The first year of President Trump’s second term rattled academic science, raising fears would-be biomedical researchers would avoid the field. New data on student enrollment, however, paint a more complicated picture.
Graduate student enrollment in U.S. biomedical programs rose 1.5% in the fall of 2025 compared to that same period in 2024, reaching nearly 112,000 students according to a report released Thursday by the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, which acts as a hub for more than 3,000 institutions. That year-over-year change, which includes both master’s and doctoral students, is more modest than the 4% bump in 2024 and previous enrollment increases since 2021.
Undergraduate enrollment in biomedical majors rose to nearly 642,500, increasing 3.7% in 2025 compared to 3.1% in 2024. And biomedical enrollment growth outpaced the 1.2% increase seen across all fields among undergraduates, and the 0.3% decrease for all graduate students.
Experts said that the data present a mixed picture, with reduced growth in graduate enrollment in life science programs that was notable but not as dramatic as they had expected. But they cautioned that the full effects of federal policy on the scientific workforce likely won’t be apparent for years.
Grant terminations, planned cuts to research overhead payments, and an environment rife with uncertainty had immediate impacts on universities last year, with STAT first reporting last February that some schools were cutting back graduate admissions in the life sciences. STAT then contacted dozens of institutions last spring to ask about class size changes. Some said there would be little to no change, while others planned to shrink incoming cohorts of biomedical grad students by a third or more. The most dramatic example was UMass Chan Medical School, which rescinded all 65 of its provisional offers before later admitting 13 students.
Reduced class sizes at some institutions might explain why biomedical graduate enrollment grew more slowly in 2025, according to Donna Ginther, a University of Kansas labor economist who studies the scientific workforce. But she added that she’d been “fully expecting” to see an enrollment drop rather than a slowdown in growth. Ginther said that it’s unclear whether the rise in undergraduate biomedical enrollment actually means more college students are on track for research careers, as many of these students are likely pre-med.
National Student Clearinghouse research director Matthew Holsapple similarly said during a press briefing that new student cohorts likely drive enrollment changes, but he added that the clearinghouse does not distinguish between newly enrolled versus continuing students.
The report found that international graduate student enrollment decreased overall by nearly 6% after years of steady growth, dropping by 10,000 students. But the clearinghouse did not look at international enrollment within specific fields, so it’s unclear how much biomedical programs were impacted. The second Trump administration has banned or limited entry for citizens from countries such as Iran and Venezuela, and travel bans during Trump’s first term discouraged some biomedical students in targeted countries from coming to the U.S. About a quarter of freshly minted life science Ph.D.s in 2024 were temporary visa holders, according to National Science Foundation data.
There are early signs student enrollment could be at least partially affected by administration-related uncertainty in 2026. Some universities, including Harvard, have already said they plan to reduce Ph.D. class sizes for the upcoming academic year, and Nature reported that dozens of biology programs indicated in a survey that they will or plan to reduce incoming cohorts next year.
Some institutions have told STAT they’ve received fewer Ph.D. applications for the current admissions cycle than in previous years, with Scripps Research Institute, Sanford Burnham Prebys, and Washington University in St. Louis’s biomedical sciences division reporting decreases ranging from around 6% to 20%. Data later this year from the Council of Graduate Schools, an organization with more than 450 member universities, should offer a clearer picture of whether there has been a nationwide application drop.
Council President Chevelle Newsome said she’ll be especially interested in the clearinghouse’s data on fall 2026, as that should better reflect the impact of a full year of federal policies on student enrollment. The clearinghouse typically releases preliminary findings around November and final numbers the following January.
“2026 is going to be the barometer where we’re going to actually see the start of the impact of all of these various cuts and caps and enrollment trends, and also the decline of the international students,” she said. “[We’ll see] from those numbers for enrollment whether or not there’s really some major cause for concern.”
STAT’s coverage of the federal government’s impact on the biomedical workforce is supported by a grant from the Dana Foundation and the Boston Foundation. Our financial supporters are not involved in any decisions about our journalism.
