lot of time into writing a proposal that maybe isn’t the best fit or they’re not ready for right now. And then in the same day, I may talk to another individual who says, I just won the NSF career award, or I just had this big success and yeah, I’d like to hear about what you do. And then in the coming weeks when people are making a decision, do they want to take this support? The person who’s having the more success is the one who enrolls in the program.
We are very grateful to be able to support those clients who are already having success. But it also can break my heart a little bit because I know that this other person is really in need of a course correction, and I know that we can help there, but I think a lot of it is the mindset that a person is in towards getting support. And I understand because of how I was raised and the culture that I grew up in, it had a lot of self-reliance, was a big virtue say. The idea was you should be able to do these things yourself. You’re competent. You have maybe a PhD and you’ve done this before. I’m talking about making the websites. Well, you can code or you can put slides together, so why couldn’t you put a website together? And it’s like, yeah, in isolation, sure.
If somebody had four to six weeks on their own with nothing else to do, they probably could put something nice together. But we’re in the real world here. And that’s something that I would like to encourage anybody who’s listening and they’re saying, I feel like I have to do this all on my own. It’s kind of a badge of honor, or I’m not getting the result that I want, but I feel like if I just keep pushing and doing the same thing, things will change. Those are kind of the red flags to alert you maybe a course a correction is in order. And the people who are getting this help are people who are already having a lot of success and they want to continue.
Jennifer: That really reminds me of my clients. I mean, I definitely have people who are like, “I don’t have anything and I’m not going to do it myself. Please do it for me.” But a lot of the people who come to me for websites, they’re already career academics. They already have won their grants and their awards and published books, and they’re realizing, “Oh wait, I need to share all of this cool stuff that I’ve done because actually it’s kind of all scattered around the internet.” And I love working with folks like that, but I really wish that people wouldn’t wait until they have so much to share because we can build this over time. It doesn’t need to be perfect when it launches. It doesn’t need to be exactly the way it’s going to be forever because frankly, that probably is no longer going to be representative of you in 2, 4, 6 years from now.
And I always think of websites as this could be with you for a lifetime if that’s something that’s beneficial for you. I love when people are like, this is something that is part of me and how people will get to know me for years to come, but there’s so much feeling like I need to do this myself. I should be able to do this myself. I should make the time to do this myself. And the truth is it’s so much easier, faster, and more beneficial for you when you don’t do it yourself. I mean, if you want to do it yourself, please, by all means do. I’m cheering you on, but there’s things that we can get support on and asking for help, being open to receiving support is number one. What are some other tips for that? Because you mentioned that growing up support was, self-reliance was really a value for, it sounds like your family, whereas for me, asking for help was definitely, you should always reach out to the community. And so I feel like we had maybe opposite recommendations and I’m curious what that means for how you think faculty should seek support on their campus for research funding.
Julia: Well, I think if they look at their situation with a bit more of an entrepreneurial mindset, then you can maybe sidestep some of that cultural conditioning or how we were brought up and say, “Look, I have my own little business here.” And what do you need to be successful in business is you need leverage and leveraging the skills of others and the time that others can invest in your work. That’s huge. So perhaps stepping out of that, is it right or is it wrong? And just saying, I’m in charge of a small team now. Perhaps it’s just one or two students and my lab space that I’m still getting set up, but it’s going to grow. And even if it remains to be a small operation, it’s still your little operation. That is a mature mindset to say, “I realize I can’t do everything. I don’t want to do everything and I’m going to make the most of the resources that are available to me and kind of step away from a moralistic or values driven approach,” because we’re all going to come to that with a lot of subjectivity and just baggage from cultural conditioning and stuff like that.
Jennifer: Exactly. Julia, this has been a great conversation and I’m going to continue to send people your way for Wise Investigator support for research funding. Is there anything else you’d like to add before we wrap up today?
Julia: I’m going to give one little tactical piece I wanted to mention. When people are rewriting different sections of their proposal, perhaps like a broader impacts, it can be very challenging to know what language to use right now. And for someone like me and you, we have facility with language, we like writing, we were raised in the US so we followed the cultural trends over the years. And so we understand at a core level when someone hears a word or a phrase like social justice or diversity versus low income or first generation college student or things like that, these all have certain connotations that can be in favor or out of favor. And it could be very difficult for many PIs to understand, I’m going to use air quotes here, but which are the good words or loud things now or not.
