Unforced Error

STEM researchers entered academia to push the frontiers of knowledge, but recent federal cuts force them to reconsider their dreams.

It is one of the most consequential decisions facing America’s brightest minds. Undergraduates deliberate it, graduate students agonize over it, scientists write op-eds defending their choices. Online forums overflow with debates about stipends versus salaries, independence versus security. Some researchers wouldn’t have it any other way, drawn to academia’s promise of intellectual freedom. Others find themselves disillusioned early on. Some drift away naturally as their interests evolve. Many prefer starting salaries that surpass what they’d make after years of academic research.

The choice between academia and industry has always tugged at ambitious researchers. But amid the Trump administration’s cuts to university funding, lab budgets are shrinking and positions are vanishing. The future of American research feels uncertain.

Santanu Antu DPhil ’29 was wrapping up his first year as a PhD student researching quantum error computing when his principal investigator (PI) pulled him aside. The federal government had terminated a grant that co-funded his lab. His PI— the faculty member managing the lab and grant money—could no longer afford to keep Antu and another student researcher on the payroll. Antu, an international student from Bangladesh, risked losing his visa if he couldn’t find a new lab by the fall.

Antu scrambled to find a new placement. Typically, students are told early on—about three or four months into the academic year—if they’ll need to look for another lab the next year. Antu suspected that his PI, and the applied physics department, had been caught off-guard amidst the sweep of funding cuts. According to Antu, his PI had mentioned losing sleep over his ability to keep the lab afloat.

Antu asked around, but other PIs were also conserving their budgets. None of the applied physics labs offered him a spot.

“If I am not on top of all of this, I can get kicked out of the country any minute,” Antu said. He started therapy. And for the first time, he began questioning his academic future.

Over the last five months, the federal government has slashed NIH and NSF grant funding, attempted to cap facilities reimbursements at 15 percent (a judge has paused the order indefinitely), and raised the university endowment tax from 1.4 to 8 percent. Due to shrinking budgets, the National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship halved its cohort this year and Yale and peer institutions instituted hiring freezes.

I spoke with ten student researchers across STEM at Yale—from mathematics and applied physics to biomedicine and neuroscience—as well as professors nationwide and alumni who’ve since moved into industry. An additional fifty-five did not respond to requests for interviews; two explicitly declined out of fear of jeopardizing their career prospects. Nearly every undergraduate could name peers whose summer research jobs vanished this year, while graduate students knew friends whose PhD offers were pulled. Across the board, students and faculty described a future clouded by anxiety and uncertainty.

* * *

In April 2025, The New York Times ran an article titled “How Universities Became So Dependent on the Federal Government.” But Sterling Professor of Physics Steven Girvin told me he thinks the real question is: “How did the U.S. research system become so dependent on universities?”

Before the end of World War 2, Germany clinched most Nobel Prizes in science. The United States was not a scientific powerhouse until wartime shifted domestic priorities. The federal government, military, and universities formed a triangle of collaboration, channeling research talent into projects such as nuclear physics and codebreaking.

After the war, the federal government decided to fund basic research through universities rather than control it from the top down. This model was institutionalized with the creation of the National Science Foundation in 1950. Locked into a mutually beneficial relationship with the federal government, U.S. universities became engines of scientific discovery. Countries like the UK, Germany, and Japan adopted the U.S. model.

Academia is not a particularly sexy path. Graduate students and postdocs work for relatively low pay, faculty balance research and teaching the next generation, and universities shoulder the infrastructure.

Companies excel at commercialization, but they rarely invest in research that may only produce discoveries decades later. The mRNA technology behind overlooked work at the University of Pennsylvania; GPS, lasers, and transistors all originate from university laboratories pursuing seemingly abstract questions.

Antu—curly-haired, soft-spoken—has always loved math. Physics seemed like a fascinating application, something more “grounded in reality,” he said. After studying math and physics at Bard College in New York, he received a master’s degree in physics from the University of Waterloo in Canada. He eventually developed an interest in quantum computing—a hot, relatively new, field in physics.

The promise of quantum computers lies in two revolutionary capabilities: processing information exponentially faster than today’s computers, and simulating complex systems. They could speed up drug discovery, optimize traffic flows across cities, predict weather patterns weeks in advance, and model financial markets accurately enough to prevent crashes. The stakes have triggered an international race. But building a quantum computer is like trying to coordinate billions of moving parts. Physicists are divided on how much progress they’ve made. While some researchers trumpet recent advances, others, including Antu, believe progress has been largely incremental since a major algorithmic breakthrough in 1994. The next advance, Antu believes, would need to come on the theoretical side—something that mainly academics work on.

