The University of Toronto is launching a $100-million scholarship fund for PhD students that will double the pay of recipients and help the school compete for bright minds at a time when elite U.S. universities are under attack by the Trump administration.
The new U of T program, unveiled Monday, will see the university recruit 12 or 13 new PhD candidates a year to conduct cross-disciplinary research on a predetermined theme, such as sovereignty and the Arctic, or health and artificial intelligence.
Winners will be paid $80,000 a year for four years, twice the current minimum base funding for PhD candidates at U of T. Half of the $100-million endowment comes from an anonymous donation, the rest from the university.
“We’ve got an unprecedented opportunity right now to bring back Canada’s best and keep Canada’s best here,” U of T president Melanie Woodin said in an interview. “The Prime Minister has spoken about the prioritization of talent as it relates to Canada’s economic resiliency and sovereignty, and as Canada’s flagship university, we’re fully aligned because we’re in the talent business.”
The new U of T awards are called the Presidents’ Impact Scholarships. If the name sounds familiar, it could be because Mark Carney’s Liberal government last year promised $1.7-billion over 12 years for an academic recruiting blitz with a similar moniker – The Canada Global Impact+ Research Talent Initiative.
Proposal aims at attracting research talent to Canada as U.S. science funding faces cuts
That federal campaign is part of a wider push by Canada’s top-flight universities and hospitals to capitalize on uncertainty at postsecondary institutions south of the border. Donald Trump’s government has cut funding for scientific and scholarly research, sued top universities and expressed a general disdain for science.
The infusion of public funding and attention for science and scholarship in Canada is also something of a departure from the past.
In 2023, an advisory panel’s report on the federal research support system found the funding dispersed by Canada’s three main granting councils – the Canadian Institutes of Health Research; the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada; and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada – had “not kept pace with evolving needs” or with Canada’s international competitors.
One of the shortfalls the report singled out was pay to graduate students, which they often receive via their professors’ grants.
The panel, led by Frédéric Bouchard, dean of the faculty of arts and sciences at the University of Montreal, concluded that financial support for graduate students in Canada was “at a breaking point.” The value of Ottawa’s awards for university research trainees had been stagnant for two decades, the panel’s report noted.
Ottawa aims to attract top research talent, including Canadians working abroad
The new U of T scholarship program is an acknowledgment that paltry pay for graduate students can be a barrier to doctoral research, especially for those who have racked up debt as undergraduates or who are considering leaving the private sector to pursue a PhD, Dr. Woodin said.
She added that the Presidents’ Impact Scholarships will be, to U of T’s knowledge, the most lucrative PhD funding package in Canada. “Globally, it puts us pretty close to the top – so above Princeton, Harvard, Cambridge and Oxford,” Dr. Woodin said.
All that said, pay packages are just one of many factors that promising PhD candidates weigh when choosing a university.
U of T is hoping candidates for the new scholarship will be enticed by the interdisciplinary nature of the awards, which require doctoral students to work with two faculty supervisors from different disciplines.
For stem cell scientist Derrick Rossi, a Canadian co-founder of the pharmaceutical company Moderna Inc., money didn’t matter as much as living somewhere interesting and finding a PhD program that was the best fit for him.
He studied at U of T before moving to Paris and ultimately getting his PhD at the University of Helsinki.
More important, Dr. Rossi said in an interview, is the message that U of T is sending with a large scholarship for doctoral students.
“The U.S. government right now is very anti-science,” he said. “The signal that [U of T] is sending to the globe is that Canada is not anti-science and we’re serious about science.”