Graduate Student Fellowships and Grants: Update

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The past year has been a time of great uncertainty in federal funding for scientific research. The Graduate School has been following the news and provides you with this overview of how the landscape of external funding for graduate students is changing as we look towards the spring and beyond.

We see three trends in external funding for graduate students. First, several programs have been cancelled – sometimes without prior notice-- or “archived” (suspended but not necessarily permanently terminated). The 2026 cycle of the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad program was abruptly cancelled after students had already submitted applications. Another important source of external support for dissertation research – NSF Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grants (DDRIG)— was quietly archived in late November 2025, with no explanation. To give a sense of the impact, we note that since 2015, 29 UMass graduate students in the social sciences or humanities were awarded DDRIGs to support their dissertation research. These recent cancellations are just the latest in a steady decrease in external grants and fellowships to support graduate research. In the last five years, the Social Science Research Council, Ford Foundation, American Council of Learned Societies, and the Institute for Citizens and Scholars have all ended graduate student funding programs.  

Second, federal agencies are providing less support for certain STEM fields. As noted in a recent New York Times article, in the 2025 award cycle for the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) awards made in life sciences were down 59%, while social science awards were down 50%. These fields are typically big award-winners for UMass Amherst graduate students. Since 2015, 70 graduate students at UMass have held the GRFP; 24% of these fellows were in life sciences and 20% in social sciences. In the 2025 cycle, four UMass graduate students were awarded the GRFP, but none in social sciences or life sciences.  

Finally, federal agencies have made changes to eligibility or review criteria, in some cases with significant impacts for our graduate students. The most well-known example is the change in the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship eligibility that cut out second-year graduate students, leaving dozens of UMass graduate students who had planned to apply in fall 2025 ineligible.  

These are just the changes in grant and fellowship programs specifically for graduate students. Graduate student assistantships have also been impacted by cancelled faculty grants. To date, the University’s ResCoE fund has been able to provide replacement funding for 48 graduate students along with 5 postdocs and many staff impacted by cancelled grants.    

What does all this mean for UMass graduate students? While the external funding landscape is certainly challenging right now, there are still opportunities to which students can and should apply. The Graduate School continues to offer robust support to our students pursuing external research funding, including info sessions on seeking grants and fellowship, writing groups, Canvas-based training courses, and one-on-one review of application drafts.  

Thanks to a generous gift from John and Elizabeth Armstrong, we are very pleased this year to be able to offer the new Armstrong Graduate Students Research Grant open to UMass graduate students pursuing research in all fields. With this timely gift, it is our hope that graduate students will be able to keep the research pipeline moving forward. 

Finally, this coming Fall 2026, our support will expand with the launch of the Office of Grants & Fellowships, to be directed by Dr. Heidi Bauer-Clapp. In addition to continuing the training Dr. Bauer-Clapp has already been providing for graduate students, the new office will offer training for faculty who want to better support their graduate students who apply for external grants and fellowships, including advice for writing effective letters of recommendation and strategies for effectively communicating research significance.