Grossman administrators first announced their decision to “pause admissions” in a Jan. 2 email to students obtained by WSN, stating that the move would help “streamline” initiatives “to restructure physician training at NYU.” MSTP leadership — Director Erik Sulman, Chief Science Officer Dafna Bar-Sagi and Chief Academic Officer Steven Abramson — also said that any structural changes to MSTP would “not have an impact” on current students.  

However, students said that much of the MSTP student body found out specifically that applicants’ acceptances were revoked through a widely-circulated Reddit thread. Administrators told admitted students that they “cannot offer” them sufficient MD-Ph.D. training in anticipation of modifications that “may differ significantly from traditional programs,” according to copies of an email posted online.

In a statement to WSN, NYU Langone Health spokesperson Steve Ritea confirmed that previously accepted MSTP students were still offered admission to Grossman as MD-only students. He said that the “timing of this decision afforded applicants ample time” to consider MD-Ph.D. programs at other institutions, and a separate Reddit thread in January detailed that NYU refunded the $110 application fee for all applicants. 

One current MSTP student said that when they first read the Jan. 2 email, they were confused and questioned if it referred to the following year’s application cycle. After their friend sent them the “famous Reddit post” a couple of days later, they realized that the halt in admissions was more immediate. 

“Already, I can get the vibe that our program director simply would not have invested his time in an entire admission cycle, and students’ time and all that, just for acceptances to be rescinded,” the student said. “So already, there’s an assumption that he was thrown under the bus here. We don’t know what happened.” 

Students said the email and Reddit post were publicized over their winter break and sparked mass confusion in the program, filled with questions about whether the information on Reddit was true and what the “super vague” restructure to MD-Ph.D. training entailed. However, in the email, MSTP administrators had also invited students to attend an on-campus “director’s dinner” on Jan. 8 to ask questions about the developments and give their input on the “restructuring process.”  

“What proceeded was more or less an exercise in futility,” another MSTP student said about the meeting. “When it came to what they were planning to do, basically the statement they were giving was that they’re viewing this as an opportunity to revamp and make the program more efficient. But, when pressed on what that means, it was more like — to tie it to current events — having a concept of a plan rather than an actual plan itself.”

At the director’s dinner, Sulman sat among Bar-Sagi, Abramson and other administrators and confirmed that they rescinded admission to nine prospective MSTP students, according to an audio recording of the event obtained by WSN. Sulman also said that, for admitted students who had canceled their applicant interviews at other institutions after receiving admission to NYU, he was contacting those schools’ program directors to try and get applicants a second chance to study the dual-degree curriculum elsewhere. 

Sulman also told students that the decision to pause admissions came after the National Institutes of Health did not renew the program’s grant funding. The T32 training grant — which will expire in June and covers around 15% of the MSTP’s total cost, according to Sulman — has financially backed NYU’s MD-Ph.D. program since 1964, making NYU one of the first institutions to host a MSTP. 

“Grants don’t get funded all the time. This is not to say that we’re never going to have the T32 — as part of the discussions that are going to go on over the next weeks and months, we’re going to decide the strategy for that,” Sulman said at the meeting. “There’s no doubt in my mind that NYU is committed to physician scientists as a career, as a discipline and in the training. That commitment has never been stronger than it is now.” 

Lawrence Brass — the MSTP director at the University of Pennsylvania and former president of the National Association of MD-PhD Programs — told WSN that although there is no public data on the success rate of federal grant renewal proposals, getting the T32 grant renewed is a “highly competitive” process. Brass explained that the NIH evaluates if institutions are presenting a program that sufficiently merges scientific study with the practice of medicine, including a “strong pool of candidates for admission” and a “strong track record of attracting and training MD-Ph.D. students who go on to have successful careers as research-focused physicians.”  From 2020 to 2024, the NIH granted about 50.4% of T32 grant applicants their requested funding. 

At the director’s dinner, Sulman told students that “for now,” he intended to resubmit the T32 grant proposal but that he could not estimate the specific timeline for the process. Ritea also told WSN that despite federal grant cuts, the university has “maintained financial and programmatic support” for current MSTP students and is “currently working to develop alternative models and funding sources for MD-Ph.D. training.” 

Several MSTP students said that upon learning that their program lost its federal funding, their primary concern was with NYU’s “unprecedented” response to halt admissions and rescind acceptances. Students also expressed concern for administrator’s vague language about reapplying for the NIH grant, saying that their MD-Ph.D. program’s reputation and designation as an MSTP, which is defined by its federal funding, is beneficial for students when applying to residency and individual federal grants.

“We have an upper administration that is unwilling to recognize that it itself is the problem when it comes to how it’s running an academic institution,” an MSTP student said. “It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to put two and two together to realize what happened. They probably submitted the most half-dashed, confused grant resubmission, and the NIH took one look at it — you really have to bungle it up for the NIH to say no.” 

