Tag: worry

  • Student Success Leaders Worry About Affordability, AI, DEI

    Student Success Leaders Worry About Affordability, AI, DEI

    After yet another rocky year for higher education, student success administrators retain high confidence in their institution’s core mission: Some 95 percent rate the quality of undergraduate education delivered as good or excellent, according to Inside Higher Ed’s second annual Survey of College and University Student Success Administrators with Hanover Research.

    About the Survey

    On Wednesday, Dec. 10, at 2 p.m. Eastern, Inside Higher Ed will present a free webcast to discuss the results of the 2025 Survey of College and University Student Success Administrators. Please register here—and plan on bringing your questions about student success going into 2026.

    This survey was conducted Aug. 20–Oct. 6 with Hanover Research. Respondents number 204 student success leaders, most of whom work in student affairs at the executive level at public and private nonprofit institutions. The survey’s margin of error is plus or minus seven percentage points. A copy of the free report can be downloaded here.

    This independent editorial survey was made possible by support from the Gates Foundation and Studiosity.

    Most student success administrators (85 percent) also report strong feelings of connection to students served, and nearly as many say they’re satisfied in their roles. Yet leaders continue to worry about the forces holding students back. Selecting up to three options from a longer list, administrators cite mental health challenges (51 percent describe this as a top challenge), financial constraints (49 percent) and lack of adequate preparation before college (48 percent) as the top barriers to student success at their institution. Community college leaders are disproportionately concerned about students needing to work while enrolled (67 percent).

    Just about half of all administrators believe their institution is highly responsive to student needs for flexibility, such as in times of personal or academic crises.

    A larger share of respondents, 61 percent, believe their institution is highly effective in prioritizing student success. Just 35 percent say it’s highly effective in using student success data to drive decisions, however. Both of these figures are similar to last year’s survey, meaning the gap between aspiration and data-driven change remains.

    Student affairs leaders who responded to NASPA’s own annual Top Issues in Student Affairs survey this year flagged “using dashboards and other data communication tools to help senior administrators translate data into actionable insights for decision-making” as a top issue for institutions, behind only “protecting the institution against cyberattacks” and “navigating political and legislative pressures affecting institutional policies and practices.”

    Colleges can certainly do more to harness the extraordinary number of student data points available to them every day. But Amelia Parnell, NASPA’s president, told Inside Higher Ed that she’d give student success leaders “a little more credit” for their use of data—especially the qualitative kind.

    “We need both quantitative data to see scale and impact and qualitative data to understand the nuances,” including around learning and engagement, she said. “I think professionals have quite a bit of qualitative context about students’ experiences because they spend a lot of time connecting directly with them.”

    Other top areas of concern for student success administrators include affordability, artificial intelligence and policy impacts on campus life, finds Inside Higher Ed’s survey.

    Affordability and Value

    A third of student success administrators say that their trust in higher education has waned in recent years, and many point to concerns about affordability (64 percent) and long-term value of a degree (62 percent) as top drivers of declining public confidence. Leaders also highlight tighter alignment between academic programs and career pathways as a key lever for rebuilding trust.

    About six in 10 respondents are highly confident that their institution is actively working to keep costs affordable, with public institution leaders especially likely to say so (69 percent versus 49 percent of private nonprofit peers).

    But just 11 percent of leaders think students at their institution clearly understand the total cost of attendance, beyond tuition. They raise similar concerns about students’ awareness and understanding of emergency funding resources at their institution.

    In Inside Higher Ed’s main Student Voice survey this year, just 27 percent of students said they understand the total cost of attendance fully and can budget appropriately. More than three in five didn’t know if their college offers emergency aid. Yet 61 percent of student success administrators say this kind of help is available at their institution.

    Some additional context—and evidence of misalignment between student experience and administrator perception: In Inside Higher Ed’s 2025 Survey of College and University Chief Business Officers, most CBOs (88 percent) said that their institution is transparent about the full, net cost of attendance, including tuition discounts and counting fees and other expenses—though just 42 percent said this of colleges and universities as a whole. Most CBOs also said that their institution’s net price is sufficiently affordable.