If you are feeling like you don’t understand that kind of language, that is normal because there’s a lot of nuance, there’s a lot of history behind these terms, and there’s a lot associated with them, so just ask again the research office. Don’t submit things where you feel like, “Oh, I just revised this broader impact section and now I think it’s aligned with how they want it now.” Really, even if I were writing something like that, and I consider myself very well versed in these terms, I would still send that to another person and say, please just do the reality check here and see how this reads because it would be a real shame to do all this work on a proposal. You have this one section that you went in alone on and you’re misusing terms that you don’t fully understand. That’s a little tactical piece. Don’t feel like you should understand all of that. Ask somebody for help, and they will guide you towards expressing what you want to express in the most neutral and honest language that you can.
Jennifer: How long does that take? Because I feel like there’s a lot of last minute proposal writers, and so I’m curious how much time should you reach out in advance to make sure that research office has a chance to review it and get back to you?
Julia: Yeah, it doesn’t take long, but it takes forethought. If you can just get that to them, say two weeks before your internal deadline, then they’re not going to need a lot of time to help you. But when you’re sending that Friday at 11:00 AM or something and people are headed home for the weekend and you’re hoping you have this back Monday, then that’s very difficult. A lot of these things, it’s not a big deal, but you’ve got to get it to somebody ahead of time. that might be a case where you say, “Oh, normally I get to this section at the end and I already have something kind of written. Instead of just starting in on the project narrative or description right now, why don’t I just paste this part out to copy this part out, paste it in an email, send it over to my research office and let them work on it,” while you’re working on the other part.
Jennifer: I love it. This has been so actionable, full of valuable advice. I can’t wait to share it across social media and the newsletter. For everyone who’s listening, please go connect with Julia Barzyk. She has an amazing free newsletter about research funding. I’m going to drop the link in the chat. Thank you all for being here. I’m Jennifer van Alstyne, and this has been The Social Academic.
Julia Barzyk is a former program manager at a major federal funding organization and the founder of Wise Investigator, where she and her team of coaches help early-career faculty win single-investigator awards. Through individualized, one-on-one coaching that demystifies the “hidden curriculum” of the funding process, their clients have secured $6M+ in federal, state, and foundation support in just over two years. Seventy-five percent are funded within 18 months, with an average award of $365K. Julia’s insider perspective, combined with her team’s breadth and depth of expertise and hands-on support, drives the program’s results.
Hi all. I thought I would take some time to have a chat about how research policy is evolving in other countries, because I think there are some lessons we need to learn here in Canada.
One piece of news that struck me this week came from Switzerland, where the federal government is slashing the budget of the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) by 20%. If the Swiss, a technological powerhouse of a nation, with a broad left-right coalition in power and a more or less balanced budget, are cutting back on science like this, then we might all have to re-think the idea that being anti-Science is just a manifestation of right-wing populism. Higher education as a whole has some thinking to do.
Over to Australia, where a few months ago the government set up a Strategic Examination of Research and Development, which released a discussion paper, held consultations and got feedback (which it published) and has now released six more “issue” papers for consultation which detail government thinking in many different and more detailed ways. If this sounds magical to you, it is because you are from Canada, where the standard practice for policymaking is to do everything behind closed doors and treat stakeholders like mushrooms (in the dark with only fecal matter for company) instead of a place where policy-making is treated as a serious endeavour in which public input and expert advice is welcomed.
For today’s purposes however, what matters is not process but policy. The review is seriously considering a number of fairly radical ideas, such as creating a few national “focus areas” for research funding, which would attract higher rates of overhead and requiring institutions to focus their efforts in one of these priority areas via mission-based compacts (which are sort of like Ontario’s Multi-Year Agreements, only they are meaningful) so as to build scale and specialization.
Whew.
