Category: Research

  • That Was the Quarter That Was

    That Was the Quarter That Was

    What’s been going on around the world since the end of March, you ask? 

    Well, unsurprisingly, the biggest stories have come from the United States.  There are in effect four fronts to the Trump administration’s attacks on the world of higher education.  First of all, the government’s new budget is going to reduce student eligibility for student loans and grants, meaning there will be less opportunity available to American students.  Second, the budget also proposes to radically slash the budgets of the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) (the cuts you heard about in the early months of the Trump administration were cuts to existing and in-progress grants – the new budget is about slashing expenditures going forward).   Third, it had decided to get itself into an enormous spat with Harvard, starting with issuing a bizarre set of demands on April 11th, followed by an admission that the letter had been sent in error, followed by enraged bellicosity that Harvard wasn’t submitting to a letter the administration had not meant to send.  Things escalated: the Trump administration impounded more billions of dollars, Harvard responded by shrugging and raising a few hundred million on the bond market, and Trump escalated by, eventually, banning Harvard from accepting or hosting any international students.  And fourth, shortly after a court granted Harvard an injunction on the international students matter, the Trump administration began delaying all student visas and aggressively cancelling Chinese student visas.

    (Whew.)

    This is of course a massive own goal with dangerous implications, as commentators such as Holden Thorp and William Kirby have pointed out.  But it is not simply about Americans losing scientific/technological supremacy.  As the Economist has pointed out, the entire world has a stake in what happens to American science; its hobbling will have consequences not just for global science but for the global economy as well.

    It has been fascinating over the past few weeks watching how the American debacle had grabbed the attention of the rest of the world as well.  It has been very difficult this past month or so to be somewhere where the papers weren’t obsessing about what was happening to students at Harvard (check out a representative smattering from Ethiopia, Iceland, Vietnam, Malaysia, India and Kazakhstan).   At the policy level, almost every OECD government is revving up plans to poach US-based researchers even in places which genuinely don’t have the scientific infrastructure to poach anyone (Ireland?  Czechia?  C’mon).  In other words, you have basically the entire world looking at how the American debacle in a massively self-centred way.  Basically, it’s all: “Yeah, yeah, death of the American research university, how does this affect me/how can I profit?”

    But the world has yet to grapple in any kind of serious way is how to maintain growth and innovation in a world where the largest spender on research is reducing expenditures by 50%.  This has implications for absolutely everybody and at the moment there are no serious discussions about how the world gets by without it.  Obviously, other countries can’t replace what used to come out of NSF and NIH.  But they can, as Billy Beane from Moneyball might say, recreate it “in the aggregate” by working together.  Unfortunately, that’s not quite what they are doing.  That would require Australia, Canada, Japan and Korea to be working actively with the European Union; not only is that not happening, but these days the EU can’t even get it’s own act together on research.

    Meanwhile, in large parts of the world, the main higher education story we hear about is one of “cutbacks”, “austerity” and the like.  But there are, I think, some fundamentally different issues at work in different countries.  In the rich Anglosphere, which happens to be where most of the big producers of higher education are located, mature higher education systems highly reliant on market fees are being forced into big cuts as governments remove their ability to attract funds, usually by changing their student visa regimes.  (An aside here: many people ask: where will international students go if not Canada/US/Australia/wherever?  To which the answer is usually: to a great extent, they will just stay home. But a few countries do seem to be doing better on international students as of late, mostly in Asia.  Turkey, Dubai and Uzbekistan in particular seem to be the big winners, though the growth in their intakes is lower than the drop in the intakes of the big anglophone countries).

    But in other countries, the fundamental financial tension is that demand for higher education is far outstripping the ability of either public or private funding to keep the system afloat (government could choose not to meet so much demand, but political needs must).   Kenya, with its widespread university financial problems comes into this category, and Nigeria, where funding new universities seems to come at the expense of funding existing ones clearly come under this category. Intermediate cases here include France (increasing demand, flat funding), Brazil (which has done a series of policy U-turns on transfers to federal universities and whose overall policy might best be described as “confused”), and perhaps Colombia (promises of money co-existing with widespread institutional precarity, even in the public sector).  What is common here is that a lot of countries seem to have built systems which are too big/expensive for what the public – collectively or individually – is willing to pay. 

    A common response to the problem of inadequate public funding is the expansion of private higher education.  Almost unbelievably, private higher education now makes up about 20% of total provision in Spain, France and Germany (in two of those countries, tuition is free, and in the third it is minimal – under 1000 euros per year in most cases).  In many cases, the expansion is in relatively cheap classroom-heavy courses (often in business) but in many cases these universities are moving into other areas such health care provision.  This explosion has led to a significant tightening of regulations on private universities in Spain and a “tri” (meaning triage”) on France’s Parcoursup system, meaning that certain types of private college will have a harder time advertising themselves to prospective students.  This phenomenon is not constrained to Europe: Tunisia is also currently pre-occupied with how to regulate private institutions.  An alternative to letting domestic private universities rip is to invite foreign institutions into the country.  India is the country most in the news for attempting this at the moment but places like Saudi Arabia, Uzbekistan and Vietnam are also eagerly heading down this route.

    Tuition fees are always an issue, and at public universities we see evidence both for and against the idea that fees are rising.  On the one hand, we have Namibia introducing free tuition (though – note – without fully announcing its operational details), and a Labor government in Australian winning on a promise to – in effect – shorten graduate repayment periods by cancelling debt.  On the other hand, Korea and Russia – both countries with abysmal youth demographics – are allowing their institutions to raise fees after years of both falling enrolments and largely frozen tuition.  Finland may be introducing fees for certain forms of continuing education.  But higher tuition isn’t the only way governments deal with crashing demographics; in Pennsylvania, the solution is outright campus closures.

    In terms of student activism, the main story so far this year is Serbia, which is now in the seventh month of student-led anti-government protests. At this point, it’s very hard to see how the students obtain their maximalist demands of regiment change.  After six months of protests, students are starting to go back to school and finish their academic year.  Recent evidence from North America suggests the movement will have trouble maintaining itself over the summer months and into next year.