    Parnell of NASPA noted that financial aid “is but one part of the cost of attendance discussion for some students.” But she added that financial aid offers represent an opportunity for colleges to improve clarity and transparency around total cost—something the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators and others have urged.

    Preparing Students for an AI Future

    Just 2 percent of student success leaders say their institution is very effective in helping students understand how, when and whether to use generative artificial intelligence in academic settings. On promoting academic integrity, specifically, 77 percent endorse educating students about ethical AI use rather than emphasizing punitive measures. Faculty and staff development and efforts to standardize use policies also rank high.

    In the Student Voice survey, just 13 percent of students said they didn’t know when, how and whether to use generative AI for coursework—but most of the remainder attributed their knowledge to individual faculty efforts rather than broader institutional ones.

    Student success administrators also describe a gap between the extent to which high-impact teaching practices, such as those endorsed by the American Association of Colleges and Universities, are highly encouraged at their institution and widely adopted (65 percent versus 36 percent, respectively). And while 87 percent agree that students graduate from their college ready to succeed in today’s job market, half (51 percent) believe their institution should focus more on helping students find paid internships and other experiential learning opportunities.

    Tawnya Means, an innovation consultant who recently joined Bowling Green State University and its Schmidthorst College of Business as a strategic innovation and AI adviser, said that all three of these concerns—lack of institutional guidance on AI, high-impact teaching practices and other opportunities for experiential learning and internships—are connected.

    “Schools treating AI as a catalyst for pedagogical redesign are simultaneously increasing high-impact practices and preparing students for AI-augmented careers,” she said. And institutions doing this well are using some common strategies: making faculty development about pedagogy, not just “AI compliance,” and designing assignments where AI supports real learning. Unpacking the latter point, Means praised approaches that are experiential, teach discipline-specific or contextual AI use versus abstract rules, and mirror actual workplaces.

    While business schools have long understood the power of “messy real-world case studies,” Means said they’re ripe for use across undergraduate education in the generative AI era and “resist simple AI shortcuts.”

    Parnell suggested on-campus employment as yet another way to provide “work experience and support students in their learning journey.”

    On AI specifically, Asim Ali, executive director of the Biggio Center for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning at Auburn University, who’s worked with many institutions on faculty development, said the “biggest gap I see is not engaging students in the process.”

    At Auburn, he said, student government leaders have taken a “focused interest directly in shaping how we support GenAI learning.” And in discussions between student leaders and faculty, “both groups emphasized that students must also take responsibility for learning the ethics and appropriate use of GenAI.”

    The biggest gap I see is not engaging students in the process.”

    —Asim Ali, executive director of the Biggio Center for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning at Auburn University

    Financial worries and uncertainty about the future top the list of students’ postcollege stressors, as ranked by student success administrators. And just a quarter of these leaders say their institution makes postgraduate outcomes are easily accessible.

    Policy Impacts and Campus Climate

    Almost all leaders say students feel welcomed, valued and supported on their campuses, and 87 percent say their institution is doing a good or excellent job promoting a positive campus climate. Yet regional differences emerge: Leaders in the South are somewhat less likely than peers elsewhere to say their institution is highly effective in encouraging diverse perspectives among students.

    Nearly two in three leaders (62 percent) say recent federal restrictions on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives have negatively impacted students, and the rate is higher among public institution leaders than their private nonprofit peers.

    In the Student Voice survey, 48 percent of students said such changes had negatively impacted their college experience or that of peers; most of the remainder saw no change, rather than a positive one.

    Most administrators also believe new student aid policies, such as those included in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, will limit access to college rather than expand it. And many already report moderate (39 percent) or significant (29 percent) declines in international student enrollments tied to recent federal actions, such as visa appointment restrictions and targeted actions at specific institutions.

