Location: Pennsylvania
My wife is a nurse pursuing her PhD in health equity research and received an NIH F31 fellowship that is supposed to cover the last 1.5 years of her PhD (07/24 -12/25). This past June/July, the NIH was supposed to deposit funds for the next year of her fellowship (she plans to defend and graduate in the fall, so only half a year is needed). However the NIH has not deposited the funds and refuses to give any kind of adequate response to my wife or the university. The most they have gotten is “we have no new information”. Her research is considered DEI and we assume this is why it is being ignored and not fulfilled.
Background on my wife’s PhD program: the university and school of nursing covers the tuition/fees and gives a monthly stipend to graduate students as long as they TA courses or have a fellowship (which funds the student). But they have a rule that they will only support their students for 4 years. My wife will technically be starting her 5th year in August and graduate in 4.5 years. She took on incredibly ambitious projects because she knew she was funded by this fellowship and could go past 4 years to finish; the ambitiousness of the projects being why she got funded in the first place.
But now that her funding has been “silently terminated” by the NIH, the university doesn’t know what to do. Mind you she never got a formal termination letter by the NIH. Some of the administration has said she could TA, some said we should wait and assume/act like the money will show up from the NIH, but now the finance office is saying because she is past 4 total years in the program, they won’t let her TA and are requiring us to pay the ~$30k in tuition/fees/health insurance by July 31st. Even though she was only directly funded by the university for 3 years and she got her own funding for the past year. Also we will be losing her stipend until she graduates, so we will be out roughly $50,000 as a result of this, which we don’t really have.
Do we have any legal recourse here?
Comments
Unfortunately because these federal changes have been made so carelessly, many people are now, or soon to be, in you and your wife’s position. There won’t be any help or recourse coming. If she can unenroll and not take on the debt, that would be the best option. Yes, she is essentially being forced to quit her schooling and stop pursuing this line of study. There really is no better or kinder way to say it I’m afraid…
[removed]
NAL, but work in academia. Sounds like legally you are out of luck, but I would keep pushing the university to make it work.
Have you looked at other funding methods?
Does the PhD advisor have a grant that includes student funding? Can the department provide money from a slush fund? Ideally, both of those should be working hard to find money for your wife, as well as lobbying the university to allow a TA position.
Alternately, have you looked at PhD completion fellowships from the university or outside groups? The university fellowship office or graduate college can try to help you find something like this. Might also make sense to send emails to relevant professional organizations or patient advocacy groups asking for funding.
Lastly, I guess there are student loans…
Sigh, what a disaster…