    War continues to re-shape universities around the world.  Ukraine has announced changes to its system of conscription which will lower its university attendance rate (particularly for graduate studies).  Something similar has happened in Ethiopia, where new rules have been introduced requiring students to do a year of national service before graduation.  Russian universities continue to atrophy in different ways, partly due to government policy but also due to the exodus of many scholars who have fled the regime.

    Among other things from this quarter that bear watching going forward: Greece is continuing the modification of its university system at a furious pace both in terms of altering curricula and in terms of changing the post-dictatorship convention that campuses are police-free zones.  Algeria is moving its entire university system from French to English instruction, which may not have a huge effect in higher education, but certainly tells you which way global linguistic politics are going.  Hong Kong is experimenting with a new institutional type, and a billionaire in China is putting some serious coin behind a new university. 

    My tip for the story this summer?  Watch graduate unemployment rates around the world, particularly in India and China (where the situation is so bad the government has just announced a kind of emergency blitz on graduate hiring which sure seems like it is set up for failure).  I think the push to align higher education more with the labour market is about to go into overdrive.

    All caught up now!  See you back here in September.

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  • The centrality of university research to the industrial strategy cannot be underestimated

    The centrality of university research to the industrial strategy cannot be underestimated

    Blue-sky research is the basis for the successful development of future technologies. The evidence that UK universities are global leaders in this is clear – the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) ranks the UK university system as third in the world on this basis.

    Yet it has often been said the UK has not capitalised enough on its world-leading research to drive economic growth. Now though, the UK has, at last, a coherent and comprehensive industrial strategy that can realise the huge potential of this global advantage.

    Previous industrial strategies identified some of the right industries, but the new strategy has a far more comprehensive approach. It recognises the breadth of sectors that are likely to be at the forefront of global technology-led growth, not just the fashionable few like AI or pharmaceuticals. Crucially, place has now taken a central role. A myriad of global growth “hot spots” show us that this is key to understanding the detailed collaborations that will deliver growth in different UK regions, cities and innovation districts.

    In that sense this industrial strategy is the welcome and long needed economic policy that the UK economy has been lacking. Universities and their research are an essential core component, but all stakeholders across higher education, industry and government need to engage in a step-change in joined-up working if the UK is to translate the real advantage its research system has into a new level of growth and prosperity. There will need to be effective partnerships and collective momentum between universities, industry and government at both national and local levels.

    Yet risks remain in successfully translating this strategy into the growth the government wants – particularly in the persistence of certain myths about university research.

    Busting myths

    A key myth is that blue sky research only equates to growth in the long term, when the government wants growth sooner. In fact, it does not work like that. Blue sky research delivers growth both now and later. Long term gains may be greater overall, but even in the short term research brings in highly skilled global scientists, attracts leading global firms, and is a draw to medium-sized firms who want to be at the forefront of the next innovation wave.

    Research also builds place-based specialised skills that are essential for other industries and sectors, as can be seen in the Oxbridge Arc, Imperial’s White City innovation district, Manchester’s Sister district or Glasgow City Innovation District. Fostering research excellence across the UK’s places is an effective short and long-term growth strategy.

    A second myth is about the breadth of impact of university research on growth. It is natural for policymakers to focus on university spin-outs and commercialisation, but in many ways these are a small, if important, part of the story. The lesson from successful university-based growth ecosystems around the world is that the role of large global firms and their relationship with university research and innovation is much more important.

    There is understandable and laudable excitement at the prospect of nurturing UK-born unicorns, but in a globally competitive economy around future technologies it is large global firms that very often have substantial research and innovation capability. They employ global leading talent, have great market reach and also can absorb some of the risk necessary for success in future technology-based growth. They also have the interest in, and capacity and capability to partner with universities around research – as we see with Microsoft in Cambridge, Novartis in Imperial’s White City campus, Cranfield’s industry research with Airbus, AstraZeneca in Glasgow or Legal & General’s partnerships with Edinburgh and Newcastle.

    In my own university, Brunel, we have long standing research relationships with Jaguar Land Rover and Constellium, one of Europe’s largest aluminium alloy firms. Yet there needs to be much more focus on increasing the number and deepening these relationships. These are near and long term relationships that will lock in longer term growth.

    Third, is the misconception that university research exists in any freestanding way in just a small number of universities. It is certainly true that the UK’s leading research universities are absolutely key, but the research system operates in a much more complex, distributed and symbiotic way. Different types of universities play different but equally important roles, and they can and will contribute to the industrial strategy. Whether that is applied research, skills development in the workforce or building entrepreneurial capacity in a region, the university research and innovation system as a whole is key to making sure the benefits of cutting edge technology research are realised for the UK.

    The government must not underestimate the centrality of university research and its contribution to future technology-led growth to any industrial strategy worldwide, let alone the UK’s. The industrial strategy is bold and ambitious, and UK universities are well positioned to propel its implementation. However, global competition in the development of future technologies is fierce. The UK cannot afford to underplay or misapply one of its core strategic assets. The opportunity with this strategy is greater than at any time for decades, but it is not going to succeed without harnessing the power of university research.

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  • With better coordination we can break down barriers to academic policy engagement

    With better coordination we can break down barriers to academic policy engagement

    How can universities best support the UK’s research base to deliver better outcomes for people? This is becoming an ever more urgent challenge for our sector, in the context of a changing geopolitical landscape and the desire of the UK government for research and innovation to better serve the public good.

    One route to deriving greater public benefit from academic research lies in research better connecting with and informing public policy development. Recent years have seen a growing number of universities establishing policy units – at least 46, at the last count, and almost certainly more now. There has also been increased investment in policy-focused activity from research funders, for example, Research England’s Policy Support Fund, UKRI policy fellowships, and ESRC investments to increase policymaker engagement with research. New mechanisms to strengthen evidence use, such as government areas of research interest and parliamentary thematic research leads, have been introduced, alongside an increased focus on building capacity for evidence use across sub-national government.

    Through the Covid-19 pandemic, we saw the myriad ways in which research evidence informed policy to deliver benefits for people, whether understanding and treating the disease, informing the public health response, or mitigating the wider social impacts.

