With an eye toward responding to the national teacher shortage, the University of St. Thomas School of Education was awarded a $6.8 million federal grant in 2023 to recruit and train more than 300 special education and elementary teachers in Minnesota. Part of the funds would help students at the university’s two-year Dougherty Family College — which enrolls undergraduates not yet ready for a four-year program — complete unpaid internships in schools.

That funding is now gone, leaving dozens of students wondering if they’ll be able to complete their classes this semester, as well as internships this summer.Shortly after President Donald Trump took office in January, the U.S. Department of Education informed St. Thomas that the federal SEED grant had been terminated mid-stream. A second federal grant, already well underway for 20 graduate students at St. Thomas, was yanked soon after.

“The university is in the process of notifying all impacted students and plans to appeal this decision,” reads a recent statement from the school. “St. Thomas is committed to ensuring that students who have already been awarded scholarships for the spring can maintain funding through the end of the semester and continue their teacher preparation studies.”

While the White House has made no secret of its efforts to dismantle “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” outreach programs at campuses nationwide, the prospect of including teacher training, lab research and other fields of study has taken even some conservative onlookers off guard. About 60% of the impacted St. Thomas students are Caucasian, and the growing demand for qualified teachers across the country has been well documented.

The Trump administration’s funding cuts to higher education show signs of intensifying.

Graduate students on the social media site Blue Sky have been tracking about 40 universities that are believed to have paused or significantly reduced new admissions to their doctoral science programs in light of funding uncertainties. With much in flux as a result of litigation brought by universities and state attorneys general across the country, officials nationally have been reluctant to confirm specifics, according to the scientific journal Nature, which reached out to 30 schools on the list.

Some schools have taken back offer letters or stopped admissions, only to restart them. Admissions to PhD science programs at the University of Pittsburgh stopped entirely in mid-February, but later resumed.

NIH indirect cost funding capped at 15%

In addition to awarding universities funding for lab research, the National Institutes of Health issue matching funds for overhead, or indirect costs such as lab administration, building maintenance, data storage and the disposal of biohazards. Those funds flow to a university’s general fund before they’re disbursed to lab uses, leading critics to label them a slush fund for higher education, even as scientists and other lab administrators call them essential toward discovering the cure for cancer or battling avian flu.

In early February, the NIH’s indirect cost ratio, which can equal up to 60% or more of research costs, was capped by the Trump administration at 15%.

“Our current rate is 54%, and our rate is competitive among our peers,” said Jake Ricker, a spokesperson for the University of Minnesota. For the U of M alone, “we’ve estimated that the loss would be $100 million to $130 million, and it would be an annual gap that would be reoccurring.”

The NIH cap has been put on hold for now as a result of legal action filed by a coalition of universities and state attorney generals, but NIH grants — which are fairly continuous at the U of M — already show signs of slowing, said Dr. Peter Crawford, vice dean for research at the medical school.

“That pipeline has been — I won’t say turned off — but the rate of flow has been markedly diminished,” said Crawford, the deputy director of the university’s Clinical and Translational Science Institute, an NIH-backed hub for the university and its partners throughout the state, including the Hennepin County Medical Center and the Veterans Affairs medical system.

In 2024, the U of M received $628 million in federally-sponsored research awards, or nearly 60% of the $1 billion awarded for research. Much of that research supports practical applications through the private sector in terms of new drugs, therapies and lab products, meaning a slowdown in research is a slowdown in cures.

“We obviously have a very diversified portfolio, but a substantial percentage at the University of Minnesota is relying on federal funding,” Crawford said.

GOP Senate targets 3,400 federal grants

Universities are bracing for similar cuts to the National Endowment for the Arts and other areas of study.

Meanwhile, it’s unclear whether Congress will make up a projected $2.7 billion budget shortfall this year for the Pell Grant, the federal government’s largest undergraduate program to help students pay for college.

On Feb. 11, U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, released a database identifying more than 3,400 federal grants — totaling more than $2 billion in federal funding — awarded by the National Science Foundation during the Biden-Harris administration. Cruz, in a written announcement, said the funding had been “diverted toward questionable projects” that promoted diversity, equity and inclusion “or advanced neo-Marxist class warfare propaganda” and “push a far-left ideology.”

Cruz said he had requested “significant scrutiny” of each of the grant awards. At least 40 of the grants were awarded in Minnesota, with recipients including Augsburg College, Gustavus Adolphus College, Carleton College, the College of St. Benedict, Macalester College, the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities system and the University of Minnesota.

Other impacts

At Carleton College, one of the federal science grants listed in the database funds “CLASP,” a Carleton-led effort to link 330 predominantly undergraduate liberal arts institutions through in-person conferences and virtual brainstorming sessions. The ultimate goal is to connect them to funding to sponsor more research professionals at colleges that have few academic researchers, including colleges that serve a high percentage of racial minorities.

At the College of St. Benedict and St. John’s University, a federal grant listed in the database supports the acquisition of a circular dichroism spectrometer — a specialized tool that studies how molecules absorb polarized light, which is used in biochemical and biophysical research. The grant description notes that the schools host a U.S. Army Educational Outreach Program that matches high school students from “backgrounds historically underserved and underrepresented” in the sciences to research mentors.

Across the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities system, all federal grants currently amount to about $70 million, or an average of 3% of the system’s overall $2.3 billion total operating budget, but the number varies by institution. At Metropolitan State University, which maintains a central campus in St. Paul and smaller locations throughout the metro, student federal loans and grants make up an estimated 83% of the university’s financial aid expenditures. Last year, approximately 49% of students at Metro State received some sort of federal grant funding or work study, such as Pell grants, federal loans and federal work study.

In addition, Metro State University in St. Paul has 10 active federal grants for programming and special initiatives totaling approximately $13.6 million, according to a spokesperson there, who said she was unaware of any funding cuts or freezes at this time.

The University of St. Thomas was recently notified that, in addition to cuts to the SEED grant, a Teacher Quality Partnership grant was terminated by the federal Department of Education. The partnership grant was designed to remove financial barriers for aspiring teachers by providing living wage stipends to approximately 20 graduate students per year as they complete internships required for licensure.

The original funding for the five-year grant was announced at $2.8 million, and St. Thomas was in the second semester of the grant’s final year, according to a university spokesman.