One thing that strikes me as odd about both the UK and Australian line of thinking is the idea that institutional specialization matters all that much. While lots of research is done at the level of the individual lab, most “big science” – the stuff people who dream about specialization have in mind when the talk about science – happens in teams which span many institutions, and more often than not across national borders as well. I get the sense that the phenomenon of institutional rankings have fried policy makers’ brains somewhat: they seem to think that the correct way to think about science is at the level of the institution, rather than labs or networks of laboratories. It’s kind of bananas. We can be glad that this kind of thinking has not infected Canadian policy too much because the network concept is more ingrained here.
Which brings me to news here at home.
The rumour out of Ottawa is that in the next few months (still not clear if this is going to be fall 2025 or Spring 2026) there will be an announcement of a new envelope of money for research. But very definitely not inquiry-driven research. No, this is money which the feds intend to spend as part of the increase in “defence” spending which is supposed to rise to 2% of GDP by 2025-2026 and 5% by 2035. So, the kinds of things it will need to go to will be “security”, likely defined relatively generously. It will be for projects in space, protection of critical infrastructure, resiliency, maybe energy production, etc. I don’t think this is going to be all about STEM and making widgets – there will be at least some room for social science in these areas and maybe humanities, too, though this seems to me a harder pitch to make. It is not clear from what I have heard if this is going to be one big pie or a series of smaller pies, divided up wither by mission or by existing granting council. But the money does seem to be on its way.
Now before I go any further, I should point out that I have not heard anyone say that these new research envelopes are actually going to contain new money beyond what was spent in 2024-25. As I pointed out a couple of weeks ago, that would be hard to square with the government’s deficit-fighting commitments.
In fact, if I had to guess right now, the best-case scenario would be that the Liberals will do this by taking some or all of the 88% of the Budget 2024 research commitment to the tri-councils and push it into these new envelopes (worst-case scenario: they nuke the 88% of the 2024 Budget commitment they haven’t yet spent and claw back money from existing commitments to make these new envelopes).
So, obviously no push here for institutional specialization, but where our debate echoes those of the UK and Australia is that all three governments seem to want to shift away from broad-based calls for inquiry driven research and toward more mission-based research in some vaguely defined areas of national priority. I know this is going to irritate and anger many people, but genuinely I don’t see many politically practical alternatives right now. As I said back here: if defending existing inquiry-driven tri-council budgets is the hill the sector chooses to die on, we’re all going to be in big trouble.
No one will forcing individual researchers or institutions to be part of this shift to mission-driven research, but clearly that’s where the money is going to be. So, my advice to VPs Research is: get your ducks in a row on this now. Figure out who in your institution does anything that can even tangentially be referred to as “security-enhancing”. Figure out what kinds of pitches you might want to make. Start testing your elevator pitches. There will be rewards to first movers in this area.
Monday, we looked at the country’s overall financial situation (dire), and yesterday we looked at how cuts of a magnitude of 15% might affect key programs like the Canada Education Savings Program and the Canada Student Financial Assistance Program. Today, we’re going to look at how a 15% cut might affect the Government of Canada’s research subsidies, which in the main are run through the Ministry of innovation, Science and Economic Development (ISED).
(I will be speaking about “the tri-councils” as a single funding line; I am aware that the Canadian Institute for Health Research (CIHR) is funded through Health Canada but for this exercise it is easier just to lump them together).
Let’s start by acknowledging that ISED is a sprawling mess of a department with small programs with very little political protection littered all over the place. I wouldn’t bet the farm on the $12 million “Futurpreneur Canada” making it out of this budget round alive. I also doubt the Universal Broadband Fund is going to continue at $900 million per year. Computers for Schools (sounded great in the 90s, less so now) and Computers for Schools Interns would also be on my endangered list. I suspect that the various regional development funds might be in for an outsized hit as well. All of which is to say that it is possible that the research enterprise – that is, the tri-Councils, the National Research Council (NRC), the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI) and all those organizations that get part or all their money through the Strategic Science Fund – might not get hit with a 15% cut. It’s quite possible all these other areas might take an outsized hit and allow the actual science stuff to get off with a lighter cut.
That said, remember this key point: the budget exercise is not about cutting 15% of funding from where it should theoretically be in three years’ time (the government has a fiscal framework that extends out four or five years). It is about cutting expenditures from a 2024-25 baseline. That means that to get through any previously planned increase in spending, the cuts to existing programs must be more than 15%.