    You can’t always get what you want

    “Academic-policy engagement” is becoming increasingly mainstream, as part of universities’ wider knowledge exchange or civic engagement strategies. However, considerable barriers to engagement between academic researchers and policymakers remain. These include significant cultural differences, lack of incentives and investment, mismatched timescales and approaches, lack of access to academic research, and difficulties in parsing an ever-growing volume of information.

    Policymakers often express a desire for a streamlined, “one stop” interface with academics to enable them to quickly and easily reach the right expertise at the right time. Given such barriers, this is much easier said than done.

    Too often, where interaction does happen, it is short-term, ad hoc, dependent on individual contacts, and enabled through fixed-term funding rather than sustainable approaches. Many institutions lack both the capacity and the necessary capabilities to respond to policy needs.

    There is no systematic mechanism for policymakers to engage with universities in order to identify and access the expertise they need, or for universities and researchers to identify policy needs, still less provide a coordinated response. This means that policymakers do not necessarily have access to the best evidence, only that which is most readily available.

    What is now required is a serious focus on establishing a more systematic and sustainable approach. Such an approach requires organisational capacity and individual capability, alongside greater collaboration and coordination across the academic-policy ecosystem.

    The policy connection cavalry is here

    This is where the Universities Policy Engagement Network (UPEN) comes in. Established in 2018 UPEN is a voluntary network of over 120 universities, research centres, and policy organisations across the UK, currently hosted at UCL. Our university members comprise diverse institutions, from large, research-intensive to small, specialist institutions, across all parts of the UK. UPEN provides an interface between all areas of academic research and public policymaking, with strong relationships with the UK’s four national legislatures and 25 government departments and growing links with local and regional policymakers.

    UPEN has until now been powered by the contributions of our members: both financial and, crucially, time. With a new funding award from Research England and ESRC, we now have the opportunity to build a national “connective infrastructure” which can respond to growing policy demand, at multiple levels of government, for academic expertise and evidence.

    Enhancing UPEN’s ability to provide this interface will enable us as a sector to work in a more coordinated and efficient way. It will also foster greater diversity in academic-policy engagement by ensuring a greater breadth of evidence and voices are heard. And it will build on previous UKRI investments to underpin stronger collaboration and collective action to harness the full potential of the university research base.

    Our new programmes of work will focus on three key areas. First, supporting universities to strengthen their academic engagement with public policy by enhancing individual and organisational capabilities. Second, strengthening place-based approaches to academic-policy engagement. Third, developing a national knowledge brokerage function to mobilise academic expertise to respond at the point of policy need.

    The UK government is grappling with multiple complex and cross-cutting policy challenges – from bolstering a weak economy, to improving energy security and sustainability, to tackling problems with the health service, to addressing housing needs. It is time for us, as a sector, to better leverage the knowledge of universities to address these challenges in order to deliver better outcomes for citizens across the UK.

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  • Brian Schmidt and Richard Holden on Australian research – Campus Review

    Brian Schmidt and Richard Holden on Australian research – Campus Review

    A Nobel laureate and an esteemed economist outlined the sub-par state of Australian research funding and sovereignty in a joint address to the National Press Club last Wednesday.

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  • The spending review is a critical moment for UK science and innovation

    The spending review is a critical moment for UK science and innovation

    A series of key government announcements over the coming weeks will set the direction of travel for research and innovation for years to come. Next week’s spending review will set the financial parameters for the remainder of this Parliament – and we shouldn’t expect this outcome to maintain the status quo, given this is the first zero-based review under a Labour government for 17 years.

    Accompanying this will be the industrial strategy white paper, which is likely to have a focus on driving innovation and increasing the diffusion and adoption of technologies across the economy – in which the UK’s universities will need to be key delivery partners. We can also expect more detail on the proposals in the immigration white paper, with implications for international student and staff flows to the UK.

    The outcome for higher education and research remains hard to call, but the government has sent early signals that it recognises the value of investment in R&D as crucial to transforming the UK’s economy. In a volatile fiscal environment, DSIT’s R&D budget saw a real-terms increase of 8.5 per cent for 2025–26 with protection for “core research” activity within this.

    Looking ahead to the spending review, the Institute for Fiscal Studies has pointed out that the fiscal envelope set by the Chancellor for capital spending – which is how R&D is classified – at the spring statement is significantly frontloaded. There is scope for increases in the early years of the spending review period and then real-terms declines from 2027–28. With such significant constraints on the public finances, it’s more essential than ever that the UK’s R&D funding system maximises efficiency and impact, making the best possible use of available resources.

    International comparisons

    Last month, the Russell Group published a report commissioned from PwC and funded by Wellcome which considered the experiences of countries with very different R&D funding systems, to understand what the UK might learn from our competitors.

    Alongside the UK, the report examined four countries: Canada, Germany, the Netherlands and South Korea, scoring them across five assessment criteria associated with a strong R&D system: strategic alignment to government priorities; autonomy, stability and sustainability; efficiency; and leveraging external investment. It also scored the countries on two measures of output: research excellence and innovation excellence.

    The analysis can help to inform government decisions about how to strike a balance between these criteria. For example, on the face of it there’s a trade-off between prioritising institutional autonomy and ensuring strategic alignment to government priorities. But PwC found that providing universities with more freedom in how they allocate their research funding – for example, through flexible funding streams like Quality-Related (QR) funding – means they can also take strategic long-term decisions, which create advantage for the UK in key research fields for the future.

    Over the years, QR funding and its equivalents in the devolved nations have enabled universities to make investments which have led to innovations and discoveries such as graphene, genomics, opto-electronics, cosmology research, and new tests and treatments for everything from bowel disease to diabetes, dementia and cancer.

    Conversely, aligning too closely to changing political priorities can stifle impact and leave the system vulnerable. PwC found that, at its extreme, a disproportionate reliance on mission-led or priority-driven project grant funding inhibits the ability of institutions to invest outside of government’s immediate priority areas, resulting in less long-term strategic investment.

    With a stretching economic growth mission to deliver, policymakers will be reaching for interventions which encourage private investment into the economy. The PwC report found long-term, stable government incentives are crucial in leveraging industry investment in R&D, alongside supporting a culture of industry-university collaboration. This has worked well in Germany and South Korea with a mix of incentives including tax credits, grants and loans to strengthen innovation capabilities.

