Toronto targets top academics with new fund as U.S. goes after elite colleges

The University of Toronto’s president says there has rarely been such a good time for her institution to recruit top professors and promising students from United States colleges. Now she has more money to go after them.

Canada’s largest university, located in the nation’s biggest city, has started a new scholarship program to attract dozens of Ph.D. candidates. It’s backed by $50 million from an anonymous donor.

The university says it will be the richest Ph.D. funding program in Canada, and it intends to enlist scholars to work together on interdisciplinary research regarding major societal problems. Each year, an advisory committee will help select a new research area for the next wave of recruits.

“Any given year, we’re going to turn our attention to a global challenge and we’re going to bring together a cohort of top thinkers to focus on that global challenge,” the school’s president, Melanie Woodin, said in an interview. “It could be something like AI in health. It could be Arctic sovereignty. It could be democratic resilience.”

“We have a fairly advanced set of plans for that recruitment,” she added. “We’ve also, I would say in recent years, been engaging in more targeted recruitment where we know there are academic superstars.”

The initiative comes at a time when President Donald Trump’s administration has attacked elite U.S. universities on a number of fronts, including curbing international student visas and freezing billions of dollars in research funding.

The number of international students applying to attend American colleges this fall dropped about 10 per cent, the biggest decline in at least a decade, according to data released in August by the U.S.’s most widely used college application platform.

Last week, the White House began investigations into the use of foreign exchange visa programs at nine institutions including Harvard University and Stanford University. The inquiry is focused on J-1 visas, which at universities are often held by international doctoral candidates and visiting scholars.

“Our ability to compete for the best — whether it be graduate students or professors — our ability is elevated right now because of the commitment around academic freedom,” Woodin said in the interview.

The University of Toronto has more than 100,000 students, about 20,000 at the graduate level. Roughly 25 per cent of its graduate students came from outside of Canada last year. China was by far the largest source; the U.S. was second.

The anonymous gift, plus university matching funds, will be enough to provide $80,000 per scholar a year, or $320,000 over a four-year period.

The university’s new fund is part of a broader effort by Canada to seize opportunities in higher education.

Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government has set aside $1.7 billion over 12 years to recruit more than 1,000 researchers, most of which is dedicated to attracting as many as 100 new research chairs to schools across the country.

In August, the government announced it had awarded 64 global scholars with $504 million in funding to relocate their work to Canadian universities and develop research and projects in areas such as health and artificial intelligence. Some 48 of the researchers are coming from the U.S., including from prestigious institutions such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard.

Among the new research chairs is Sara Seager, a renowned astrophysicist whom the University of Toronto had already announced would be leaving MIT to return to her alma mater.

The first group of scholars for the University of Toronto’s new program, known as the Presidents’ Impact Scholarship Program, will be recruited over the coming months to start their work in September 2027.

The current political climate around higher education in the U.S. and other countries is one factor in the university’s ability to find talent, she said.

“There’s been a cancelling of a lot of paths of research in the United States, including the climate emergency, sex and gender differences in medical research,” said Woodin, a neuroscientist who received two of her degrees from the University of Toronto and did post-doctoral work at the University of California, Berkeley.

“There’s certainly types of research that just can’t be done in the United States right now if it’s federally funded. So it’s a huge opportunity for Canada — as a country that cares deeply about scientific discovery, ideas and academic freedom — to seize this opportunity to recruit the best.”

—With assistance from Liam Knox and John Harney.