--:-- Aisha Roscoe: I'm Aisha Roscoe, and you're listening to The Sunday Story, where we go beyond the news to bring you one big story.
--:-- [Soft music fades out]
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: A few weeks before graduating from Duke Kunshan University, senior Liam Powell received a letter he'd been anticipating from the U.S. State Department.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Dear William N. Powell, thank you for your interest in an internship with the U.S. Department of State.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Liam was a global health major, and he'd interned at the United States Agency for International Development, or USAID.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: So when he saw there was an internship with the State Department, he applied, and he was chosen.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: But then came a federal hiring freeze.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: We regret to inform you that the U.S. Department of State has canceled the summer 2025 cycle of the student internship program.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: In accordance with the president's executive order entitled Hiring Freeze and the Office of Management and Budget and Office of Personnel Management's Joint Memorandum, the department hereby rescinds your tentative offer to participate in the student internship program.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: We wish you success in your academic career.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: The email came to me March 14th this year, so pretty far down the line after the hiring freeze.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: A couple weeks ago, he walked across the stage at his graduation.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Liam Powell! Liam!
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: As the class of 2025 celebrate their achievements so far, many like Liam are grappling with the question of what next?
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: And that's the way it is with graduations, right? No one knows what is to come.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Graduation season, it's a celebration. It's a time of optimism.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: And, you know, it makes me feel nostalgic for my own college graduation from Howard University.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: You know, you're thinking like of all the people who've come before you, and you are now a part of this long line of alumni.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: And so it's almost like you're being baptized into this new part of your life.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: As a person, I was not ready to be on my own.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: I wasn't prepared or I didn't think I was prepared.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: But what I had learned in college, the seeds that were planted in me in college, they would bloom.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: And the woman that you see before you today, or that you hear today.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Her voice was developed on that college campus.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Now, I'm going someplace with this.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: I've been thinking about that younger Aisha because I recently talked to some graduating seniors who are in that same place.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: At the same time, a lot has changed in higher education in the last several months.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: It seems like every time you turn on the news, there's a headline about how universities are being affected by the decisions of the federal government.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: The Supreme Court recently cleared the way for the Trump administration to cancel roughly $65 million in federal education grants linked to diversity, equity, and inclusion.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: This morning, the Trump administration has revoked the visas of 18 students at FIU.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Columbia University announced today it is laying off 180 staff members working on research funded by federal grants after the Trump administration announced its intent to cut the university's funding.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: I wanted to hear about their fears and hopes for the future, so I sat down with them.
--:-- Liam Powell: My name is Liam Powell.
--:-- Liam Powell: Liam Powell, who we just heard, a recent graduate of Duke Kunshan University.
--:-- Alyssa Johnson: I'm Alyssa Johnson.
--:-- Alyssa Johnson: I am a senior at Purdue University studying wildlife.
--:-- Bobby McAlpine: My name is Bobby McAlpine, and I am the current sitting student body president at The Ohio State University.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: I felt inspired by these students and their sense of clarity and purpose as they consider the world that they're about to head out into and their determination and courage to find new paths for their lives.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Our conversation after the break.
--:-- [Soft music fades in]
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: This message comes from BetterHelp.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: It's only human to ask others for advice, like turning to your barista, hairdresser, or a taxi driver for life advice.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: But when you're looking for help about relationships, anxiety, depression, or other clinical issues, they may not have all the right answers.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Instead, get guidance from a licensed therapist online with BetterHelp.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Visit BetterHelp.com slash NPR for 10% off your first month.
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--:-- Aisha Roscoe: People are living through a moment defined by unrelenting crises and need.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Civilians are caught in the crossfire of violence and war.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Malnutrition threatens the lives of children.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Communities depend on life-saving humanitarian aid.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Doctors Without Borders is meeting this moment of overwhelming need with action.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: But they can't do it alone.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Help provide life-saving care around the world.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Learn how to donate today at doctorswithoutborders slash NPR
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: This message comes from NetSuite.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: What does the future hold for business?
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Can someone invent a crystal ball?
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Until then, over 42,000 businesses have future-proofed their business with NetSuite by Oracle, the number one AI cloud ERP, bringing accounting, financial management, inventory, and HR into one platform.