    Getting the balance right

    The UK currently lags behind global competitors on the proportion of R&D funded by the business sector, at just over 58 per cent compared to the OECD average of 65 per cent. However, when considering R&D financed by business but performed by higher education institutions, the UK performs fifth highest in the OECD – well above the average.

    This demonstrates the current system is successfully leveraging private sector collaboration and investment into higher education R&D. We should now be pursuing opportunities to bolster this even further. Schemes such as the Higher Education Innovation Fund (HEIF) deliver a proven return on investment: every £1 invested in HEIF yields £14.8 in economic return at the sector-level. PwC’s report noted that HEIF has helped develop “core knowledge exchange capabilities” within UK HEIs which are crucial to building successful partnerships with industry and spinning out new companies and technologies.

    In a time of global uncertainty, economic instability and rapid technological change, investments in R&D still play a key role in tackling our most complex challenges. In its forthcoming spending review – the Russell Group submission is available here – as well as in the industrial strategy white paper and in developing reforms to the visa system, the government will need to balance a number of competing but interrelated objectives. Coordination across government departments will be crucial to ensure all the incentives are pointing in the right direction and to enable sectors such as higher education to maximise the contribution they can make to delivering the government’s missions.

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  • The economic cost of an unequal R&D workforce

    The economic cost of an unequal R&D workforce

    The argument for investment in R&D goes as follows.

    The more innovative an economy is the greater level of economic output it will produce. The more output an economy produces the wealthier a country will be and by extension its citizens will enjoy higher wages, better public services, and a greater quality of life.

    Innovation is dependent on two things. The first is the infrastructure to make innovation happen. The great universities, laboratories, equipment, and less prosaically the roads, broadband, and public transport, that facilitate the physical transfer of ideas. The second is human capital. The educated workforce that can turn the raw materials of our collective knowledge into new products and services which make the economy strong and society better.

    The ideal scenario has two major assumptions. The first is that the products of innovation will be widely felt in the economy to spur economic growth and these benefits will be felt by the workers who are not taking part in R&D intensive activities. In other words, private activities have a spill over benefit to the public at large. The second is that human capital will be allocated efficiently where the best people to do R&D will be placed in the best roles and the market will reward them for their time.

    This means that work in R&D should return higher wages through the input (people’s labour) and through its output (a more productive economy.) A new independent report for DSIT has raised questions on whether the benefits of R&D are felt evenly either by its producers or the population at large.

    Skill issue

    As the report highlights there is little empirical evidence on the kind of R&D workforce the UK needs. The evidence of which kinds of people in which kinds of roles will spur which kinds of R&D activity is poorly understood across geographies, it is poorly understood which specific skills are needed, and it is poorly understood which skills are needed to meet the R&D challenges of the future.

    This is surprising when we learn that 56 per cent of all business R&D spend is spent on staff and the number of people working in roles essential for R&D activity has grown by over a million in the past eleven years. Owing to changes in R&D accounting methodology it’s hard to suggest whether R&D activity or spending intensity has increased at the same rate. It is however true that there are regional imbalances in R&D spending, R&D intensive roles generally pay more, and despite an increase in the R&D workforce the UK’s overall productivity levels remains frustrating low.

    Successive government industrial strategies, incentives, and supply-side reforms, aimed at any kind of redistribution of the proceeds of R&D activity may not have been an effective counterweight to the incentives of business to simply invest where they will see the largest private returns.

    Imbalances

    There is a distinct problem that the R&D workforce is imbalanced. Some parts of the R&D economy, particularly roles like software, have an underrepresentation of women, a significant number of people with level four and above qualifications, and growth is rapid in London and the South East. There is both a demographic and geographic equality issue which means the benefits of R&D investment are not broadly felt across the UK population.

    This is bad on its own terms. It is not a good outcome for society that the public investment in R&D through subsidies, tax credits, capital investment, infrastructure, and the myriad of kinds of corporate welfare, is producing a workforce which has gendered earning inequalities amongst even the highest paid R&D workers (albeit this less than some parts of the labour market), where growing investment is concentrated in the most economically prosperous part of the country, and where there is significantly more instability for the least qualified workers.

    As the report points out, academic literature demonstrates that a more diverse workforce is good for economic growth, productivity, innovation, and entrepreneurship. The inequality of inputs limits the UK’s innovation potential, which in turn impacts how widely the benefits of R&D are felt. Compounding this innovation trap is the UK’s poor record at in work training, geographic inequalities in access to jobs, challenges with university pipelines into specific skills, and geographic imbalances in hard to fill vacancies.

    Universities

    The solution to a more dynamic R&D workforce does not fall exclusively at the door of universities. As the report highlights, universities are churning out large numbers of graduates in subjects aligned to the R&D intensive roles. However, there is a significant undermatching in those graduates then being able to deploy their skills in the labour market. There is also a significant gender imbalance in university recruitment into STEM programmes which then leads into the imbalances in the workforce.

    Interviewees for the report also suggested that university CPD for R&D industries could help close skills gaps and redefining their commercial approaches with SMEs could help with the workforce challenges. Yes, but it also doesn’t feel like universities should be responsible for the permanent reskilling of their graduates. Again, in work training in the UK is low.

    The labour market in R&D is the product of every step up to someone entering the workforce and then the conditions once they are in it. At the current trajectory the UK will have an ever large R&D workforce but the expansion in its size will not occur conterminously with a geographic or demographic expansion of its impacts.

    Universities are not factories that churn out graduates with neatly aligned skills to the ever changing demands of the labour market. However, this report does convincingly point out that the UK’s economy benefits from diverse firms and more diverse firms will only happen with more diverse graduates.

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  • Another Casualty of Trump Research Cuts? California Students Who Want To Be Scientists – The 74

    Another Casualty of Trump Research Cuts? California Students Who Want To Be Scientists – The 74


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    This spring, the National Institutes of Health quietly began terminating programs at scores of colleges that prepared promising undergraduate and graduate students for doctoral degrees in the sciences.

    At least 24 University of California and California State University campuses lost training grants that provided their students with annual stipends of approximately $12,000 or more, as well as partial tuition waivers and travel funds to present research at science conferences. The number of affected programs is likely higher, as the NIH would not provide CalMatters a list of all the cancelled grants.

