The Trump administration is pairing top universities with corporate giants in an effort to steer traditional PhD programs toward national scientific priorities. Today, the White House and National Science Foundation are announcing a $47 million pilot program to fund around 250 four-year doctorates in technical fields, starting this fall. Students in the pilot will be placed at an industry partner, where they will spend at least one year doing “practical research” that can go towards their dissertation. NSF’s investment will fund three years of these PhDs, with 31 universities and 20-plus companies funding the rest.

The structure is meant to put doctoral training closer to the kinds of problems companies are actively working on, while still keeping universities involved in the degree itself. That makes the pilot notable not just for its size, but for what it signals about how the administration wants federally supported research training to connect to the broader innovation ecosystem, especially in fields where academic labs and private-sector R&D already overlap.

“About the same amount of basic research is done today in academia as in the private sector,” Michael Kratsios, the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, told Pirate Wires. “Over time, while the ecosystem has changed and different players have emerged where important scientific work is being done, the institutions which train our next generation of scientists have not really been updated.”

The pilot represents a small fraction of the more than 45,000 science and engineering doctorates awarded annually, but the administration says it is a “scalable model” that can expand to more universities and companies. If that happens, the practical question will be how widely the framework is adopted and whether other institutions decide the model fits their own graduate programs.

Here is the full story, I will pass along more details as I learn them.