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--:-- Aisha Roscoe: We're back with the Sunday story.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: When I sat down with Liam, Alyssa, and Bobby, I first wanted to get a sense of how all the changes happening on their campuses and in the country affected them personally.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: I have a question for everybody.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Are you where you thought you would be six months ago?
--:-- Liam Powell: This has definitely not been the semester or the graduation plans that I thought it was going to be.
--:-- Liam Powell: So I thought I was going to go to graduate school to get a PhD, but everything that's been going on has kind of changed my life plans.
--:-- Alyssa Johnson: In terms of my future, I was really expecting to be able to have some sort of referral or return offer at either of my last two internships that I've had.
--:-- Alyssa Johnson: And both of those prospects have fallen through.
--:-- Bobby McAlpine: This last semester, quite frankly, has been one of the hardest.
--:-- Bobby McAlpine: So, you know, I expected to graduate.
--:-- Bobby McAlpine: It's an amazing time, a celebratory time.
--:-- Bobby McAlpine: We're going to dance. We're going to laugh. We're going to do all the fun things.
--:-- Bobby McAlpine: But when it comes to the work to get here and as student body president, it has significantly grown the job to something that I never thought it would be.
--:-- Bobby McAlpine: How would you describe morale on campus right now?
--:-- Bobby McAlpine: A lot of people have asked me this question, and I always struggle to answer it because, you know, on the one hand, we are an amazing school.
--:-- Bobby McAlpine: We just won a national championship for football.
--:-- Bobby McAlpine: But on the other hand, students have come to me and just they feel really scared.
--:-- Bobby McAlpine: I just think that people think that a lot of or some of their government, people are making decisions in their name without actually consulting them.
--:-- Bobby McAlpine: Do you have some students, though, who are happy with the changes they're seeing?
--:-- Bobby McAlpine: There are people on all sides of the spectrum all the time.
--:-- Bobby McAlpine: I mean, I delivered, I can't even count, probably over about 400 letters from conservative students.
--:-- Bobby McAlpine: It was from liberal students, from black students, white students, to the governor of Ohio asking him to veto a bill, Senate Bill 1, that did pass.
--:-- Bobby McAlpine: And it's very unfortunate, but we'll continue to move forward.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: What did that piece of legislation do?
--:-- Bobby McAlpine: Yeah, Senate Bill 1, unfortunately, it gets rid of all offices of diversity and inclusion in all public university spaces within the state of Ohio.
--:-- Bobby McAlpine: The only and sole reason why I am at The Ohio State University is because of our Office of Diversity and Inclusion.
--:-- Bobby McAlpine: When I lost my grandmother, when I lost a really good friend to mental health, that's where I was able to go to make sure that I not only stayed in college, but I was able to stay afloat.
--:-- Bobby McAlpine: You know, you could just go in, talk to the folks.
--:-- Bobby McAlpine: I called some of them my campus aunties, campus uncles, and you really just feel at home.
--:-- Bobby McAlpine: And they made you feel heard when, quite frankly, some other parts of Columbus, some other parts of the university, when you didn't feel heard, they allowed you to be heard.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: I can imagine at a big state university the importance of finding people in the staff and professors who care about you and connect with you, who make you feel like family and not just a number.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: And it sounds like for Bobby, that is what the DEI office did.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: And I'm sure he wasn't alone in that.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: There was something else I wanted to know.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: How were they making sense of the funding cuts?
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: And how were they adjusting to these curveballs that have now been thrown at them?
--:-- Alyssa Johnson: Alyssa, you're having a hard time finding work in the wildlife space that you wanted to do your research on?
--:-- Alyssa Johnson: Yeah, so originally I was going to pursue a PhD in amphibian disease ecology.
--:-- Alyssa Johnson: So I have been researching how contaminants affect amphibians and their disease dynamics for the past four years.
--:-- Alyssa Johnson: So I was going to continue that work.
--:-- Alyssa Johnson: At this time was when a lot of like the federal funding cuts towards academic institutions were going through when the funding cuts from the National Science Foundation were happening.
--:-- Alyssa Johnson: And so graduate admissions across the whole entire country have gone to a very low point because universities and institutions and professors need to protect the people they already have so they not really letting a lot of people in
--:-- Alyssa Johnson: Do you think it was your particular field of study that made it harder for you to get chosen Or do you think it was just overall because of the funding cuts as you said they just had to pick less people?