    Cal State San Marcos, a campus in north San Diego County with a high number of low-income learners, is losing four training grants worth about $1.8 million per year. One of the grants, now called U-RISE, had been awarded to San Marcos annually since 2001. San Marcos students with U-RISE stipends were often able to forgo part-time jobs, which allowed them to concentrate on research and building the skills needed for a doctoral degree.

    The cuts add to the hundreds of millions of dollars of grants the agency has cancelled since President Donald Trump took office for a second term.

    To find California campuses that lost training grants, CalMatters looked up known training grants in the NIH search tool to see if those grants were still active. If the grant’s award number leads to a broken link, that grant is dead, a notice on another NIH webpage says.

    The NIH web pages for the grants CalMatters looked up, including U-RISE, are no longer accessible. Some campuses, including San Marcos, Cal State Long Beach, Cal State Los Angeles and UC Davis, have updated their own websites to state that the NIH has ended doctoral pathway grants.

    “We’re losing an entire generation of scholars who wouldn’t have otherwise gone down these pathways without these types of programs,” said Richard Armenta, a professor of kinesiology at San Marcos and the associate director of the campus’s Center for Training, Research, and Educational Excellence that operates the training grants.

    At San Marcos, 60 students who were admitted into the center lost grants with stipends, partial tuition waivers and money to travel to scientific conferences to present their findings.

    From loving biology to wanting a doctoral degree

    Before the NIH terminations, Marisa Mendoza, a San Marcos undergraduate, received two training grants. As far back as middle school, Mendoza’s favorite subjects were biology and chemistry.

    To save money, she attended Palomar College, a nearby community college where she began to train as a nurse. She chose that major because it would allow her to focus on the science subjects she loved. But soon Mendoza realized she wanted to do research rather than treat patients.

    At Palomar, an anatomy professor introduced her to the NIH-funded Bridges to the Baccalaureate, a training grant for community college students to earn a bachelor’s and pursue advanced degrees in science and medicine.

    “I didn’t even know what grad school was at the time,” she said. Neither of her parents finished college.

    The Bridges program connected her to Cal State San Marcos, where she toured different labs to find the right fit. At the time she was in a microbiology course and found a lab focused on bacteria populations in the nearby coastal enclaves. The lab was putting into practice what she was learning in the abstract. She was hooked.

    “It just clicked, like me being able to do this, it came very easily to me, and it was just something that I came to be very passionate about as I was getting more responsibility in the lab,” Mendoza said.

    Marisa Mendoza, right, and Camila Valderrama-Martínez, left, get ready to demonstrate how they use lab equipment for their research work at Cal State San Marcos on May 6, 2025. Photo by Adriana Heldiz, CalMatters

    From Palomar she was admitted as a transfer student to San Marcos and more selective campuses, including UCLA and UC San Diego. She chose San Marcos, partly to live at home but also because she loved her lab and wanted to continue her research.

    She enrolled at San Marcos last fall and furthered her doctoral journey by receiving the U-RISE grant. It was supposed to fund her for two years. The NIH terminated the grant March 31, stripping funds from 20 students.

    For a school like San Marcos, where more than 40% of students are low-income enough to receive federal financial aid called Pell grants, the loss of the NIH training awards is a particular blow to the aspiring scientists.

    The current climate of doctoral admissions is “definitely at a point where one needs prior research experience to be able to be competitive for Ph.D. programs,” said Elinne Becket, a professor of biological sciences at Cal State San Marcos who runs the microbial ecology lab where Mendoza and other students hone their research for about 15 hours a week.

    San Marcos doesn’t have much money to replace its lost grants, which means current and future San Marcos students will “100%” have a harder time entering a doctoral program, Becket added. “It keeps me up at night.”

    Research is ‘a missing piece’

    In a typical week in Becket’s lab, Mendoza will drive to a nearby wetland or cove to retrieve water samples — part of an ongoing experiment to investigate how microbial changes in the ecosystem are indications of increased pollution in sea life and plants. Sometimes she’ll wear a wetsuit and wade into waters a meter deep.

    The next day she’ll extract the DNA from bacteria in her samples and load those into a sequencing machine. The sequencer, which resembles a small dishwasher, packs millions or billions of pieces of DNA onto a single chip that’s then run through a supercomputer a former graduate student built.

    “Once I found research, it was like a missing piece,” Mendoza, a Pell grant recipient, said through tears during an interview at Cal State Marcos. Research brought her joy and consumed her life “in the best way,” she added. “It’s really unfortunate that people who are so deserving of these opportunities don’t get to have these opportunities.”

    A side-view of a person looking down at a piece of tissue as tears stream down their face.
    Student Marisa Mendoza gets emotional while she speaks about her research at Cal State San Marcos on May 6, 2025. Photo by Adriana Heldiz, CalMatters

    The origins of the San Marcos training center date back to 2002. Through it, more than 160 students have either earned or are currently pursuing doctoral degrees at a U.S. university.

    The grant terminations have been emotionally wrenching. “There had been so many tears in my household that my husband got me a puppy,” said Denise Garcia, the director of the center and a professor of biological sciences.

    Garcia recalls that in March she was checking a digital chat group on Slack with many other directors of U-RISE grants when suddenly the message board lit up with updates that their grants were gone. At least 63 schools across the country lost their grants, NIH data show.

    In the past four years of its U-RISE grant the center has reported to the NIH that 83% of its students entered a doctoral program. That exceeds the campus’s grant goal, which was 65% entering doctoral programs.

    Mendoza is grateful: She was one of two students to win a campus scholarship that’ll defray much, but not all, of the costs of attending school after losing her NIH award. That, plus a job at a pharmacy on weekends, may provide enough money to complete her bachelor’s next year.

    Others are unsure how they’ll afford college while maintaining a focus on research in the next school year.

    Student Camila Valderrama-Martínez in a lab at Cal State San Marcos on May 6, 2025. Photo by Adriana Heldiz, CalMatters

    “You work so hard to put yourself in a position where you don’t have to worry, and then that’s taken away from you,” said Camila Valderrama-Martínez, a first-year graduate student at San Marcos who also earned her bachelor’s there and works in the same lab as Mendoza. She was in her first year of receiving the Bridges to the Doctorate grant meant for students in master’s programs who want to pursue a biomedical-focused doctoral degree. The grant came with a stipend of $26,000 annually for two years plus a tuition waiver of 60% and money to attend conferences.