This matters for two reasons. First, it is because the government runs its subsidies to electric vehicles manufacturers through ISED. Those subsidies were worth $39M in 2024-25; they were planned to cost $2.1 billion this year and $4.2 billion in 2027-28 (i.e. it’s about half the department’s direct budget spend come two years from now, and about a third of total sci/tech spend if you include the tri-councils). To accommodate that increase while following the letter of the budget reduction request would basically mean requiring the entire department to shut down. That’s probably not happening (though one presumes that Carney’s announcement last week releasing Canadian auto manufacturers from their 20% EV sales target in 2026 might also lead to a reduction in EV subsidies to manufacturers).
Second, remember budget 2024? The one where the Liberals promised $1.8 billion in new spending on research and the whole sector cheered with relief? Yeah, well only $75 million went into the budget framework for 2024-25; 87% of that 1.8 billion is backloaded until after spring 2026. So, basically none of it is protected, and it’s all at risk. I wouldn’t be surprised in the least if they just cancelled the whole thing. And then, on top of that, we must worry about what happens to existing programs, and whether they take a 15% hit.
CIHR transfers about $1.2 billion to Canadian post-secondary institutes each year, while the National Science and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) transfers about $1 billion, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) transfers about $440 million (although a fair bit of that last one includes combined tri-council projects which administratively run through SSHRC, including – if I am not mistaken – funding for the Canada First Research Excellence Fund). CFI is another $550 million a year or so. NRC is about $1.7 billion per year. The Strategic Science Fund is another $900 million or so, closer to a billion if you include base funding for Genome Canada. Canada Research Chairs are another $300 million. Call it $6.2 billion in total. Required savings to get to a 15% cut is therefore just under $1 billion.
Where to start?
Ask most researchers at universities what they would prefer, and the answer is likely that they would eliminate everything except the tri-council funding. Ditch CFI, significantly cut NRC, definitely obliterate the Strategic Science Fund – anything, anything, anything but touch tri-Council grants. I understand the preference, but as I noted last week, this is a monumentally detrimental position for the sector to take. Yes, basic research and the existing grant system are the basis of the existing tenure and promotion system, and as such is naturally dear to those in the system, but almost no one in Ottawa thinks that’s what these systems are for. If we’re going to keep research funding afloat, it’s probably going to be through more spending on things like the Strategic Science Fund.
I have very little insight into the state of official Ottawa’s current thinking on the relative value of these various programs, but I could imagine three basic scenarios that get us to $1 billion in savings.
Option 1 is a straight 15% cut across the board. Take out $400 million or so from the granting councils, $80 million from CFI, $250 million from NRC, cut the Strategic Science Fund and Genome Canada to the tune of $150 million or so, and lose about 350 Canada Research Chairs.
Option 2 would be the spare the professors approach. Now, you probably can’t spare them entirely, because they are such a big proportion of the overall expenditure, but if you jacked up the cuts to CFI, NRC and Strategic Science to say 25%, you could hold the losses to CRCs and the tri-councils to under $100M. I think this is unlikely, but it is a possible scenario.
Option 3 would be the hammer the tri-councils approach. Because, as I said, I don’t think they are particularly well-liked at Finance/PMO. This is close to the inverse of option 2; zero cuts to NRC and Strategic Science, keep the CFI cut at 15% and take the rest of the necessary money out of the tri-councils. That would mean a cut of about $800 million or about 30% to council funding.
And remember, all of this is on top of walking back the measures announced in the 2024 Budget. Ugly doesn’t even begin to cover it.
To be clear: I suspect it is unlikely that the research area will get a cut of 15%, in part because officials will feel bad about doing serious damage to existing budgets after, I suspect, already taking away the Budget 2024 measures. If I had to guess, I would say that the department will probably come down hardest on regional development subsidies. Nevertheless, the scenarios above are possible even if not probable. Universities should start thinking about what they might mean and how they might cope.
