LIAM POWELL: (Reading) Dear William N. Powell...
AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
Like millions of other American college students, Liam Powell is about to graduate and start his working life. As a global health major who interned at the United States Agency for International Development, he eyed a postgrad internship at the State Department. He applied and got chosen. Then came a hiring freeze.
POWELL: (Reading) The department hereby rescinds your tentative offer to participate in the student internship program.
RASCOE: Now Liam Powell is headed home from his time at Duke Kunshan University in China with a degree but no work in his field of choice. Alyssa Johnson planned to pursue a doctorate in ecology after her four years at Purdue.
ALYSSA JOHNSON: Graduate admissions across the whole entire country have gone to a very low point because universities and institutions and professors need to protect the people they already have.
RASCOE: And that's forced her to reconsider. The past few months have up ended life for many graduating seniors. The White House has accused schools like Columbia or Harvard of bias. The administration has voided federal contracts and frozen research money. Bobby McAlpine is the outgoing student body president at Ohio State.
BOBBY MCALPINE: One of the biggest things that I've heard from students - students have come to me and just - they feel really scared. I just think that people think that a lot of or some of their government - people are making decisions in their name without actually consulting them.
RASCOE: Do you have some students, though, who are happy with the changes they're seeing?
MCALPINE: There are people on all sides of the spectrum all the time. I mean, I delivered - I can't even count - probably over about 400 letters to the governor of Ohio, asking him to veto a bill, Senate Bill 1 - 400 student letters from conservative students. It was from liberal students, from Black students, white students. That did pass, and it's very unfortunate, but we'll continue to move forward.
RASCOE: And what did that piece of legislation do?
MCALPINE: Yeah, Senate Bill 1 - unfortunately, it gets rid of all offices of diversity and inclusion in all public university spaces within the state of Ohio. The only and sole reason why I am at the Ohio State University is because of our Office of Diversity and Inclusion. That's where I was able to go to make sure that I not only stayed in college, but I was able to stay afloat.
RASCOE: I would love to hear from the rest of you about how your postgraduation plans or even your immediate career goals have changed in the last few months. Alyssa?
JOHNSON: So I have been researching how contaminants affect amphibians and their disease dynamics for the past four years. So I was going to continue that work, and I had applied to three different graduate schools for three different PhD programs. And one school, I had a tentative offer, and what ended up happening as I got wait-listed. The research that I was doing - there were some concerns about the funding source because it had both climate and diversity in the title, so...
RASCOE: Yeah, it's related to, like, diversity of the species.
JOHNSON: Yeah. This is quite a strange thing that's going on with the National Science Foundation and, like, DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency, is that they're using either people who maybe don't have a lot of expertise towards reviewing these grants and understanding, like, the scientific terms behind them, or they're using things like AI to screen through the names of grants for words like diversity, equity, climate change. And so with that throughout the whole entire country, regardless of whether you're qualified or not, you're seeing, you know, either offers going out and then being rescinded or, you know, everybody being put on some kind of waitlist. And so that's kind of what ended up happening.
RASCOE: Well, Liam, what were you thinking as you were seeing the Trump administration essentially dismantling USAID?
POWELL: There's a feeling that's pretty selfish of just knowing that the career field that I've spent so long studying for in my undergrad is just going to be in such a weird state of flux and toss-up for such a long time. I think that talking to a lot of professionals that work in the foreign aid and international development sector, there's a really common perspective that reform is absolutely necessary but that this isn't the way to do it and that this is a decision that objectively leads to the loss of a lot of lives in a way that a lot of the American public is very insulated from and just completely unaware of.
RASCOE: Bobby, you decided to push off law school for a year. Why did you decide to push it off?
MCALPINE: Well, honestly, being so inundated in the fight for higher education this past year has quite frankly put a chill down my spine. I do want to be a lawyer. I do. I want to go to law school. But over the last few years, but especially this last semester, there is so much in flux right now. Why would I place myself in that extreme unknown rather than wait a few years to try and see just how this is going to affect everything?
POWELL: Just from talking to other students - not even students that are American, but students that are coming to the U.S. to study - people are just so insanely worried and fearful about what's happening with ICE, with people being interrogated at the border, that sort of thing. And I think the worst part is that there isn't really anything that I can say as an American that would make the situation feel any sort of better because the amount of uncertainty is just so profound. And I completely understand why a lot of people are really reevaluating whether they want to study in the U.S. or not, like a lot of my international friends.
RASCOE: A lot of this work, like research, have a lot of ties to the government. They're either government-funded or a lot of people would go into the government. Is that something that you see in your future or that you can see in your future now, doing research or going into government work for the federal government or what have you?
POWELL: It's definitely not something for me that I've completely ruled out, and it's still a field that I'm really passionate about. So I think that it's more of a delaying of what my goals look like and where I want to be.
JOHNSON: I would love to be a public servant if academia didn't work out for me. But I think the reality is that the shifts that are happening right now are making it incredibly difficult for that to happen. And like Liam was saying, it takes a lot of work. It takes a lot of time. It takes decades to get these institutions set up. And usually once those things go private or if they're shut down, they don't come back. And I wasn't very tapped into that until recently because maybe this is ignorant of me, but I just felt like I didn't have to. It felt like the funding was always going to be there.
MCALPINE: Honestly, Alyssa, that is exactly what so many students are feeling. Where we get our funding as a university, especially coming from a public university like I am, it never really crossed students' minds. At the end of the day, America in general has really leaned into the free pursuit of thought and free pursuit of academic excellence. And that's what makes people, just like Liam was saying, come from across the world just to have the opportunity to study in a place like the United States of America.
JOHNSON: I think one thing that you said, Bobby, that I've really been trying to, like, promote within, like, my friends and the people that I interact with is, like, you hear a lot of - I'm so overwhelmed right now, I feel so depressed, I feel so horrified by what's going on, I just don't know what to do, I'm just going to, like, delete Instagram, or I'm just going to delete my news apps. And I feel like one thing that, like, I've been trying to do and that I feel like a lot of, you know, like, young people are starting to shift towards is - this is so horrifying, and it is so scary, and it is so frustrating, and it makes me so angry, but I can't look away.
MCALPINE: Silence is not an option anymore.
RASCOE: And Liam, did you have anything you wanted to say?
POWELL: I really think both Bobby and Alyssa have both put it together really well. I feel like a lot of the actions that are happening are sort of trying to isolate us and make us feel small, but that's really not the case because we're all going through such similar things. We have to work together for - I don't know, for something better than this to happen. I just think that it's going to take me a few years longer than I expected to sort of realize my postcollege dream, but I think that I'll get there eventually.
RASCOE: We've been talking with college seniors, Bobby McAlpine, Alyssa Johnson and Liam Powell. Congratulations to all of you. I'm wishing you all the best of luck. Thank you so much for speaking with us.
POWELL: Thank you.
MCALPINE: Thank you. This has been an awesome conversation.
JOHNSON: Thank you for giving us a platform for our voices.
RASCOE: This segment was produced by Eleana Tworek and Janet Woojeong Lee.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