    She can get a job, but that “takes away time from my research and my time in lab and focusing on my studies and my thesis.” She relies solely on federal financial aid to pay for school and a place to live. Getting loans, often anathema for students, seems like her only recourse. “It’s either that or not finish my degree,” she said.

    Terminated NIH grants in detail

    These grant cancellations are separate from other cuts at the NIH since Trump took office in January, including multi-million-dollar grants for vaccine and disease research. They’re also on top of an NIH plan to dramatically reduce how much universities receive from the agency to pay for maintaining labs, other infrastructure and labor costs that are essential for campus research. California’s attorney general has joined other states led by Democrats in suing the Trump administration to halt and reverse those cuts.

    In San Marcos’ case, the latest U-RISE grant lasted all five years, but it wasn’t renewed for funding, even though the application received a high score from an NIH grant committee.

    Armenta, the associate director at the Cal State San Marcos training center, recalled that his NIH program officer said that though nothing is certain, he and his team should be “cautiously optimistic that you would be funded again given your score.” That was in January. Weeks later, NIH discontinued the program.

    He and Garcia shared the cancellation letters they received from NIH. Most made vague references to changes in NIH’s priorities. However, one letter for a specific grant program cited a common reason why the agency has been cancelling funding: “It is the policy of NIH not to prioritize research programs related to Diversity (sic), equity, and inclusion.”

    That’s a departure from the agency’s emphasis on developing a diverse national cadre of scientists. As recently as February, the application page for that grant said “there are many benefits that flow from a diverse scientific workforce.”

    Future of doctoral programs unclear

    Josue Navarrete graduated this spring from Cal State San Marcos with a degree in computer science. Unlike the other students interviewed for this story, Navarrete, who uses they/them pronouns, was able to complete both years of their NIH training grant and worked in Becket’s lab.

    But because of the uncertain climate as the Trump administration attempts to slash funding, Vanderbilt University, which placed Navarrete on a waitlist for a doctoral program, ultimately denied them admission because the university program had to shrink its incoming class, they said. Later, Navarrete met a professor from Vanderbilt at a conference who agreed to review their application. The professor said in any other year, Navarrete would have been admitted.

    The setback was heartbreaking.

    A person -- with short black hair and wearing a black jacket and green shirt, leans against a light brown concrete column while looking straight into the camera.
    Josue Navarrete at the Cal State San Marcos campus on May 6, 2025. Photo by Adriana Heldiz, CalMatters

    “I’m gripping so hard to stay in research,” Navarrete said. With doctoral plans delayed, they received a job offer from Epic, a large medical software company, but turned it down. “They wanted me to be handling website design and mobile applications, and that’s cool. It’s not for me.”

    Valderrama-Martinez cited Navarrete’s story as she wondered whether doctoral programs at universities will have space for her next year. “I doubt in a year things are going to be better,” she said.

    She still looks forward to submitting her applications.

    So does Mendoza. She wants to study microbiology — the research bug that bit her initially and brought her to San Marcos. Eventually she hopes to land at a private biotech firm and work in drug development.

    “Of course I’m gonna get a Ph.D., because that just means I get to do research,” she said.

    This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.


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  • Impact can’t be gamed or systematised

    Impact can’t be gamed or systematised

    In a recent Wonkhe blog, Joe Mintz discussed the challenges of policy impact in social sciences and humanities research.

    He highlighted the growing importance of research impact for government (and therefore institutions) but noted significant barriers. These included a disconnect where academics prioritise research quality over early policy engagement and a mutual mistrust that limits research influence on decision-making.

    We have recently published a book on research impact that endeavours to explore the challenges of research impact, and these views chime greatly with us. Our motivation for starting the book project were personal. We have carried out a great deal of impactful research and provided support and training for others wishing to engage in impact. However, we wondered why impact seems to be so poorly understood across the sector, and, we had observed, there was a clear fracture between those who wanted to do impactful research, and institutions who wanted to control the process while not really understanding it.

    Agenda opposition

    There continues to be understandable opposition by some to what has been referred to as “the impact agenda”. One criticism is that impact is something being imposed by government and management that is at odds with the ideology of research. This argument follows that research impact is a market-driven mechanism that pressures academics to demonstrate immediate societal benefits from their research, often at the expense of intellectual freedom and critical inquiry. And a metric driven measurement of research impact may not fully capture the complexity or long-term value of research.

    We can certainly empathise with this perspective, but might suggest that this is, in a large part, due to how impact has manifested in a sector that does not really understand what it can be. In our own experiences we have experienced management “advice” that firstly says do not waste your time doing impact, then, once performance-based research funding becomes attached to it, being told it is very important and your impact needs to be “four star”. And then indifference is replaced with interference and attempts to control, to make sure we’re doing it “properly” and making sure it can be monitored.

    In trying to develop our understanding, we spoke to 25 “impactful” academics, who had objectively demonstrated that their research has high value impact, and a range of research professionals across the sector. It soon became very clear that our own observations were not outliers for those doing impactful research.

    Impact success for those we spoke to came from a personal belief that saw it ingrained in their own research practice – this was something they did because they felt it was important, not because they had been told to. The stakeholders and networks they had, and often spent considerable time building, were their own not their institution’s, and many protected these contacts and networks from institutional interference.

    In most cases, interview subjects said that there was little support from their institutions, they just did the work because they felt it was an important part of their research, and this symbiotic work with stakeholders provided further research opportunities. They could see the value of doing impactful research and felt personally rewarded as a result.

    And many talked of institutional interference, where there was opposition to what they were doing (“you’re not doing impact properly”) and advised from positions of seniority although perhaps not knowledge or, in some cases integrity. They were instructed to do things more in line with university systems, regardless of how poor they might be. There was a clear dissonance between academic identity and management culture, often informed by an “impact industry” where PowerPoints from webinars are disseminated across institutions with little opportunity for deep knowledge becoming embedded.