It’s been a busy summer at HESA Towers. We’ve been developing Boardwise, our new suite of governance products with our partners at Balsam Advisory, and exploring new ideas on data governance and analytics with our friends at Plaid Analytics. We’ve also been touring the country with the Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) Thought Leadership Office and the Business + Higher Education Roundtable (BHER) to talk about higher education, economic growth and productivity. The “what we heard” document from those sessions will be out in mid-September, and there are several follow-up events scheduled, including a leaders’ summit hosted by RBC later this month. This event will focus mainly on how higher education and business can work together to tackle some of the country’s most pressing challenges, such as clean energy and technology, artificial intelligence, and defence. Further insights from this work will also be explored at the BHER Executive Summit in February 2026.
And, of course, our own Re: University conference – where we will be presenting some of the most interesting ideas out there to improve and inspire the quality, effectiveness and experience of postsecondary education in Canada – is coming up in late January in Ottawa. (Tickets are going fast – reserve your spot!)
A couple of other small programming notes:
The State of Post-Secondary Education in Canada 2025 will be released tomorrow.
The World of Higher Educationpodcast will still come out every Thursday, but we’re back to an audio-only format because editing is a hassle and apparently very few of you are videophiles.
TheFifteen will continue to bring you the top global higher education stories every other week.
Next Friday will mark the debut of a new biweekly webinar series, Friday Focus, to be hosted by Tiffany MacLennan, surfacing the most interesting shifts and innovations in Canadian higher education – from AI & technology, cutting-edge programming, and the everchanging student experience – through the voices of those leading the change. We hope you can join us.
Our University Vice Presidents Network (UVPN) is going strong and is scheduled to convene in Victoria in November, Quebec City in February, and then internationally for a May 2026 Study Tour in Germany.
Finally, we are targeting the first week of December for the launch of the World of Higher Education Annual Review 2025, a new year-in-review publication which tries to document the year’s shifts across the whole of our crazy sector, right around the globe, using statistics, stories and strategic planning documents.
Now, on to the year ahead.
In most places, I think the hard part for colleges is over. 2025-26 isn’t going to be an easy year, by any means, but the big decisions have mostly been made, future directions have been set and the floor on institutional income has either been reached or is in sight.
Universities, on the other hand, are a different story. They have – not everywhere, but in the main – been more hesitant to act. It’s a conservative sector that is resistant to change, be it financial, organizational or cultural. And the financial problems the sector faces – again, not everywhere but in the main – are going to drag on for quite awhile mainly because international student numbers aren’t bouncing back the way they might have (more on that next week) and because an imminent recession is the opposite of helpful when it comes to provincial finances.
So, it’s going to be a tough year ahead. In my mind, I think there are 5 rules for success.
Rule 1 – Act like Universities are a Means to an End, not an End in Themselves. Literally the worst thing universities can say right now is “universities are crucial, give us more money”. It’s an utterly tone-deaf approach, even if you give it an “elbows up” spin. The sector has been saying it for years and it clearly hasn’t worked, so continuing with this approach is the literal definition of insanity. And the reason it doesn’t work is because Canadians (or at least Canadian politicians) simply don’t believe that universities are crucial because they don’t believe that knowledge and science is useful. Rather, they far prefer a Canada where the construction and natural resources industries continue to call the shots (if there is a Deep State in Canada, it is surely comprised of these two sectors and their watercarriers). The case we need to make is not “spend on universities”, it’s “a knowledge-driven Canada is a better Canada”. And more importantly, it’s not a case institutions can make on their own – they need to make it with lots of other actors, particularly from industry. Alliances, people. Form alliances. Downsize your government relations team, build up your community relations efforts.
Rule 2 – Stop with the Tri-Council Fundamentalism. Federal budgets for research are going to get hammered in the coming months. This will make a lot of people argue that we should ditch all research funds except the tri-councils because inquiry-driven research is sacred etc. I understand the instinct here because so many institutions make council success a key part of the tenure/promotion process. But it’s a bad instinct. No one in Ottawa cares about your tenure processes. You can argue all you want about how basic research is more cost-efficient in terms of driving long-term discovery, but i) the public likes some short-term wins mixed in with the long-term ones and b) nobody outside universities is buying that one story about NSERC funding Geoffrey Hinton’s AI research 30 year ago as a business case for science. Like, nobody. Get over it. Understand that if there is to be growth in Canadian research funding in future, it’s going to look a lot more like Horizon Europe or the Biden Administration’s Chips and Science Act, both of which were widely hailed as being good for science despite – or perhaps because – they are largely mission-driven rather than inquiry-driven. If this is the hill the community chooses to die on, God help us all.
