Prospective UW-Madison grad students lose funding offers amid federal cuts

Prospective graduate students accepted to the University of Wisconsin-Madison have been receiving emails changing the terms of their offers amid uncertainty over federal funding for higher education.

One student told WPR she was thrilled to be accepted to a Madison genetics program in January, only to have the offer revised on March 3. 

“I was so excited, because it was my top school,” said the prospective student, who asked to remain anonymous. “So excited that I accepted the offer almost immediately, maybe a week after it was sent. And then I immediately looked for an apartment and signed a lease.”

But, weeks later, she received an email from the UW-Madison program explaining that her acceptance was no longer guaranteed. It said she would have to compete with other accepted applicants for a limited number of spots in labs that still had funding to support graduate students. 

“Incoming students will need to identify faculty willing to sponsor their admission,” the email read. 

“If you don’t find someone, that’s it,” the prospective student said. 

What followed has been nerve-racking, she added.

“I already had everything planned out, and then suddenly it just disappeared in front of my eyes,” she said. “You’re competing with everybody again, and it’s like interview round two, but on steroids.”

Students enrolled in science Ph.D. programs are typically paid and have their tuition covered. But with uncertainties around federal funding, driven by the Trump administration delaying grant review meetings and calling for sweeping cuts to university research dollars, faculty scientists said they now have limited funds to offer students.

“Without these monies coming in from federal sources, there’s no money to pay for tuition and stipends to these graduate students,” said UW-Madison biochemist Aaron Hoskins, who is involved in graduate admissions for four of the university’s many programs. “Therefore you have to admit, or agree to support, a significantly lower number of students.”

His programs had to significantly alter their admissions this year, he said. 

“Without being absolutely certain that you’re going to have this money coming in in the future, you can’t make a multi-year commitment to a student to train them,” Hoskins said. 

Some programs are reducing incoming class sizes, sometimes by over half, he said. Others are using a “direct admit” approach, where a lab essentially sponsors a graduate student’s acceptance. And some programs are changing the funding they can offer accepted students. 

“In some cases, this means not being able to offer research assistantships, which are used to pay for graduate student tuition and stipend to students,” Hoskins said. 

“This would then give a very large financial burden onto students who would come here for graduate school that they would not have experienced in the past,” he added. 

Over 5,500 graduate students, including 72 percent of Ph.D. students, are supported by graduate assistantships, according to a statement from UW-Madison. 

“A reduction in federal research funding would limit resources for these graduate assistantships, thereby restricting graduate programs’ ability to make support commitments for new students,” the university stated.

Across the nation, other colleges have gone a step further, rescinding graduate acceptance offers.

That does not appear to be happening in Wisconsin.

Marquette University Graduate School told WPR they had “not rescinded any admission offers due to the current federal funding uncertainty.”

A university spokesperson at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee said they are watching the federal funding situation but have not taken action. “We continue to monitor what is happening at the federal level. UWM has not made any decisions regarding graduate admissions.”

“At UW-Madison, deans of each school and college are making decisions about the number of new graduate students their programs will be able to support when admitted,” UW-Madison said in a statement. “The university remains committed to current graduate students’ success and maintaining a balance between supporting those who are already enrolled and offering funding to new admits.”

While the offers he’s seen at UW-Madison aren’t being rescinded, the impact could be similar, Hoskins said. 

Revised offers that no longer guarantee prospective students paid tuition and a stipend will leave them with a tough choice, he said 

“Almost all the students who are in that boat are going to end up going to graduate school somewhere else,” Hoskins said. 

As a result of admitting a smaller number of graduate students, there could be fewer teaching assistants to support undergraduate students, he said. And ultimately, he said, scientific progress — from cancer to farming research — at the university could be stalled. 

“UW-Madison, its greatest resource and its greatest scientific power are their graduate students, ” Hoskins added. 

He said the best case scenario is paused grant meetings and approvals move forward once a new National Institutes of Health, or NIH, director is confirmed.

In the meantime, Hoskins said young people are the most impacted by these tough decisions.

“They’ve been in tears, like literal tears,” he said of undergraduate students who are applying to graduate school this year. 

Yunju Ha is a senior undergraduate student at UW-Madison, majoring in statistics and computer science. She was hoping to apply her statistics training to Alzheimer’s disease research in graduate school. But despite being what her advisor describes as a “top tier student,” she was rejected from or hasn’t heard back from the Ph.D. programs she applied to this cycle. 

“I felt very overwhelmed, depressed,” Ha said. 

On top of that, her backup plan of doing a post-baccalaureate program at the NIH was paused, she said. 

But leaning on current graduate students and professors really helped. 

“Because of that, I shifted my perspective,” Ha said. “There was nothing wrong with me as a candidate, circumstances were just really bad.”

Now, she plans to apply for full-time work in research, before applying to graduate school in the future. 

“This experience will make me more resilient and probably a better candidate, and a better version of myself when I apply again, hopefully,” Ha said. 

The prospective genetics student said she applied to graduate school in the hope of ultimately helping the planet through microorganism research. Even with her revised offer, she’s still hoping to land a spot in a UW-Madison lab that will essentially sponsor her admission. 

“I’m glad that I still get the opportunity to try and make this work, because I was really looking forward to going to UW,” she said. 

She even sympathizes with program leaders, and said she knows they’re under pressure from federal funding delays and cuts. 

“Everything that’s happening is the opposite of what a scientist normally does. We’re very methodical,” she said. “We’re currently being asked to think on our feet.”