NSF Seeks Model for Graduate Fellowships Co-funded by Government and Industry

The National Science Foundation is funding the design of a new graduate fellowship program that would be co-funded with industry partners. The project is getting underway amid concerns over the agency’s existing graduate fellowship program, which greatly reduced the number of awards this year and has not yet issued a solicitation for next year.

The NSF grant to the University-Industry Demonstration Partnership (UIDP) funds a series of town halls throughout September to discuss the challenges of developing a doctoral model funded jointly by a government agency and an industry partner. A workshop at the NSF headquarters on Sept. 29 and 30 aims to finalize the pilot program design and identify five or six company-university pairs to test it out.

NSF approved the grant roughly a month after the agency’s governing board introduced an initiative seeking partners to contribute funding for this year’s Graduate Research Fellowship Program. NSF selected 1,000 fellows in April, roughly half the usual number. Meanwhile, the number of “honorable mentions” reached a new high of around 3,000.

The agency awarded 500 more fellowships in June to “honorable mention” students, overwhelmingly to students in computer science, physical sciences, and engineering. This year’s solicitation stated that NSF would support up to 2,300 new fellowships “pending availability of funds.”

Tony Boccanfuso, president and CEO of UIDP, said the initiative to develop public-private fellowships is not aimed at “cannibalizing other efforts,” nor is it a response to the NSB initiative seeking private funding for GRFP. UIDP submitted its project proposal to NSF over a year ago, well before this year’s “dramatic changes” to GRFP, Boccanfuso said.

“What we’re talking about is not a one-time stopgap,” Boccanfuso said. “What we’re really trying to focus on with this initiative is creating a market-oriented approach that can withstand things like changes to the federal funding streams,” he added.

September’s virtual town halls will cover topics such as the student research life cycle, intellectual property issues, employment status of fellows, and program structure.

Though NSF is funding UIDP’s work, the agency has not committed to running such a doctorate program itself, Boccanfuso said. The initial plan will be tailored to partnerships between the federal government and industry, but a successful model could be expanded to state governments, philanthropic organizations, or local nonprofits, he added.

Concern for next year’s Graduate Research Fellowship Program

An NSF spokesperson said GRFP will continue this year and that the solicitation is currently in development. They did not comment on whether the fellowship model that emerges from the UIDP workshop might replace GRFP.

Most years, the solicitation goes out in July, allowing applicants 90 days to submit before the deadline in mid-October, former GRFP program directors Susan Brennan and Gisèle Muller-Parker said. They added that NSF may push back the application deadline to November or December, but that doing so would make it hard for the agency to finalize its decisions by its usual April deadline.

The delay may be a result of current federal funding proposals for NSF. The president’s budget request proposes a 55% cut to GRFP for fiscal year 2026, while the Senate Appropriations Committee’s bill proposes flat funding, which would support 2,000 new fellowships, according to the bill report. The Senate and House are scheduled to return from their August recess next week and have until Sept. 30 to pass their funding bills.

Brennan and Muller-Parker have criticized the National Science Board’s initiative to find funding partners for GRFP, emphasizing the importance of maintaining independence for GRFP awardees. “GRFP funds the person, not the project,” Brennan and Muller-Parker said, which allows awardees to change their research focus or institution if needed. “With no guardrails, standards, or policies across public-private funders, applicants could be exploited, and their independence compromised,” they wrote in a May letter to NSB members.

However, Brennan and Muller-Parker said they support the idea of a new program in addition to GRFP to further support deserving students, as long as applicants opt in to having their information shared with outside partners.

Brennan said providing funding for students who receive honorable mentions in the GRFP selection process is a “wonderful idea.” “Honorable mentions are in the top pool, and NSF’s word on this is that they deserve funding, were funding available,” Brennan said.

Muller-Parker said GRFP has several important strengths compared to other fellowship and grant programs, including its lack of a service requirement, which she said allows awardees to focus on their degree. “If they develop a fellowship program with a different model, I would just want to know that GRFP is still there, because it’s a successful model,” she added.

Boccanfuso said UIDP’s pilot design will explore requiring students to perform a significant amount of their research “embedded within a company” to increase the company’s return on investment.

Brennan noted that an additional graduate fellowship program could enable GRFP to support a wider variety of research by relieving some of the pressure to concentrate awards on a relatively narrow set of agency “priority areas,” such as AI and quantum information science.

“If you have hot research areas that can be supported by Intel or OpenAI or whoever is willing to fund these partnered fellowships, then there’s less pressure on the rest of the program, which really is focused on basic research,” Brennan said. “You don’t want to cut out all the talented people in geosciences and life sciences and psychology and sociology in favor of giving everyone who’s doing AI a fellowship.”