Selection Bias for Fields of Study in NSF’s 2025 GRFP Awards

This paper identifies striking selection biases based on STEM field of study in the 2025 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) competition. Since 1952, GRFP has recruited “the best and the brightest” early-career individuals into STEM careers by providing support for them to attend graduate programs and to pursue research of their choice. The fellowship was founded to support talented people rather than particular research projects, with awardees going on to win Nobel prizes and lead innovation in U.S. science and engineering. Not only did 2025 see major cuts to the number of GRFP awards, but for the first time there was a finger on the scale: rather than recognizing talent across all STEM fields of basic research, the 2025 GRFP competition prioritized a narrow set of “priority areas.” We curated the publicly available data from 2025’s unprecedented two-step release of results (only 1,000 awards in April rather than the 2,300 projected, followed by another 500 in June) in order to identify and analyze bias in the selection process. The distribution of awards among fields of study appeared to depart significantly from previous years, when numbers of awardees within fields of study were driven primarily by application pressure. We found particularly strong bias in the second release of awards, which excluded the life sciences entirely—even though the life sciences had the highest number of applications. We discuss the risks of redefining NSF’s long-standing GRFP funding policy in order to favor narrow sectors of the STEM research workforce while disadvantaging other fields. Although the favored fields, artificial intelligence and quantum science, are national priorities, it is counterproductive for GRFP to prioritize them, as merit is independent of an early-career applicant’s field of study. We discuss the potential harm of such biases for seeding innovation in science as well as for broadening participation of women and others in basic research and the U.S. STEM workforce.