    Leaders estimate that 40 percent of students participate in no extracurricular activities, a figure that rises to 67 percent among community college administrators. Respondents are mostly like to say involvement would increase if students saw a clear connection between activities and their career goals.

    For institutions struggling to get students in involved, Parnell highlighted the importance of effectively communicating and delivering available activities to students: Are any activities at community colleges, which serve many working students, available after 5 p.m., for example, she asked?

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  • Why do people worry about inflation?

    Why do people worry about inflation?

    That’s why central banks have gone to extraordinary lengths in the past decade to banish the specter of deflation. They’ve succeeded. Indeed, stock markets have been rattled by evidence that inflation is stirring in the United States, which might prompt the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates more rapidly than previously thought.

    (On Wednesday, the U.S. government reported that consumer prices rose by 0.5 percent in January, more than expected. “Core” prices excluding volatile food and energy costs marked the biggest monthly gain in a year.)

    But the chances of inflation getting out of control are small.

    First, companies operate globally, so if manufacturing costs rise too high in the United States, they will shift production to cheaper locations overseas.

    Second, there is still slack in the U.S. jobs market because many people who gave up looking for work after the crisis could be lured back into employment, capping wages.

    Third, there is no reason to believe the Fed — or financial markets for that matter — would allow the money supply to spiral out of control.

    The United States is no Venezuela.

    Prices rise and fall all the time in response to factors such as changing consumer tastes and technological innovation. Medical care costs a lot more than in the past, computers a lot less. But a generalized rise in prices across the economy — which is the definition of inflation — is possible only if a country’s central bank prints too much money.

    That’s what’s happened in Venezuela, where the money supply has increased by 4,000 percent in the past two years. The result is hyperinflation, forecast by the International Monetary Fund to reach 13,000 percent this year. Goldilocks’s oatmeal is nearly doubling in price every month. Poverty is rife because wages lag price rises. The economy is on its knees.

    The United States is no Venezuela. Evidence of a pick-up in wages is good news in fact, considering that workers have been taking home less and less of the economic pie in recent years, while the suppliers of capital have benefited handsomely.

    It’s possible that the recently enacted package of U.S. tax cuts and spending increases will cause the economy to run a bit too hot, pushing up prices a bit. But of the many problems facing the U.S. economy, runaway inflation is not one of them.

    In 1981, then Fed Chairman Paul Volcker had to raise short-term U.S. interest rates to 20 percent to crush inflation. History will not need to repeat itself.

    Questions to consider:

    1. What “ripple effect” could a rise in consumer prices cause?

    2. How can inflation be good?

    3. When prices go up significantly, what might you or your family not buy?

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  • Advocates Worry About McNair Scholars Program

    Advocates Worry About McNair Scholars Program

    Delays in the distribution of federal grants for undergraduates involved with TRIO, a series of college-access programs, combined with an ongoing lawsuit have raised concerns among proponents for the McNair Postbaccalaureate Achievement Program—a TRIO grant designed specifically for those pursuing graduate school.

    Legally, grants don’t have to be awarded for either the TRIO undergraduate programs or McNair until the end of the fiscal year, Sept. 30. But in most years prior, the Department of Education has notified institutions about the status of awards in late August or mid-September. 

    That has not been the case so far this year. 

    Award notifications started to trickle out after Sept. 15 for the undergraduate programs that started Sept. 1, but according to a TRIO advocacy group, most of the college staff members who lead McNair are still waiting to hear from the department, though at least one program got approval Friday.

    As with the other TRIO programs, the Education Department says it will issue notices by the end of the month. But with a lawsuit filed last year arguing McNair is discriminatory and President Trump calling to slash TRIO altogether in his recent budget proposal, uncertainty remains rampant. 

    “All of a sudden, we’re in sort of this panic mode,” one assistant program director said on condition of anonymity, fearing that speaking out could harm the students she serves. “That stress and panic has certainly been building since January, but this definitely accelerated it.” 

    And while the anonymous director said her program has yet to receive a status update, for some the fear of cancellation has already become a reality. 

