Several outlets have run articles with the unexpected good news that the National Science Foundation is giving out more GRFP awards than ever, after a deep reduction in 2025.
Hooray!
But those awards, and I have written about several times before, are highly concentrated in a small number of institutions.
MIT, with about 4.5 thousand undergrads gets 88 awards, versus the entire University of Texas system of about 200K undergrads getting ~63 awards.
Harvard University, with about ~7k undergrads, gets 51 awards, versus the entire University of California system of about ~200K undergrads getting ~300 awards.
Again, the NSF does not disclose a lot of data about who applied to the awards, so it could be that Texas students aren’t submitting proposals at the same rate. But I recently ran across an analysis of who gets fellowships in by Dominque Baker, which points out that in the awards examined there, they cluster in people working at universities deemed “prestigious.” She wrote:
Longstanding methods of (fellowship) selection… tend to coincidentally find talent in the same places, year after year.
I suspect but can’t prove this describes the GRFP process. Oh, look, it’s just coincidence that a small number of east coast universities suck up most of the awards. Every. Year.
External links
NSF awards record number of coveted PhD fellowships in surprise move
NSF names record number of graduate fellows, rebounding from 2025 dip
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