Rule 3 –Focus on what you can control, not what you can’t. Yes, things are bad. You can spend time complaining about it – government is short-sighted, we’re always getting shafted by the granting councils, etc. – or you can get busy. Fire up your friend-raising and fund-raising. Ramp up your spend/effort on international recruitment (more on this next week). Make a big bang with some new programs that stand out. Go big on one theme. Stand out. Please.
Rule 4 –Faster Collegiality is a Must. Part of regaining public confidence is going to involve being able to make changes at the institutional level with much more speed and determination than is historically the case. That means being able to deliver on promises and priority in the immediate term, not in some far-off future, to be able to act as an institution and not just as a sack full of cats fighting over research priorities and teaching schedules. The way this normally happens is to concentrate power in the hands of the upper administration. This is how it works in most of Asia, most of the United States, and increasingly in Europe as well (though crucially, senior admin tends to be elected in Europe). But it doesn’t have to be like that. There’s no obvious reason why collegial governance needs to be slow: it’s just custom and practice. I’ve been saying for a while that better, faster governance is key to institutions in rough times and while too few have heeded that advice, it’s never too late to start.
Rule 5 – Do less, but do it better. Universities are ridiculously strung out. Many forces are at work here, but I will single out two. At a system level, we have governance systems that are great at approving new programs and initiatives but absolutely rotten at pruning them once they have outlived their purpose. Result: institutions do too much, but do it badly, thus leading to enshittifcation. But it works at the level of individual faculty too, since departments tend to hire the biggest keeners in the system, the kind of people who won’t say no to more research, or extra teaching, or whatever. Result: burnout. In a normal organization, a manager would come along and try to make workloads manageable. But since Canadian academia long ago decided that the main purpose of department chairs is to protect staff from unwanted Decanal or Provostial schemes rather than to manage academics’ workloads, there is no one in the system who can actually make the problem go away (high-sounding talk about “wellness” doesn’t do the trick either). So, seriously, do less.
It’s going to be a hard year (or let’s face it, a hard few years), but if everyone gets the basics right, we can come out of this better and stronger.
“Dundee University’s reputation soars,” shouted the front page of the Courier in 2004. Making the most of a rise in the league tables, the then university secretary highlighted the institution’s commitment to excellent learning and teaching, its outstanding research and its contribution to the local community.
Fast forward 21 years and more recent press coverage has been less positive – the university’s desperate financial situation, rapid departures by senior staff, emergency government funding, threats of large-scale job losses and very painful sessions before the Scottish parliament education committee.
A hard-hitting report by former Glasgow Caledonian principal Pamela Gillies put the blame on “poor financial judgement, inadequate management and reporting, poor monitoring of the financial sustainability KPI, a lack of agility in responding to a fall in income by the University leadership and weak governance in relation to financial accountability by the University Court” compounded by the “top-down, hierarchical and reportedly over-confident style of leadership and management” and “a culture in which challenge was actively discouraged.”
The 64-page document is excoriating in its condemnation of senior officers and the university’s governors – a view shared by the select committee, where MSPs expressed their criticism in the strongest possible terms. Later events – including the departure of the interim finance director after a week in the job – have only made the agony worse.
The financial collapse at Dundee inevitably raises questions for the rest of the HE sector in Scotland and the UK as a whole. Are the same weaknesses present in other institutions? Is higher education in crisis? And how should governments and the sector respond?
Governance and management
Before going any further, I must declare a personal interest – I was the university secretary quoted in the 2004 press article and I have retained an abiding affection for the University of Dundee since leaving in 2008.
I also chaired the group that produced the latest revision of the Scottish Code for Good Higher Education Governance in 2023 – a document which Professor Gillies deems fit for purpose, provided institutions follow it carefully. However, implementing the code of governance, excellent as it is, will not be enough – we all need to learn lessons from the Dundee story and make sure that our own universities are protected from a similar fate. To that end, we ought to engage in an open discussion about what has happened and consider it from every angle.
