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The NSF recently announced that it is investing $380 million in AI-enabled autonomous labs across the United States. The investment will result in a national network of “cloud labs” that will “test, scale, and demonstrate new methods and tools” to advance science and engineering.
In 2025 alone, university research led to the creation of 761 new products, 1,095 new startups, and 13,729 applications to patent new discoveries.
The future is deeply uncertain for the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), the agency within the United States Department of Education responsible for awarding federal grants for education research at AAU member campuses and other institutions across the country.
Taken together, their comments paint a troubling picture of how OMB’s proposal could undermine the effectiveness and stability of federal financial assistance, making it harder for nonprofits, states, and localities from carrying out their public service missions.
A recent analysis finds that the NASA missions that are the most economical – those that yield the greatest scientific bang for their buck – are mid-sized operations that cost the agency less than $1 billion per mission.
Many AAU members are represented as both leads and as institutional partners in the 278 projects selected for the Genesis Mission’s initial national portfolio of research teams.
This shift in career intentions, the study’s authors say, is an early warning that the U.S. STEM talent pipeline – which feeds both academic and industrial research and development – is cracking.
While the overall decline is modest, the latest numbers show that 50% of respondents who identify as Democrats have “a great deal” or “quite a lot of confidence,” down from 61% last year and 56% in 2024.
The study shows that most so-called “unicorn founders” of billion-dollar startups are significantly more educated than the general population. The highest producing schools are all AAU institutions.
AAU has submitted comments to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), urging it to rescind or seriously modify a set of changes the agency has proposed that would affect the entire system for federal grants and other federal financial assistance.