A PhD Built for the Real World

In late July, the White House and National Science Foundation announced in the right-leaning tech publication, Pirate Wires, that, beginning this fall, they would be establishing a $47 million program to fund around 250 four-year Industry-Integrated PhD (I-PhD) Scholars in technical fields. The NSF will be funding three of those four years, and 31 universities and 20 companies will be funding the rest—those who have submitted letters of interest include companies like Dow Chemical Company and Lockheed Martin, as well as colleges like Columbia University, North Carolina State University, and the Ohio State University. Students in the pilot program will have a year-long industry placement involving “practical research” that can count towards their dissertation.

“About the same amount of basic research is done today in academia as in the private sector,” Michael Kratsios, the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, told Pirate Wires. He noted, additionally, that “the institutions which train our next generation of scientists have not really been updated” despite the way scientific research is conducted having changed dramatically.

In other words, this new program will be catching universities and PhD students up to speed, so that their training is actually relevant to their individual careers as well as the broader public interest.

PhD programs around the country are, with a few exceptions like RAND’s, designed to prepare graduate students primarily for academic employment—and yet, increasingly, few opportunities for academic employment exist. About 56% of all new PhDs in 2004 entered academia; in 2024, that number had fallen to just 40%. And much of that 40% is employed rather precariously, with over half of all faculty holding contingent positions, as opposed to more stable tenured or tenure-track employment.

Part of these trends in science and technology, as in the humanities and social sciences, are indubitably due to the decline in academic jobs. But what the White House and NSF recognize—unlike universities—is that it’s also due to the fact that much of the most interesting, cutting-edge research, and broader technological innovation in the sciences is no longer carried out in the academy.

Much of the most interesting, cutting-edge research, and broader technological innovation in the sciences is no longer carried out in the academy.

Just look at the 2024 Nobel Prize in chemistry, half of which was won by two PhD-holding researchers at Google’s DeepMind AI research lab. Or consider a recent study from the Centre for Economic Policy Research, which finds that between 2001 and 2019—well before artificial intelligence (AI) had become a kitchen-table topic—the percentage of AI researchers who were working in industry rose from 48% to 68%.

When these researchers moved to industry, they published 65% fewer papers than their academic counterparts, and yet they produced 530% more patents. Even in 2019, private pharmaceutical R&D spending was about $83 billion, around double NIH’s full budget even at its COVID-era peak of $41 billion in 2020, while also having grown much faster than the federal government’s investment in pharmaceutical R&D.

This also, naturally, shows up in terms of what PhD program graduates are actually doing in their careers. In 2004, it was only physical sciences and engineering PhD programs that sent more than half their graduates to industry or business positions outside of academia. As of 2024, several other technical fields have joined them: computer and information sciences, biological and biomedical sciences, and mathematics and statistics.

But, some might ask, why should the government be funding such a program in the first place? After all, industry has plenty of money as is. Carolyn Bertozzi, a Nobel-winning chemistry professor at Stanford University, wrote in a post on Bluesky, “We already do this, and companies who want them are happy to pay for Ph.D. student interns,” adding that “precious and limited NSF funds” should not be going toward what industry is willing to fund.

There are a few issues, however, with this logic.

First, the fact that industry is willing to fund one year of the PhD can save the federal government—aka the taxpayer—millions of dollars, seeing that the federal government funds more than half of all academic research and development. While this program is currently on a relatively small scale, the amount saved could have an even bigger effect if and when it expands.

Second, just because the de facto industry-academia pipeline has not been formalized does not mean it shouldn’t be, especially if the PhD is to remain a relevant degree that delivers value to the degree holder and the taxpayer alike. Most attempts at PhD reform have been surface-level. The Council of Graduate Schools, for example, ran a seven-year PhD Completion Project funded by the Ford Foundation and Pfizer Inc aimed entirely at increasing graduation rates.

The NIH’s Obama-era Broadening Experiences in Scientific Training (BEST) Program was closer to something resembling real reform, but was entirely focused on getting PhD students in the biomedical sciences to prepare for the non-academic paths that they would likely face, and was mostly centered around professional development rather than promoting innovative research itself. The I-PhD program is different in that it is nothing short of a reimagining of what graduate education looks like from start to finish.

Indeed, most proposed reforms to graduate education have been Band-Aid solutions at best designed to try and mitigate the bad academic job market for current graduate students.

Indeed, most proposed reforms to graduate education have been Band-Aid solutions at best designed to try and mitigate the bad academic job market for current graduate students. While well-intentioned, that has meant that these reforms are essentially faddish—for instance, a lot of them have gotten graduate students to study something for which “all the fields are hiring right now,” like DEI-colored research in 2020, only for the graduate students to graduate into a job market (and political climate) five years later that has largely passed DEI by and is looking for completely new things. 

And of course, the cost of all of this has been passed onto taxpayers, who fund the NSF in the first place, as well as the graduates of the program, who find themselves out of a job at the end of it all. By having corporations and universities put their money where their mouth is, and aligning funding with the needs of cutting-edge, private-sector research, the I-PhD mostly circumvents the problem of fad chasing in academia and adequately prepares students for the skills they will actually need—ensuring in the process that taxpayer money is spent more efficiently.

Third, and perhaps most importantly: it is obviously true that science and technology are large drivers of economic growth, and are often lucrative industries as far as the private sector is concerned, but they are also fields that define national interest and even national security. Possessing the most up-to-date tech and biotech protects us from threats like cyber warfare, biological warfare, and excessive medical dependency on foreign countries, especially China, to research and provide our pharmaceuticals. Explicit public-private partnerships can help accomplish this goal—for instance, with NASA’s Commercial Orbital Transportation Services program, which fueled (no pun intended) the success of Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

Seeing how much money the federal government has funneled into universities over the past several decades, there’s also the basic fact that the federal government has a stake in having functional PhD programs. And seeing how incompetent universities have largely been at being anything resembling normal—instead leaving PhD students ill-prepared for the market and focused on research questions that are not necessarily relevant to what they’ll actually be working on—the federal government’s intervention into reimagining the PhD is more than warranted.

What higher education desperately needs—and what the White House and NSF are currently providing—is a healthy dose of competition, and namely a competing model for education and research that actually meets modern demands and serves the needs both of students and of the taxpayers funding academic research. The I-PhD injects just that competition, and if the pilot is successful, it has the potential to completely reimagine doctoral education and deliver real scientific excellence for a country that has historically relied on the public and private sector funding science in tandem with each other.

Neeraja Deshpande is a policy analyst at Independent Women (independentwomen.com) and a senior contributor to IWFeatures (iwfeatures.com).