In the race to build a quantum computer, academic research acts as an incubator. Unlike industry, which often chases commercial returns, academia can be more “nimble,” Girvin said—able to take risks, pursue novel ideas, and pivot quickly. The broader ecosystem has a rhythm: academia develops frameworks like new error correction codes and tests them with prototypes, while quantum companies like IBM, Quantinuum, and IonQ use their more abundant resources to scale them up and build as close to a quantum computer as they can.

Yale has been at the frontier of both the promise and the uncertainty in the field of quantum computing. Girvin—a theorist—and his experimentalist colleagues pioneered advances in quantum processor design. They also founded the Yale Quantum Institute in 2015, drawing students worldwide and positioning Yale as a physics innovator alongside schools like Stanford, MIT, and Caltech.

Given this intricate web of academic research, industry applications, and national priorities—built over decades and battle-tested—the current funding cuts alarm Girvin. “In baseball terms, this is an unforced error,” he said. “We’re doing this to ourselves, and it seems extremely risky and completely unnecessary.”

* * *

Six months ago, Antu leaned toward an academic career. But after the upheaval of losing his lab placement, he’s now “50/50.”

In 2024, twelve Yale physics and applied physics PhDs entered for-profit industry positions, while two pursued academic careers, according to data from the Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. The class of 2023 shows a similar split. In the past decade, excluding a two-year period in the mid-2010s that skewed toward industry, cohorts were more evenly divided. Small sample sizes and limited data before 2015 make trend analysis difficult.

While many physics graduates enter fields like quantum computing, biotech, and data science, some pursue careers in aerospace and defense. The United States doesn’t publish a clean tally of physics PhDs hired by defense contractors, but physics backgrounds align closely with the engineering skills sought by major defense employers. Federally funded labs such as Los Alamos National Laboratory explicitly recruit physics PhDs for weapons design. The American Institute of Physics’ employer lists routinely include the likes of Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and the Department of War (formerly the Department of Defense).

Career trends for physicists have always been cyclical, Girvin said, pointing to past booms and busts in computer science and finance. “But the current challenges feel a little worse than those sort of natural cycles.”

In his May 23 executive order on federal research, President Donald Trump insisted he wants to restore “a gold standard for science.” Some scientists share his skepticism about what he calls the current system’s “reproducibility crisis”. The relentless pressure to publish—key to prominence and hireability in academia—has flooded the literature with papers of dubious value. In 2024, a landmark paper highlighted the glut of 2.82 million articles in 2022 compared to 1.92 million in 2016—far outpacing the number of practicing scientists and their available time for peer review. And artificial intelligence is further enabling “paper mills,” schemes to mass-produce articles with doctored images and faked bylines and data, Yale professor Carl Zimmer reported for The New York Times in August.

But the federal administration’s actions have disrupted ongoing projects without addressing existing problems of dubious science. In his first term, Trump signed the National Quantum Initiative Act, committing $1.2 billion in funding from 2019 to 2023 for quantum information science (the act is awaiting reauthorization in the House.) The situation shows how haphazard the cuts are, Girvin said: health sciences and diversity, equity, and inclusion-related research have been hit hardest, but other fields—including federally prioritized ones like quantum—are also getting caught in blanket cuts to universities and the NSF.

In February, University President Maurie McInnis broke her precedent of public restraint to denounce the NIH’s proposed cap on research facilities reimbursements. In a May email, she urged the Yale community to speak up against the increased endowment tax. Congress passed the legislation in July, costing Yale an estimated $280 million in the first year and likely more in the years to come.

“Universities perform fundamental research that has led to advancements that define modern life,” McInnis wrote. She warned that the endowment tax hike would be ruinous: “The U.S. will cede leadership in new technologies to other countries.”

The current moment feels reminiscent of the 2008 financial crisis, when Yale’s endowment plunged by $6 billion and its hiring froze for two years. One unsettling feature of today’s turmoil is that its impact won’t be felt immediately, researchers warned me. Restricting academic freedom and driving bright students to other countries or corporate jobs won’t necessarily hurt tomorrow’s discoveries, but may erode the foundation for breakthroughs a decade into the future.