Sulman also said that the nationwide attrition rate for physician scientists is exceptionally high, citing that only a third of MD-Ph.D. graduates pursue research, and that administrators hope to establish NYU as a leading institution in combatting the yearslong concern by drastically restructuring its MSTP. He also said that Grossman leadership has considered restructuring the program since last year after recently seeing four students drop out of the MSTP over six months, without clear understanding as to what challenges they may have faced in the program. 

Bar-Sagi and Abramson discussed that an aspect of the MSTP restructure might be to reduce the time commitment needed to complete a Ph.D. without compromising on the quality of education. They referenced Grossman’s 2013 initiative to condense the MD curriculum into three years instead of four — which MSTP students said was implemented into their curriculum in the summer of 2021 — and questioned whether it would be better for students to complete Ph.D. research while in residency programs, rather than during medical school. 

MSTP students said that the prospective plan to incorporate Ph.D. research into the same time frame as residency was floated in the program’s community through word of mouth, and expressed concern that students’ quality of research would diminish if urged to prioritize speed. They alleged that with continuous pushes to condense the time for graduate degrees, Grossman was placing too much emphasis on maximizing profit by reducing its operating costs of hosting MD students — who all receive full-tuition scholarships, while MSTP students get an additional annual stipend of around $50,000.  

“I just don’t think it’s necessary to rush people doing a Ph.D.,” an MSTP student said. “We’re in a really rich institution in a developed nation, the richest country on earth, and our life expectancies are way longer than they were in the past. So, what’s the point in rushing? I think that’s ridiculous.”

During a Q&A portion of the director’s dinner, students asked administrators why they could not have allowed the accepted students to matriculate into the MSTP and implement the structural changes afterward, expressing concern for the “serious damage that was done to the reputation of the program” without their input or prior knowledge. One student at the meeting accused the administration of subjecting applicants to “unnecessary distress” by accepting them into the MSTP in October and not communicating with them until January. 

“It was not a decision that was made lightly,” Bar-Sagi said at the dinner. “Many of us felt that it would be very disingenuous to invite people and showcase them something that we are not certain that this is what they are coming to see.”

Students continued to push for answers regarding how long the MSTP leadership plans to close admissions. They said that as more years go by, the amount of number of students in the program — which currently hosts 98 students total, including 13 first-year students — will shrink drastically and that subsequently, the strength of programming will decline. In response, administrators said that current students will be unaffected by any structural changes and that they hope to incorporate students’ input at future stages of the decision-making process. 

“We’re stuck in this frustrating situation of a total lack of communication and just total unknowns,” an MSTP student said. “The only thing we do know is the fact that — this is just through word of mouth and discussions — that this decision to do this solution came from the dean’s office straight from Dr. Grossman’s mouth himself.” 

MSTP students said that after the director’s dinner, it became clear through discussions with principal investigators and faculty members that the decision to rescind acceptances was made unilaterally by Dean Robert Grossman, who also serves as CEO of NYU Langone, because of the program’s falling student retention rate. One student described that allegedly, Sulman had advocated for NYU to enroll the accepted students despite the loss of the T32 federal grant, and was then “thrown under the bus” to take ownership in explaining the controversial decision to the rest of the school’s MSTP community. 

“We have leadership that’s so erratic that we have leaked emails every few years, and such a culture of retaliation, such that one person can throw a tantrum and stop one of the first MSTPs that ever existed, and to just throw it away like that is bad,” an MSTP student said. “I don’t understand the vision and it’s not a collectively decided vision. It’s like a couple people at the top decide what’s the best for the school, and they just do it — what the hell?” 

After several instances of community members facing retaliation under Grossman’s leadership, students said there is a “culture of fear” and “omnipresent concern” to engage in speech that goes against the school’s actions. They referenced widely-publicized scandals in recent years — including when Benjamin Neel, the former director of NYU Langone’s cancer center, was terminated after making posting “anti-Arab” cartoons online in 2023, and when hundreds of residents petitioned for hazard pay during the COVID-19 pandemic and saw internal emails about the situation leaked online. Regarding fears within their program specifically, two students cited that an MSTP student allegedly had their guaranteed NYU residency rescinded after engaging in a Black Lives Matter movement protest in 2020. Ritea did not respond to requests for comment about the rescinded residency acceptance. 

MSTP students also agreed that there has been an air of anticipation for Grossman to retire in August. Although they acknowledged that it would be too late for his successor to reverse the rescinding of acceptances this year, they expressed hope that the incoming NYU Langone CEO and dean Alec Kimmelman may work toward reinvigorating their program and unpause admissions. Kimmelman — an MD-Ph.D. graduate of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai — currently leads the medical center’s Laura and Isaac Perlmutter Cancer Center and is slated to begin his term in September. 

“For NYU, I think they can still preserve their name just because they already have such a reputation,” an MSTP student said. “But for the people who are in the program now and who have seen what just happened — and for the nine students who had their offers rescinded — it’s only for us that this will remain on our minds for a while.”

Contact Aashna Miharia at amiharia@nyunews.com.