    So far, the Council for Opportunity in Education, a TRIO advocacy group, has tallied 18 grant cancellations out of the more than 200 McNair programs. Collectively, McNair serves more than 6,000 first-generation, low-income and underrepresented students each year. 

    ED deputy press secretary Ellen Keast said in a statement, “The department plans to issue continuation awards for the McNair Scholars program by the end of the fiscal year,” while also continuing to “evaluate the underlying legal issues raised in litigation.” In an email obtained by Inside Higher Ed, a legislative affairs officer at the department reinforced this statement to a staffer on Capitol Hill, saying that any grantees facing a cancellation would have been notified by Sept. 16. 

    Still, the director said she is scrambling to devise a backup plan.

    “We have less than three weeks to figure out what’s going on, talk to our institutions and make a plan,” she said. “Jobs are going to be lost and students aren’t going to have services.”

    ‘Unacceptable Delays’

    Worries about McNair have existed for months, but they kicked into a higher gear at a COE conference earlier this month. 

    The program director and COE president Kimberly Jones, both of whom attended the conference, say that Christopher McCaghren, ED’s deputy assistant secretary for higher education programs, spoke about the future of McNair on Sept. 10. And according to both of their recollections, when the secretary was asked if and when grant awards would be allocated, he said the department needed to wait on further rulings from the court before it could administer this year’s awards. (Jones noted that the session was not recorded, at the request of the department.) 

    Keast said the account of McCaghren’s comments was “unsubstantiated fake news” and reinforced that the department is committed to issuing McNair awards by Sept. 30. She declined, however, to provide a transcript or recording of his remarks.

    The lawsuit McCaghren was likely referring to was filed last year by the Young America’s Foundation, a national conservative student group. It alleged the criteria for McNair eligibility was race-based and argued that in order to be constitutional, the program should be open to all students. The case was dismissed by a federal district court, but the plaintiffs have since appealed. 

    If the government is delaying grant allocation because of the lawsuit, Jones said, it would be an “absolutely unacceptable” practice. 

    “If the government couldn’t move on something every time they were sued, then they wouldn’t do anything,” she added. “I believe that this is an opportunity they’re taking advantage of to undermine the program and attempt to eliminate it.”

    Amanda Fuchs Miller, the Biden administration appointee who previously filled McCaghren’s role, made similar comments.

    “Just because there’s pending litigation doesn’t mean that you don’t fund a program that Congress has authorized and appropriated funds for,” she said. “That’s not the role of the executive branch.”

    Both Jones and Fuchs Miller pointed to the department’s recent decision to end funding for grant programs that support minority-serving institutions as another reason they are worried about McNair’s future. 

    The MSI decision stemmed from a similar lawsuit that argued the criteria for Hispanic-serving institutions was illegal. And while no court ruling had been issued, a Justice Department official agreed with the plaintiffs and so did Education Secretary Linda McMahon, who expanded the determination to include similar grant programs.

    ‘Tapping Into Talent’

    Named after Ronald McNair, a first-generation college student and astrophysicist who died during the launch of NASA’s space shuttle Challenger in 1986, the McNair Scholars program started in 1989 and receives about $60 million per year from Congress.

    As with other TRIO programs, at least two-thirds of the students served under McNair must be first-generation and low-income. But what has sparked the legal scrutiny of the graduate program is a provision that allows up to one-third of the participating students to be admitted because they are “a member of a group that is underrepresented.” 

    Proponents for McNair say that this may include characteristics like race or sexuality, but aspects like gender and field of study often play a role as well. In many instances a student will tick all three boxes—first-gen, low-income and underrepresented—at once.

    “There’s a perspective that McNair is only for students of color, which it is not,” said Jones. “It particularly looks for a demographic that is not usually sought after in postgraduate education … We’re tapping into talent that we would not have otherwise.”

    For example, a white woman from a low-income household who is pursuing a career in STEM could be a prime candidate under the current regulatory statute.