--:-- Alyssa Johnson: The research that I was doing, there were some concerns about the funding source because it had both climate and diversity in the title.
--:-- Alyssa Johnson: Yeah, it's related to like diversity of the species.
--:-- Alyssa Johnson: Yeah, this is quite a strange thing that's going on with the National Science Foundation and like DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency, is that they're using either people who maybe don't have a lot of expertise towards reviewing these grants and understanding like the scientific terms behind them to screen through the names of grants for words like diversity, equity, climate change.
--:-- Alyssa Johnson: And so with that throughout the whole entire country, regardless of whether you're qualified or not, you're seeing either offers going out and then being rescinded or, you know, everybody being put on some kind of wait list.
--:-- Alyssa Johnson: And so that's kind of what ended up happening for me.
--:-- Liam Powell: Well, Liam, you were an intern at USAID.
--:-- Liam Powell: What were you thinking as you were seeing the Trump administration essentially dismantling USAID?
--:-- Liam Powell: There's a feeling that's pretty selfish of just knowing that the career field that I've spent so long studying for in my undergrad is just going to be in such a weird state of flux and toss up for such a long time.
--:-- Liam Powell: I think that talking to a lot of professionals that work in the foreign aid and international development sector, there's a really common perspective that reform is absolutely necessary, but that this isn't the way to do it.
--:-- Liam Powell: And that this is a decision that objectively leads to the loss of a lot of lives in a way that a lot of the American public is very insulated from and just completely unaware of.
--:-- Bobby McAlpine: Bobby, you decided to push off law school for a year.
--:-- Bobby McAlpine: Why did you decide to push it off?
--:-- Bobby McAlpine: Well, honestly, being so inundated in the fight for higher education this past year has, quite frankly, put a chill down my spine.
--:-- Bobby McAlpine: I am really, really scared just to see the amount of attacks that are coming through with higher education in general.
--:-- Bobby McAlpine: It's become a political football.
--:-- Bobby McAlpine: These are the places that are supposed to be for opportunity.
--:-- Bobby McAlpine: The places where people come to find themselves, the places where students and young people live, eat, breathe, and lead every single day.
--:-- Bobby McAlpine: Higher education should not be a political football.
--:-- Bobby McAlpine: I will stand at the top of the highest building and yell that with the biggest megaphone I can.
--:-- Bobby McAlpine: Higher education should not be a political football, period.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: I mean, do you still want to be a lawyer?
--:-- Bobby McAlpine: What are you going to do?
--:-- Bobby McAlpine: Right now, I want to go into government relations and government affairs.
--:-- Bobby McAlpine: I know, hell of a time to do that, right?
--:-- Bobby McAlpine: I do want to be a lawyer.
--:-- Bobby McAlpine: I do.
--:-- Bobby McAlpine: I want to go to law school.
--:-- Bobby McAlpine: But there is so much in flux right now.
--:-- Bobby McAlpine: Why would I place myself in that extreme unknown rather than wait a few years to try and see just how this is going to affect everything?
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: A lot of this work, like research, they have a lot of ties to the government.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: They're either government funded or a lot of people would go into the government.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Is that something that you see in your future or that you can see in your future now?
--:-- Liam Powell: Doing research or going into government work for the federal government or what have you?
--:-- Liam Powell: It's definitely not something for me that I've completely ruled out.
--:-- Liam Powell: But even if a new president comes along, there really isn't an easy way to magically rebuild the capacity that the U.S. has built up with these international development programs over decades of work.
--:-- Liam Powell: So I think that it's more of a delaying of what my goals look like and where I want to be.
--:-- Alyssa Johnson: I would love to be a public servant if academia didn't work out for me.
--:-- Alyssa Johnson: But I think the reality is that the shifts that are happening right now are making it incredibly difficult for that to happen.
--:-- Alyssa Johnson: And they're not going to recover for a very long time, if not ever.
--:-- Alyssa Johnson: Like Liam was saying, it takes a lot of work.
--:-- Alyssa Johnson: It takes a lot of time.
--:-- Alyssa Johnson: It takes decades to get these institutions set up.
--:-- Alyssa Johnson: Usually once those things go private or if they're shut down, they don't come back.
--:-- Alyssa Johnson: So I wasn't very tapped into that until recently because, I mean, maybe this is ignorant of me, but I just felt like I didn't have to.