* * *

Last year, Riya Bhargava ’26, an undergraduate student studying biomedical engineering and philosophy, sat down at a formal, intimate club group dinner with a high-profile venture capitalist. Over the meal, the venture capitalist told her it would be “stupid” to pursue a PhD.

Bhargava, a student from India, is interested in anti-aging research to help people lead longer, more dignified lives. When she was young, her grandmother fell ill. Her grandmother’s age meant doctors couldn’t administer her all the treatments they could’ve for younger patients. Bhargava wants to devote her career to changing that standard.

Bhargava had previously worked at four Yale biomedicine labs. This summer, she interned at Schrödinger, an international physics-based biotech software company. But whether she’ll pursue a PhD is still “up in the air,” she said. She prefers industry’s faster pace but worries she might need the skills and “scientific intuitions” that only years of grappling with foundational questions can provide. Even if she does choose to pursue a PhD, she anticipates working a few years first to build savings.

A desire for certainty, combined with a heavy finance and consulting recruiting presence at Yale, can push otherwise aspiring scientists to reconsider their career choices. Thirty percent of the class of 2024 landed in finance or consulting after graduating, according to Yale’s Office of Career Strategy. In a time when schools can rescind PhD offers and labs cut positions weeks before start dates, Goldman Sachs secures interns eighteen months in advance. The same reasoning and problem-solving skills that researchers hone transfer neatly to quantitative trading, Bhargava added.difference: an entry-level trading job at Jane Street pays over $300,000, while a Yale PhD stipend barely clears $50,000.

“Because of how solid your friends’ trajectories look, you almost want that certainty for yourself,” Bhargava said. For some, the move to industry wasn’t driven by certainty, but disillusionment. Pranet Sharma, a senior majoring in physics and economics, lost interest in academia after observing its bureaucracy as a research assistant. “This is not really what I want to spend the rest of my life doing,” he said.

His PIs, he saw, were always stressed about funding. A 2012 National Academies report surveyed 13,453 PIs across the nation and found that, on average, 42 percent of their faculty research time was dedicated to administrative activities. The burden is so great that some universities hire specialized grant writers. The daily grind of managing operations and seeking grants is arduous, almost akin to running a business, as Sharma and two other researchers independently described.

Perhaps most troubling is the psychological impact on the next generation of researchers. Violet Kimble, a fourth-year graduate student in neuroscience, used to be “really pro academia, really pro becoming a PI.” While PhD students usually wait until their last year to seriously deliberate their postgrad choices, she’s now meeting first-years who are already agonizing over their future. And though industry may seem more secure than academia, it doesn’t guarantee certainty. Even computer science undergraduates and economics PhDs are now struggling to find roles in the job market.

Kimble and her friends aren’t concerned about finding the ideal job because they don’t feel like they have “power in the economy” to be picky, she said. “We just want a job, full stop.”

By late August, Antu had switched to a new lab to work on computational biology. In a maze of hallways under Kline Tower, his group works among white boards scrawled with math equations and molecular diagrams.

After his PI dropped him, Antu couldn’t find another lab in the applied physics department. Computational biology seemed more stable: it was an area he found better funded at Yale, though very different from his quantum background.

He said he’s grown more practical as he matures, whether that means switching to a new field or being open to an industry role in the future. And given the current funding challenges, he doesn’t consider taking an industry job a concession, but rather “going with the flow.” He even told his girlfriend that they can’t get married until he graduates from his PhD program in 2029, because an annual stipend of barely $50,000 cannot support a family.

Before his PhD, he hadn’t considered the constraints of academia—it had seemed like a world driven by pure curiosity, free of financial pressures. Now, with PIs unable to take him on without grant money, he’s confronting the reality of scarce funding. He’s even considered a career in finance or consulting.

Despite everything, Antu still feels pulled to academia. “You can pursue any question,” he said. “It’s a simple life.”

But he’s still mentally recovering from the shock of losing his job and having to prove his mettle in his new field. The past few months have forced him to rethink his limits in this balancing act of independence and stability.

He pursued academia for the opportunity to choose what problems are worth exploring. The question is how funding cuts might continue to hinder that freedom.

As he tried to articulate his mental state, his voice, soft as ever, hesitated. “How much does one want to give up on the pay to satiate their curiosity?” ∎

Tina Li is a junior in Pierson College and managing editor of The New Journal.

Photos by Colin Kim.