    But advocates worry that because of current political tensions, many eligible students of all races could lose access to this critical service.

    The program leader who spoke with Inside Higher Ed said that until grant awards are sent out, her rural institution will lack $278,000. As a result, she will likely have to tell 27 students that the classes they have already signed up for, the workshops they were promised and the conferences they planned to attend will not be possible.

    “This is the semester that our seniors’ grad applications are due, so to just yank the rug out from underneath them and say, ‘You’re on your own’ in this critical time is just cruel,” she said. “It’s also, in my opinion, a really shortsighted way of the administration understanding national security and participating in the global economy.”

    Tara Ruttley, a McNair alumna who studied neuroscience and now works in the space industry, always knew she wanted a Ph.D. but wasn’t sure how to get there before she saw a poster advertising the grant program at Colorado State University. Through McNair she was able to pursue a paid research internship, present her findings at conferences, receive guidance on application essays and then give back to younger students. If funding were to be cut, Ruttley said, other aspiring graduate students won’t be so lucky.

    “I’m kind of a scrapper, so I might have figured it out, but it definitely would have been delayed. The entire package wouldn’t have been as strong and it probably would have taken me a lot longer to get to where I was going,” she explained. “There’s a whole generation of scientists we may never see from varied backgrounds across the country.”

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  • Withheld Adult Education Funds Worry Community Colleges

    Withheld Adult Education Funds Worry Community Colleges

    The Trump administration is holding up hundreds of millions of dollars slated for adult education programs as part of a review of education spending.

    The roughly $716 million was supposed to be disbursed to states July 1 and then divvied up among their adult education providers, such as community colleges. But the funding for high school equivalency classes, English as a second language programs and other adult education services never arrived. The news comes as the Trump administration continues to withhold $7 billion from states for K–12 education, including ESL classes and after-school programs, which includes the adult education money.

    The freeze is part of a broader “ongoing programmatic review of education funding,” an unnamed spokesperson for the Office of Management and Budget wrote in a statement to Inside Higher Ed.

    “Initial findings show that many of these grant programs have been grossly misused to subsidize a radical leftwing agenda,” wrote the OMB spokesperson, citing examples of states and schools using the money to support students in the country without proper documentation as well as for a seminar on “queer resistance in the arts,” though the statement made no mention of adult ed programs.

    The fate of the withheld funding remains unclear. “No decisions have been made yet,” the spokesperson said.

    Now states and their community colleges, which offer a significant share of adult education programs, are scrambling to figure out how to continue providing adult education services despite staggering funding shortfalls.

    “If funding is not provided, there are nothing but bad options for institutions,” said David Baime, senior vice president for government relations for the American Association of Community Colleges. He predicts community colleges would have to reduce adult education services, lay off personnel and vie for funds to fill in the gap from states and other sources. But even so, “the funding is so substantial in a number of places that there’s no immediate source of replacing that money.”

    He emphasized that adult education programs have received “broad support from both parties for decades”—and they were already underfunded relative to student need.

    Adult basic education is “a core function and a core part of the mission of community colleges across the country,” he said.

    Adult education is one of several programs on the chopping back in the Education Department’s proposed budget for fiscal year 2026. Officials wrote in budget documents that states and localities are “best suited to determine whether to support the activities authorized under this program or similar activities within their own budgets and without unnecessary administrative burden imposed by the federal government.”

    Higher ed advocates worry other programs like the Child Care Access Means Parents in School program that are on the chopping block could suffer a similar fate.

    Concerns Across the Country

    Community colleges in red and blue states alike are anxiously waiting for the adult education funds to come through.

    Heather Morgan, executive director of the Kansas Association of Community Colleges, said if the pause persists beyond two months with no alternative funding, Kansas’s 19 community colleges will have to make “tough decisions” about laying off or furloughing staff.

    She added that college leaders were given no notice, leaving them with no time to prepare.

    “Situations where funding doesn’t come as expected are real hardships on small colleges and really leave staff in a position of wondering and not knowing what’s coming next,” she said.

