_WHAT’S HAPPENING_
The Trump administration is launching a $47 million pilot program to pair top universities with major corporations, aiming to reshape PhD programs around national scientific priorities.
The initiative, announced by the White House and National Science Foundation (NSF), will fund around 250 four-year doctorates in technical fields starting this fall. Students will spend at least one year conducting "practical research" at an industry partner.
_THE FACTS_
NSF will fund three years of the doctoral programs; 31 universities and 20+ companies cover the rest.
Schools span state universities like UT Austin to Ivy League names like Columbia, Dartmouth, and Penn.
Industry partners include defense contractors Lockheed Martin, Honeywell Aerospace, Rolls-Royce, and John Deere, plus HP and Thermo Fisher.
Students will spend at least one year doing “practical research” that will go towards their dissertation.
Trump’s science adviser Michael Kratsios says the goal is PhD training that reflects "the realities of the scientific ecosystem today."
Kratsios went on: “About the same amount of basic research is done today in academia as in the private sector… the institutions which train our next generation of scientists have not really been updated.”
A separate memo sent by the White House directs federal agencies to fund individual researchers over institutions.
The memo pushes agencies to test peer-review alternatives, including a "golden ticket" letting individual reviewers greenlight high-risk proposals.
_OUR TAKE_
While headlines about the Trump administration’s battles with Harvard and Columbia have dominated news coverage, this initiative suggests the White House sees universities as potential partners who can serve the national interest.
Because of the mass anti-Vietnam War protests in the 1960s and ‘70s, student opposition to weapons research pushed such work off campus or into independent labs.
Now, with competition intensifying with China and reindustrialization becoming a bipartisan priority, the Trump administration found a slam dunk with this initiative to put America’s smartest minds to work on critical priorities.
