The Trump administration is pairing top universities with corporate giants in an effort to steer traditional PhD programs toward national scientific priorities.

Today, the White House and National Science Foundation are announcing a $47 million pilot program to fund around 250 four-year doctorates in technical fields, starting this fall. Students in the pilot will be placed at an industry partner, where they will spend at least one year doing “practical research” that can go towards their dissertation. NSF’s investment will fund three years of these PhDs, with 31 universities and 20-plus companies funding the rest.

“About the same amount of basic research is done today in academia as in the private sector,” Michael Kratsios, the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, told Pirate Wires. “Over time, while the ecosystem has changed and different players have emerged where important scientific work is being done, the institutions which train our next generation of scientists have not really been updated.”

Essentially, the administration says they want to correct the mismatch between PhD programs’ academia-focused pedagogy and the large proportion of graduates who take industry jobs.

The administration’s move is a signal that despite its general scrutiny toward legacy institutions of higher education, it is still open to collaborating with them — including with elite schools that have borne the brunt of research funding cuts and civil rights investigations. The pilot spans a wide range of public and private universities across the country, from state schools like the University of Texas at Austin to the Ivy League, including Columbia, Dartmouth, and the University of Pennsylvania, according to an initial list.

“We want to support merit,” Kratsios said. “We want our interactions with academia to reflect the realities of the scientific ecosystem today.”

The pilot represents a small fraction of the more than 45,000 science and engineering doctorates awarded annually — but the administration says it’s a “scalable model” that can expand to more universities and companies.

Also notable are the types of companies involved in the pilot. In addition to tech mainstays like HP, biotech firms like Thermo Fisher, and energy giants like BP, defense contractors such as Honeywell Aerospace, Lockheed Martin, Rolls-Royce, and John Deere are well represented.

Judging by the companies participating, it seems likely that America’s push for reindustrialization will increasingly involve our universities. For the defense industry, specifically, the admin’s move harkens back to an era where collaboration between universities, the military, and its contractors was much more common and less controversial.

During the Vietnam War era, campus revolts over weapons-related research led to the dismantling of much of the defense-academia infrastructure. MIT spun off its Instrumentation Lab (now Draper), as did Stanford with its Stanford Research Institute. Then, post-Cold War, federal R&D spending decreased, leading to growth in private research funding.

Now, the administration wants to tighten relations between universities and the U.S. government once again. It’s especially noteworthy that Columbia — the site of widespread protests in 1968 that supercharged the anti-war movement, and the 2024 anti-Israel encampments that led to the White House’s crackdown on elite universities — has signed on, although its industry partners are still being finalized.

“A lot of these PhD students may be working on projects that touch the national security interest,” Kratsios said. “We should return to a time when we have large, bold national scientific goals that we’re trying to achieve as a country.”

—Jonas Du