    Joe Schaffer, president of Laramie County Community College in Wyoming, said the withheld funds risk hurting high-demand, successful adult education programs in the state.

    He noted that, historically, the coal and oil industries in the state offered well-paying jobs that didn’t necessarily require a high school diploma. But now, because of changes in technology and the state’s diversifying economy, many jobs do require at least a high school education. Wyoming workers hit with that realization are coming to adult education programs later in life to earn high school equivalency certificates, commonly referred to as the GED.

    And the programs work. Roughly 80 percent of Wyoming adult basic education students get a job or enroll in college after their programs, and 84 percent earn a credential beyond a GED. These programs graduate more people with a high school equivalency than any one high school in the state, making the programs arguably Wyoming’s “largest high school,” he said.

    Because the state funds half of these programs, he believes Laramie County Community College can make do without the federal funds and continue to offer these programs for another year, with some belt-tightening measures.

    But still, the move to withhold federal funds risks “reducing the flow of high school graduates at a time when the workforce pipeline, the talent pipeline, is a concern of everybody across the nation,” Schaffer said.

    Morgan agreed that state economies would suffer if adult education programs took a permanent funding hit.

    For many Kansans, “this is their option to get out of poverty and to get into a higher-paying job,” she said. “The ability for them to get skilled up is important, and we have to have the resources to do that, and the uncertainty that’s been injected into the system is not helpful in trying to meet our mission, which is to prepare citizens for the Kansas economy.”

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  • Americans worry about AI in politics — but they’re more worried about government censorship

    Americans worry about AI in politics — but they’re more worried about government censorship

    As artificial intelligence technologies make their way into political ads and campaigning, Americans are expressing growing concern. But they’re not just worried about deepfakes and deceptive content’s impact on elections —  they also fear how the government might use the fight against misinformation to restrict free speech.

    In a recently released FIRE poll of registered American voters, conducted by Morning Consult, one concern stood out: government regulation itself. Nearly half of respondents (45%) said they are “extremely” or “very” concerned that government regulation of election-related AI content could be abused to suppress criticism of elected officials. That’s a powerful signal that while Americans see the risks posed by AI, they don’t trust government regulators to police political expression fairly.

    When asked to choose between protecting free speech in politics or stopping deceptive content, a plurality (47%) said protecting free speech in politics is more important, even if that means allowing some deceptive content. Just 37% prioritized stopping deceptive content, even at the expense of limiting speech that would otherwise be protected by the First Amendment. These sentiments are held across the political spectrum, but are stronger among Independents and Republicans, than among Democrats.

    This isn’t just a preference — it’s a principled stand in favor of the core freedoms the First Amendment exists to protect. Political speech lies at the heart of those freedoms, and Americans clearly recognize that any government attempts to police what can or can’t be said pose a far greater threat to democracy than free speech itself.

    Regulation threatens participation

    The chilling effects are already measurable. About 28% of voters said they’d be less likely to share content on social media if the government began regulating AI-generated or AI-altered content. (That’s right: All content, not just AI-generated or AI-altered content.) That may not sound dramatic at first glance, but that’s more than the average voter turnout during the last midterm primaries. As our political culture is increasingly shaped online, discouraging speech — even unintentionally — can have real consequences for public discourse.

    These findings suggest a troubling trajectory: Government regulations justified in the name of protecting the public from AI could end up silencing the public instead. 

    While some polls show that a similar percentage of voters (41%) say it’s important to protect people from misinformation, that concern cannot be used to justify censorship. About 39% said that preserving freedom of speech should be the government’s top priority when crafting AI laws. Only 12% said that view doesn’t describe them at all. In other words, most Americans believe that protecting speech isn’t just one goal among many — it’s the central concern.

    And they’re right to think so. The First Amendment doesn’t permit the government to restrict speech simply because it believes the public might be misled. The solution to bad speech is more speech, not less.

