Science magazine reports a new skew in the awarding of the National Science Foundation’s Graduate Research Fellowship Program (NSF GRFP) awards.
No awards in life sciences. Zip. Zero. Zilch.
I used to joke that there was no Nobel prize for biology. Now it seems there’s no GRFPs, either. The awards are heavily skewed toward computer science, particularly artificial intelligence.
And let’s not forget that the number of awards was cut in half.
I strongly suspected that the awards were probably heavily skewed to fancy, well funded research universities and showed little love to the larger public university systems, which has been going on for as long as I know. But I had to poke the wound and look at the award data. Currently easy to download into an Excel file.
I posted a super quick check on the numbers in a Bluesky thread.
Harvard University, with about 25,000 students total (many who would not be eligible) gets 25 GRFP awards.
Meanwhile, the entire University of Texas system, with about 250,000 students total (again, many not eligible) gets 30.
Embattled Columbia University, about 33,000 students total, gets 29 GRFP awards.
Arizona State University, with over 183,000 students total, gets 8 GRFP awards.
MIT, which is tiny, gets 82 GRFP awards. They always get a lot of awards, but the number of awards per student has jumped. Back in 2022, MIT had 83 awards, but keep in mind that because the number of awards were halved this year, the 82 award count this year is proportionately much heftier than the 83 awards in 2022.
The University of California system, which is gigantic, gets about 147 GRFP awards. (I say “about” because I just searched the Excel spreadsheet for “University of California,” and I know some universities in that system don’t follow that naming convention.)
Yes, I could try to figure out student enrolment numbers better so they might more accurately reflect the population of students eligible for GRFP awards, but there is no way that the overall trend would budge.
I do not believe talent to so concentrated in such a small number of institutions. It’s a Matthew effect.
A recent article by Craig McClain is also worth pointing out here. McClain points out that the current academic training system makes it extraordinarily difficult to be a career scientist unless you have money to burn. The way they NSF GRFP program runs contributes to this problem.
References
McClain CR. 2025. Too poor to science: How wealth determines who succeeds in STEM. PLoS Biology 23(6): e3003243. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3003243
Related posts
The NSF GRFP problem, 2022 edition (Links to my older rants – er, posts – about this award contained within)
External links
Prestigious NSF graduate fellowship tilts toward AI and quantum
No comments:
Post a Comment