--:-- Alyssa Johnson: Honestly, Alyssa, that is exactly what so many students are feeling.
--:-- Alyssa Johnson: Where we get our funding as a university especially coming from a public university like I am it never really crossed students minds
--:-- Alyssa Johnson: At the end of the day it forcing a lot of students to really look at how all of these universities are funded
--:-- Alyssa Johnson: How can we make sure that they continue to be funded?
--:-- Alyssa Johnson: There is some positive in it because it's forcing so many students to form our opinions and form how we want our government to work in the future.
--:-- Alyssa Johnson: Yeah.
--:-- Alyssa Johnson: I mean, you hear a lot of, I'm so overwhelmed right now.
--:-- Alyssa Johnson: I feel so depressed.
--:-- Alyssa Johnson: I feel so horrified by what's going on.
--:-- Alyssa Johnson: I just don't know what to do.
--:-- Alyssa Johnson: I'm just going to like delete Instagram or I'm just going to delete my news apps.
--:-- Alyssa Johnson: And I feel like one thing that like I've been trying to do and that I feel like a lot of, you know, like young people are starting to shift towards is like, this is so horrifying and it is so scary and it is so frustrating and it makes me so angry, but I, I can't look away.
--:-- Alyssa Johnson: Silence is not an option anymore.
--:-- Alyssa Johnson: Exactly.
--:-- Alyssa Johnson: It really isn't.
--:-- Alyssa Johnson: I feel like a lot of the actions that are happening are sort of trying to isolate us and make us feel small, but that's really not the case because we're all going through such similar things and we have to work together for change and just like for, I don't know, for something better than this to happen.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: You know, it feels like what I'm hearing you saying is that these interruptions to your future plans have actually made you more politically aware than you might have been otherwise.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: So I got to ask all of you, how are you feeling about the future?
--:-- Liam Powell: Yeah, our generation is incredibly resilient.
--:-- Liam Powell: We were young people through the COVID pandemic.
--:-- Liam Powell: We're now young adults during this extremely tumultuous time in the federal government.
--:-- Liam Powell: And still, I see people continuing to push.
--:-- Alyssa Johnson: I really agree with you.
--:-- Alyssa Johnson: I think that it has taught me a lot about resiliency in a way that I wasn't really expecting to have as a lesson in my college career.
--:-- Alyssa Johnson: I just think that it's going to take me a few years longer than I expected to sort of realize my post-college dream.
--:-- Alyssa Johnson: But I think that I'll get there eventually.
--:-- Alyssa Johnson: Students are a determined people.
--:-- Alyssa Johnson: Young people in general are a determined people.
--:-- Bobby McAlpine: And I'm going to just read a small part of my last speech as I go out of Ohio State.
--:-- Bobby McAlpine: Tonight, we celebrate, we dance, we laugh, we reflect.
--:-- Bobby McAlpine: But when we leave this place, let's carry this energy with us.
--:-- Bobby McAlpine: Let's organize, let's educate, let's pour into our communities, let's support one another, hold each other accountable, and never, ever let anyone tell us that our story does not matter.
--:-- Bobby McAlpine: As we move forward, we have to know our stories and we have to know our history.
--:-- Bobby McAlpine: Determined people remain and a determined people rise.
--:-- Bobby McAlpine: Class of 2025, this is not the end of the road.
--:-- Bobby McAlpine: This is the start of a new chapter.
--:-- Bobby McAlpine: Let it be bold.
--:-- Bobby McAlpine: Let it be brave.
--:-- Bobby McAlpine: Let it be worthy of the journey that it took to get here.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: We've been talking with college seniors Bobby McAlpine, Alyssa Johnson, and Liam Powell.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Congratulations to all of you.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: I'm wishing you all the best of luck.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Thank you so much for speaking with us.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Thank you.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Thank you.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Thank you for giving us a platform for our voices.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: This episode of The Sunday Story was produced by Elena Tworek and Janet Ujong Lee.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Additional production and editing by Justine Yan.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: The conversation was edited by Ed McNulty for Weekend Edition.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Mastering by Robert Rodriguez.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: The Sunday Story team includes Andrew Mambo and our senior supervising producer, Liana Simstrom.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Irene Noguchi is our executive producer.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Up First is back tomorrow with all the news you need to start your week.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Until then, have a great rest of your weekend.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: And congratulations to the class of 2025.
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