    These results should serve as a warning to policymakers: The public views efforts to regulate AI in political campaigns as a risk to free expression. FIRE has been actively engaged in legislative advocacy to safeguard First Amendment rights, including vague and overbroad bans or disclosure requirements imposed on AI content. 

    If voters already believe regulation will be abused — and are already pulling back from political expression using AI — that’s not just a theoretical harm. It’s a chilling effect in action.

    Instead of rushing to regulate, elected officials should reaffirm their commitment to protecting political speech, no matter the medium. The technology may be new, but the principle is not: In a free society, the government doesn’t get to decide which ideas are too dangerous to be heard.

    The poll was conducted May 13-15, 2025, among a sample of registered voters in the US. A total of 2,005 interviews were conducted online across the US for a margin of error of plus or minus 2 percentage points. Frequency counts may not sum to 2,005 due to weighting and rounding. Topline results are available here.

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  • Trump’s upheavals worry job-hunting postdoctoral researchers

    Trump’s upheavals worry job-hunting postdoctoral researchers

    Julia Barnes, a National Science Foundation postdoctoral research fellow, was watching President Donald Trump’s speech to Congress last week when she heard him refer to her work as an “appalling waste” that needs to end.

    In a list of expenses he called “scams,” Trump mentioned a $60 million project for Indigenous peoples in Latin America.

    “Empowering Afro-Indigenous populations in Colombia, South America, is exactly what I do,” Barnes said. “My project is explicitly DEI, and it is DEI-focused in a foreign country.” The Trump administration has targeted both foreign aid and diversity, equity and inclusion.

    Even before the speech, she knew her work helping such communities, which have faced atrocities, was under threat. Barnes said officials at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, where she’s based, last month asked her not to travel to Colombia for a planned research trip. She’s taken further precautions herself out of fear that she’ll be forced to repay any NSF grant money she uses, she said.

    She’s not using the money at all—even to pay herself, she said. “I’m drawing on my savings right now to pay rent and pay for groceries,” Barnes said. She’s also teaching at another university and freelancing for a nonprofit. (An NSF spokesperson pointed Inside Higher Ed to an agency webpage that says activities such as travel “are permitted to proceed in accordance with the terms and conditions of existing awards.”)

    “It’s pretty devastating,” she said. “This is the highest position I’ve ever gotten in my career. This is my dream job to do this research; it’s a cause that I care about very deeply.” She said, “It really breaks my heart to see this shift in values away from what I had initially hoped would become a tenure-track professorship and something—something greater.”

    Postdocs like Barnes are worried about their careers amid the tumult of the Trump administration, which has frozen federal funding; canceled grant review meetings; slashed National Institutes of Health payments for indirect research costs; targeted diversity, equity and inclusion activities without clearly defining DEI; and laid off swaths of federal research agency employees.

    Many of those actions have been in flux as judges block and unblock the administration’s orders amid courtroom fights, and as federal officials walk back terminations and other cuts. But university officials nonetheless appear unnerved, with some restricting Ph.D. program admissions and pausing hiring.

    “There’s a very complicated feeling in spending close to a decade of time and energy pursuing this type of career,” said Kevin Bird, who’s on the job hunt. He’s nearing the expiration of his stint as an NSF biology postdoc research fellow at the University of California, Davis, and said he’s always tried to work at public universities because he values their mission.

    “The whole process of striving for this for so long and making the sacrifices—to think it’s worth it—and then kind of having the entire system be attacked and sort of collapse in uncertainty has really been an unpleasant thing to experience,” Bird said.

    The White House didn’t provide an interview or statement last week.

    Looking Overseas

    Counting her undergraduate days, Amanda Shaver said she’s spent 19 years building a science career. Now an NIH postdoc fellow at Johns Hopkins University, she said she feels “so close to the finish line of trying to do everything right for so many years to get a faculty position”—only for it to now “feel unattainable.”

    Shaver said meetings to consider the career transition NIH award she applied for have been postponed, and she wonders whether Trump officials actually axed the program because they considered it a DEI initiative. The NIH didn’t respond to Inside Higher Ed’s requests for comment last week about the program’s status.

