I’ve spent my entire career training students in STEM, and sending them off to graduate and professional schools to become scientists and doctors and dentists and veterinarians and nurses and research technicians. That may be ending sooner than I expected. Entire fields are drying up right now.

Admissions in some graduate programs have have been cut in half or paused altogether, said Emilya Ventriglia, president of UAW 2750, the union representing around 5,000 early career researchers at NIH facilities in Bethesda, Maryland, and elsewhere.

“At this rate, with the hiring freeze, there may be no Ph.D. students next year if it’s not lifted soon, because usually people make their decisions by April,” Ventriglia said.

Spring is when we’re accustomed to hearing joyful news from our students who have applied to and gotten in to the programs they wanted. It’s kind of quiet around the campus this year. A lot of students who have been working hard for four years are being told that their progression is over, and are having to rethink their life suddenly.

I’m worried, too. Universities around the country have suffered declining enrollments, and it’s going to make it worse if the perception spreads that universities are a dead end. Government policy is about to kill science and engineering in this country. It’s also a bit ironic that these people who have been railing about DEI and liberal arts and majors that don’t have concrete utility are now using that angle to destroy STEM education.

We might wonder who is going to benefit from this intellectual suicide.

At the University of Nebraska, an institute that works to improve water management for agriculture offered to host a doctoral candidate in hydrology from Ghana and was talking to three other international students. But it had to rescind the offer after it lost USAID funding, said Nicole Lefore, associate director of the school’s Daugherty Water for Food Global Institute.

She now worries about the diplomatic fallout, noting she has met with agriculture ministers in other countries who were educated at land grant universities in the U.S. through USAID programs.

“The university you go to, people have a loyalty to it. And so bringing in generations of students for education and agriculture in the U.S. helped to create those personal connections and then later scientific and diplomatic connections. That’s really important to the soft diplomacy side of what the innovation labs were doing.”

She said she is barraged with emails asking what this will mean.

“The only winner out of this is China, she said. ”Because the countries that are being cut off there, I think they will turn to someone.”

I thought MAGA hated China, but here they go helping that country, and the EU. I’ve got one bright student who is thinking about applying to a university in Mexico. Everyone benefits except the US.