A third of young U.S. scientists reconsidered academic careers in early 2025

A team of researchers studying how biomedical labs are managed happened to be interviewing senior postdocs across the country in early 2025, just as the Trump administration began cutting government-funded science and tightening rules on international students. The interviews, part of a larger study led by Raffaella Sadun of Harvard Business School with colleagues from MIT and Monash University, kept drifting toward anxiety about funding and policy changes rather than lab management. Sensing they were positioned to measure a disruption as it happened, the team sent a short six-question survey to more than 13,000 doctoral students and postdoctoral fellows who had already taken part in the larger study.

The survey asked three questions twice: once for how respondents felt in March 2025, and once asking them to recall how they had felt six months earlier. The questions covered how likely they were to stay in academia, how likely they were to stay in the United States, and how satisfied they were with having pursued a PhD in science. Responses came from 916 scientists across 770 labs at 134 institutions. The researchers acknowledged a risk that people misremember the past more favorably than they experienced it at the time, but a check against earlier survey answers collected before the change in administration showed no sign of that bias.

The shift in stated intentions was large. Sixty-six percent of respondents said that six months earlier they had been likely to stay in academia; by March 2025 that figure had fallen to 44 percent, a drop of 22 percentage points. Ninety-three percent said they had earlier expected to remain in the United States to work; that fell to 72 percent. And the share who were satisfied or neutral about their decision to pursue a PhD fell from 92 percent to 76 percent over the same recalled period.

Sadun, who led the analysis, said the implications extend beyond individual careers. "This is not great for research and it's problematic from the perspective that R&D activities that are conducted in universities are an engine of growth," she said, adding that the population of scientists the country trained is now telling researchers "I want out." She also cautioned that stated intentions do not always translate into actions, though she said she personally knows several scientists who have already relocated.

A separate pilot study, conducted by the Stem Advocacy Institute's Biomedical Workforce & Policy Research Group, surveyed early career researchers online between May 23 and June 6, 2025, using two rounds of questions distributed through academic listservs and social media. Respondents were mostly PhD students and early career researchers, with the largest share from the life sciences. Many described threats to the continuity of their research from cuts at the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation, and many said the disruptions led them to consider leaving research altogether or pursuing careers outside the United States.

This survey's authors documented specific agency actions behind the anxiety. In April 2025, the NSF's Graduate Research Fellowship Program was cut roughly in half, from about 2,000 awards to 1,000, and eligibility for second-year PhD students to apply was removed; the award total was later partially restored, with 2,500 fellowships funded for the 2026–2027 academic year. In May 2025 the administration's FY 2026 budget proposal called for a 40 percent cut to the NIH and a 55 percent cut to the NSF, and several universities, including the University of Pennsylvania, the University of California system, and Northwestern, announced hiring freezes or spending cuts in the same period. The authors describe their findings as a pilot study providing "early evidence" that funding reductions may disrupt training pathways and erode confidence in research careers, a hedge that reflects the survey's small, self-selected sample recruited by convenience rather than random sampling.

Concerns about the pipeline of early career scientists predate the 2025 funding disruptions. A national survey of physician-scientists, who combine clinical medicine with laboratory research, found that nearly half of respondents, 49 percent, had considered leaving academic medicine within the next two years, even though 65 percent still expressed a high likelihood of remaining in the field over five years. The most common reasons for considering departure were burnout or unhappiness and stress, each cited by 35 percent of respondents, followed by funding challenges at 30 percent. That survey, distributed to department chairs at 110 institutions and completed by 230 respondents, also found that only 43 percent of participants had received funding or career development awards during their junior faculty years.

Earlier research on undergraduates offers a contrasting picture from before these disruptions: a study of the Survey of Undergraduate Research Experiences found that more than 87 percent of student respondents began or continued to plan for further education in science after a research experience, with students who discontinued those plans showing clearly diminished reported gains from the program. Taken together, the sources describe a pipeline into science research that was already showing signs of leakiness at the physician-scientist and junior faculty stages, onto which the 2025 funding and policy disruptions have been layered.

Both of the 2025 surveys carry explicit limitations. The NBER-linked survey drew from a sample built for a different study of biomedical lab management, and its authors note that stated intentions do not always predict actual behavior. The Stem Advocacy Institute survey used convenience sampling with no control for demographic representation and did not calculate a response rate, and its authors describe it as a pilot study offering "early evidence" rather than definitive findings. Neither survey can say how many of the scientists who reconsidered their career plans will actually leave academia, leave the United States, or abandon research, a question Sadun says will require future research to answer.