    Looking at the overall future of research and higher education in the U.S., Shaver said, “Things are not good.” She’s applying to positions in other countries.

    In the meantime, she awaits word on what’s happening with her NIH Pathway to Independence Award application. This award—also known as K99/R00—provides recipients money to finish work during their postdoc stints and then start labs at new institutions, Shaver said. “It really sort of elevates you in the candidate pool” for faculty jobs, she said.

    But Shaver—who describes herself as from a low-income family and a disadvantaged school district—said she applied for a version of the award known as MOSAIC, which is meant to keep talented people from underrepresented groups in the biomedical sciences field. That makes it a potential target of Trump’s anti-DEI crusade.

    Shaver said the MOSAIC website disappeared temporarily, “and people thought that they just weren’t in existence anymore, and people were told to not submit those.” But she had already applied; a study section of faculty was supposed to meet in February to consider the application, she said. That was postponed once, and last week she received an email saying it’s been postponed again until May, she said.

    “I don’t know if they will actually meet or not,” Shaver said. She might apply for the regular version of the award in the future but will then have lost an application cycle and can only keep applying until the fourth year of her postdoc stint, she said.

    “The NIH is the worldwide leader in biomedical research,” she said. “And canceling different types of grants or delaying funding and firing people that are really qualified at the NIH, cutting the indirect costs at universities—all these things collectively are really harming the research industry.”

    She added, “It doesn’t make any sense—I think to any voter—to want to dismantle biomedical research … it’s like a degradation of an entire system that is built on facts and knowledge.”

    Amid the upheaval, it can be hard to tell whether university job cuts stem from Trump’s actions or other factors. Bird, the NSF postdoc at UC Davis, said searches for two tenure-track faculty positions he applied for have been canceled since Trump took office. One of the institutions he mentioned, North Carolina State University, told Inside Higher Ed the search is now progressing, and the other, Clemson University, said its search was canceled to “attract a broader and more qualified candidate pool” and the position will be reposted soon.

    Whatever the reasons for those cuts, “many people I’ve talked to now at institutions are feeling the crunch or feeling the concern about what the next few years might hold if the NIH cuts go through, if any aspect of the indirect rate shifts happen,” Bird said. “It’s kind of forcing a lot of universities to really plan for the worst, I think.” So far, a federal district court judge has blocked the NIH from implementing such cuts.

    He lamented the attacks on efforts to recruit into science more first-generation students and students from historically excluded groups. These attacks change “what the job I could even have would be like—if part of the job isn’t taking that mindset of broadening participation and bringing people into the career path like I was,” said Bird, who comes from a small town and a low-income family.

    All this turmoil is pushing him to start “broadening my horizons,” including looking at positions in Europe or other parts of the world that hopefully “will have more stable science institutions and stable higher education,” he said.

    Job cuts at federal research agencies and universities may increase competition-—and uncertainty—among those trying to take the next step in their careers. Julia Van Etten said, “I have a lot of friends who’ve lost their jobs” as early-career researchers in federal agencies.

    Van Etten, an NSF postdoc research fellow at Rutgers University at New Brunswick, said she’s looking for faculty jobs. But “it’s uncertain how many of those jobs will exist going forward.”

    “There’s a lot more people on the job market here,” Van Etten said. “There’s a lot of uncertainty on the job market here. There seems to be a general feeling that the overseas job markets—if they’re not already—are going to become saturated.”

    “It just feels like the job market is kind of bleak,” she said.

    Van Etten said the government—through funding from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the Department of Energy and other agencies—has already invested much in her education and work. And she’s invested time that might have been wasted.

    “I spent my entire 20s in grad school and working to get my Ph.D.,” she said. “And no one gets a doctorate just for the pay, right? I really love what I do, and I think my work in basic research is really important. And, for the first time in my entire life, I’ve had to start thinking about what I would do if I wasn’t a scientist anymore.”

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