So far, the criticism has focused on the failings of Dundee’s senior managers and governors. In response, they have accepted that they should have spotted the financial problems earlier and taken avoiding action. That way, as one officer put it to the committee, they could have dealt with them “under their own steam”.
Senior managers and the university court should certainly have been aware of the worsening financial situation in the second half of academic year 2023–24. Student recruitment fell in September 2023 and again in January 2024; meanwhile the international market was contracting and the UK government looked set to implement unhelpful policy developments as part of its anti-immigrant agenda.
At that stage, the university’s executive board should have been keeping an eagle eye on the monthly management accounts, freezing all but essential staff recruitment and paring back expenditure. The failure even to recognise there was a financial deficit until October 2024 was a critical lapse.
Reflecting on this, all universities will now be examining their systems, processes and culture to make sure they do not fall into the same trap. The sense of urgency will be especially acute in institutions which are running deficits – a plight that now affects many HEIs previously considered immune to such challenges. In Scotland, the cabinet secretary for education has urged the sector to address the problem of “unsustainable jobs” – apparently giving the green light to further staffing reductions.
University courts and councils will be assessing governance arrangements and exploring how to strengthen financial scrutiny; some will also be reviewing the way they interact with their vice chancellors and senior teams. In doing this, they should ensure that senior officers and trade union reps are enabled to challenge heads of institutions and bring any concerns they have to the governing body.
Model issues
All of this is sensible, but the debate so far has largely ignored some fundamental points. Most importantly, the sector needs a different financial model – it cannot survive by placing ever greater reliance on the international student fee account. In England, the UK government has at least allowed the home undergraduate fees cap to increase in line with inflation but Holyrood has not made a similar move, and nor is it likely to before the 2026 Scottish election.
The lack of funding will mean further retrenchments and cost-cutting in estates and IT budgets; unpalatable options such as delaying the national pay uplift or cancelling academic promotions rounds may also come into play. Against this background, Scotland’s politicians must step up – we need to treat university funding as a national problem which deserves an enduring solution, preferably identified through a review supported by all parties.
Returning to Dundee, there is a reason why that university was so badly hit that goes beyond mistakes made by senior management. For at least 30 years, Dundee has been a powerhouse of life sciences research, with a special focus on cancer and tropical diseases. A glance at the 2021 REF results for biological sciences bears this out – there is Dundee, ranked number two behind the Institute of Cancer Research, ahead of Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial and many other universities with much greater resources.
This is an extraordinary story – a relatively small, provincial university taking on and beating some of the greatest and best-funded institutions in the world; in the process, Dundee’s researchers have benefited humanity, not just in this country but also across the global south. Sir Alfred Cuschieri, Sir David Lane, Sir Philip Cohen, Cheryll Tickle CBE, Sir Pete Downes, Sir Mike Ferguson – the list of top biomedical scientists whose careers have flourished at Dundee is hugely impressive.
However, this achievement comes at a price – even 20 years ago, Dundee struggled to generate surpluses which would protect the institution against a rainy day. As everyone knows, research funding simply does not cover the cost of the work it is supposed to support – universities have to cross-subsidise scientific endeavour with endowments, donations and international student fees.
The challenge is even greater when much of your funding is from charities, which pay a lower overhead than government research councils. That left Dundee in an especially vulnerable position when the international student recruitment market began to contract in 2023–24 – a problem not shared by other universities with a fraction of Dundee’s research activity.
Given what has happened, it is right that universities conduct self-audits and make certain that their own houses are in order. The Scottish government and the funding council should also seek assurance that Scotland’s HEIs are effectively led and managed. But the deeper question of how the sector should be funded still needs to be addressed, and quickly.
As part of this we should recognise that world-class research of the kind nurtured in Dundee is something to be cherished; we should all back the recovery effort on Tayside. For my part, I believe strongly that the university will remain a powerhouse of research and excellence in learning and teaching for decades to come. With the right support, Dundee’s reputation will soon soar again.