    Secret sauce

    And many spoke of the research management machine, insisting that they engage with central systems so their work could be “monitored” and having many people around them telling them what to do, but offering no support. This support was often as basic as “do more impact” and “give us the evidence now”. In some cases, threats were made to not submit their case studies should they not follow the “correct process”, even when their work was clearly highly impactful. An odd flex for a senior leader, given QR funding goes to the institution, not the academic.

    While the research that went into this book probably threw up as many questions as answers, one thing was very clear for this work. If it is to be successful, impact cannot be imposed upon academics or centrally controlled, it must originate from the academic’s community and own identity as a researcher. Telling someone to “do some impact because we need another case study” with a year before a REF submission is not good practice; management needs to take time to understand the research academics are doing and explore together how best to support it.

    We are reminded of a comment from one interviewee, who does incredibly interesting and impactful research, and has done for many years. When asked why they do it, they simply said “because I enjoy it and I’m good at it”.

    High quality impact case studies come from high quality research and high-quality impact. This is not something that can be gamed or systematised. Academics need to own impact for it to be successful, and institutions need to respect this.

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  • Action on researcher career development must go beyond surface-level fixes

    Action on researcher career development must go beyond surface-level fixes

    The Concordat to Support the Career Development of Researchers was designed to drive culture change, not compliance. However, many institutional action plans suggest institutions are meeting the letter rather than the spirit of its commitments.

    Financial constraints and the evolving REF 2029 people, culture and environment (PCE) guidance are shaping how institutions support research staff, and universities face a choice: stick with the easy, surface-level interventions that look good on paper, or commit to the tougher, long-term changes that could truly improve research careers.

    The latter is difficult, resource-intensive, and politically fraught – but it is the only route to a research culture that is genuinely sustainable.

    Progress and pressures

    There has been real progress in embedding researcher development in UK higher education. The 2019 review of the concordat highlighted expanded training opportunities, strengthened mentoring schemes, and, crucially, the integration of researcher development into institutional strategies and governance. Many institutions have since used its principles to shape research culture action plans and strategies.

    This progress has been uneven, however. Access to high-quality training and development opportunities varies across the sector, particularly for researchers in smaller, less well-resourced institutions. In addition, new initiatives frequently lack long-term sustainability beyond initial funding.

    Institutional action plans tend to emphasise soft politics – awards, charters and resource hubs – which, while useful, may function as reputational signals more than mechanisms for change. Meanwhile, the concordat’s more challenging commitments, like improving job security, workload management, and the visibility of career pathways across sectors, receive less attention.

    Financial constraints and shifting priorities

    Universities are operating in an era of financial constraint forcing difficult decisions about what can be sustained and what must be scaled back. These financial pressures are already reshaping researcher development and career pathways, with potentially lasting consequences:

    Shift toward low-cost interventions: Institutions may prioritise training, mentoring, and “off the shelf” development workshops as the most financially viable options, while more complex reforms – such as improving career pathways, addressing workload pressures, and ensuring meaningful career learning – are pushed aside.

    Growing precarity and inequity in research careers: With the risk of non-renewal of fixed-term contracts and rising redundancies, instability may increase. The effects will likely be unequal – early-career researchers, those with caring responsibilities, and underrepresented groups are usually most affected in such situations, with workload pressures further widening existing inequities in career progression and retention.

    Shifts in career trajectories: Financial pressures will push more researchers to seek opportunities beyond academia, not always by choice but due to diminishing prospects within universities. This is not in itself a bad thing, but the absence of robust career tracking data, limited engagement with non-academic sectors, and a lack of structured support for diverse pathways mean that institutions risk making decisions in a vacuum.

    Without a clear understanding of where researchers go and what they need to thrive, researcher development may become misaligned with market realities – undermining both retention and outcomes. Initiatives like CRAC-Vitae’s new UK research career tracking initiative aim to close this critical evidence gap.

    What makes researcher development sustainable?

    What will actually make researcher development sustainable? The answer isn’t simply more initiatives, or cheaper ones – it’s about embedding development in institutional culture and building on evidence of what works. That means making time for development activities, creating space for strategic reflection, and encouraging researchers to learn from one another – not just offering mentoring or reciprocal schemes in isolation. Vitae’s refreshed Researcher Development Framework sets out the full breadth of what this encompasses.

    Researcher development doesn’t necessarily require large budgets. Much of it comes down to embedding development in the culture: time to pursue meaningful opportunities, support from line managers and supervisors to do so, and the ability to learn in community with others. Yet in times of crisis, workloads tend to rise – and it’s often this development time that’s seen as non-essential and cut. Around half of research staff do not have time to invest in professional development – demonstrating just how limited that space already is.

    These overlapping pressures are pushing institutions to make trade-offs – but it’s clear that the most effective and sustainable approaches to researcher development will depend not just on resource levels, but on institutional priorities and strategic leadership.

    Unmet expectations

    At the same time, the ongoing review of sector-wide concordats and agreements, meant to clarify priorities and improve alignment, seems to have stalled – raising concerns about whether it will lead to meaningful action. The Researcher Development Concordat Strategy Group, tasked with overseeing implementation and strategic coordination, has also been quiet over the last year, though the new chair has recently signalled renewed commitment to its activities.

    This stagnation raises questions about the long-term value of the concordat, particularly in a landscape where institutions are grappling with resource constraints. Without strong leadership and coordinated sector-wide action, there is a real risk that institutions will continue to take a fragmented, compliance-driven approach rather than pursuing deeper reform.

    If the concordat is to remain relevant, it must address the structural issues it currently skirts around – particularly those related to researcher employment conditions, workload sustainability, and career progression. Without this, it risks becoming another well-intentioned initiative that falls short of delivering real sector-wide change.

    PCE and the concordat

    The introduction of people, culture and environment (PCE) in REF 2029 was intended to shift the sector’s focus from research outputs to the broader conditions that enable research excellence. However, the way institutions interpret these requirements is critical.

    REF PCE has the potential to drive meaningful change – but only if institutions use it as a platform for genuine reflection rather than a showcase of best practices.

    PCE and the concordat share several ambitions: both emphasise inclusive research environments, professional development, and supporting leadership at all career stages. The concordat’s focus on employment conditions, researcher voice, and long-term career development also aligns with PCE’s emphasis on institutional responsibility for research culture.

    This coherence is no accident – PCE was co-developed with the sector, and the concordats and agreements review recognised the overlaps between existing frameworks.

    If institutions take a strategic, integrated approach, REF PCE could reinforce and enhance existing concordat commitments rather than becoming another compliance exercise. However, this requires institutions to go beyond superficial reporting and demonstrate tangible improvements in the working conditions and career pathways of researchers.

    A call to action

    If institutions want to move beyond just ticking boxes, they need to take bold, practical steps.

    Job security must be redefined in the current climate. Researcher development should not just focus on career skills and knowledge but on career sustainability, accountability, and agility. While reducing reliance on fixed-term contracts remains a long-term goal, immediate priorities must also include clearer career progression routes (within and beyond higher education), cross-sector mobility, and support for career transitions.

    Workload and pay transparency need urgent attention. As researchers face increasing uncertainty about their career trajectories, solutions must go beyond surface-level fixes. This requires coordinated policy reform at both institutional and sector levels, including meaningful workload management strategies, transparent pay equity audits, and governance processes that embed researcher voices. While wellbeing initiatives have value, they are not a substitute for structural reform.

    Finally, the role of the concordat strategy group must evolve in response to the current climate. With institutions facing severe financial constraints and a shrinking research workforce, the group must take a more proactive role in advocating for sustainable researcher careers. This includes setting clearer expectations for institutions, addressing gaps in employment stability, and ensuring that commitments to researcher development are not lost amid cost-cutting measures. Without stronger leadership at the sector level, there is a risk that the concordat will become little more than a bureaucratic exercise, rather than a meaningful driver of change.

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  • UKRI has too many people telling it what to do without the resources to do what it’s told

    UKRI has too many people telling it what to do without the resources to do what it’s told

    UKRI has a massive job.

    As the National Audit Office’s (NAO) new report sets out in 2023–24 UKRI assessed close to 29,000 grant funding applications and spent £6bn on innovation grants. It featured in 105 policy papers across 13 ministerial departments in the last three years alone, and it has been seven years since the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) formally set out UKRI’s role and objectives.

    Scale

    The scale of UKRI’s work is so massive that according to its own estimates

    […] were it to receive a 2% budget increase each year for the following three financial years, its existing legal, statutory and political commitments would take up around 98% of its budget in 2025-26, 84% in 2026–27, and 74% in 2027–28. When also including investments that it considers critical, such as continuing to fund similar numbers of new doctoral students and similar levels of new curiosity-driven research, this would then take up around 103%, 101%, and 99% of its future budget, respectively, in those years

    The obvious question here is if UKRI has so much to do, if it is then compelled to do even more, how can it possibly change as government introduces new priorities. Whether it is moonshots, levelling up, supporting the industrial strategy, fuelling government missions, working with devolved authorities, or whatever comes next, UKRI’s funding is so committed it has little bandwidth to put its massive resources behind emerging government strategies.

    However, this assumes that UKRI has a clear idea of what it’s supposed to do in the first place.

    Roughly, UKRI has a corporate strategy which then informs its funding calls which institutions then bid for and through post award work UKRI then assures that the thing it set out to do is being done in some way. The NAO found that how government communicates its priorities to UKRI is a bewildering mix of things:

    ad hoc and routine meetings; board meetings; formal letters; key UK government strategies and mission statements; and spending review budgets. These are not consolidated or ranked, meaning that the government does not currently have an overall picture of what it is asking UKRI to do.

    It is therefore not surprising that in UKRI’s own strategy none of its formal objectives are “specific, measurable or time-bound, making it difficult to understand what outcome UKRI is seeking to achieve.”

    Priorities

    To the outside observer it would seem odd that UKRI doesn’t have a single ministerial letter with a single set of priorities which it can then pursue at the expense of everything else. Instead, in reading the NAO report it seems that UKRI has become the everything box where the entire hopes of a government are pinned, whether UKRI has the resources to achieve them or not.

    It’s easy to see how the research funding ecosystem becomes so complex. UKRI is an important part but it sits alongside the likes of ARIA, charitable organisations, national institutes, venture capital, businesses, and others. The bluntest assessment is that if the government is unable to specify a single set of aims for UKRI, UKRI then cannot measure outcomes as clearly as it would like – and even if it could there is little spare budget to pivot its work. The report makes clear that there is ongoing “prioritisation” to address this confusion – but this work will not conclude until after the spending review, by which point key decisions will already have been made.

    It’s not that UKRI is failing – by any reasonable assessment it is powering a world-leading research ecosystem, even with some deep cultural challenges – it’s that as NAO point out it is given a lot to do without all the tools to do it, and even when it can measure its work government priorities are liable to change anyway. The one thing that good research and innovation policy needs is time. The one thing every government has is little time to get anything done.

    It is even harder to assess whether its measurable things are good value on their own terms. NAO is interested in ensuring the public gets value for money in the things it funds. One of the challenges in assessing whether what UKRI does is good value for money is that outcomes from research and innovation funding are diffuse, happen on a long-time scale, and may even fail but in doing so moves the research ecosystem toward something that works in some hard to measure and adjacent way.

    Value

    Although not directly captured within the NAO report, assessing value for money within research and innovation also depends on which level it is assessed. For example, there may be investments in breakthrough science which return little direct economic benefits but expand the knowledge of a field in a way they one day might. There may be investments that achieve immediate economic benefits but have few long term economic benefits as new technologies become available.

    It is clear that UKRI would benefit from fewer directions and fewer priorities which would allow it to use its resources more efficiently and in turn measure its impact more easily. The problem is that government policy overtakes bureaucratic needs which in turn encourages policy churn.

    In lieu of being able to change the nature of politics part of the solution must lie in changing how UKRI works. The organisation is aware of this, and realises it needs a capacity which goes beyond adjusting the direction of its existing activities – rather, one that “incentivises applicants to put forward ideas that align with government objectives which can be quicker and more efficient than setting up new programmes.”

    The fundamental problem for policy makers is that they have collectively turned to UKRI with an enormous list of asks without the resources to achieve them. UKRI either needs clearer direction or more resources, or both, what it does not need is more asks without clear priorities.

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