William T. Grant Scholars Program 2026: A $425,000 Five-Year Award for Early-Career Researchers

William T. Grant Scholars Program 2026: A $425,000 Five-Year Award for Early-Career Researchers

The William T. Grant Scholars Program is a career-development award for promising early-career researchers. It supports a five-year research and mentoring plan that significantly expands the applicant’s expertise in a new discipline, method, or content area. The award is designed for a researcher who has already shown the ability to conduct high-quality work but needs protected time, structured mentoring, and a substantial plan of professional growth to take the next step.

This page is a historical reference for the 2026 competition. The William T. Grant Foundation’s official funding page says that the 2026 competition is closed and that dates for the next competition will be posted in January 2027. The archived deadline was June 30, 2026; it should not be read as an open deadline for a new application. Anyone preparing for a future round should return to the official program page when the Foundation publishes new dates and guidelines.

Key details

The Foundation describes the award as exactly $425,000 over five years. Its guidelines say that awards begin July 1 of the award year and are made to the applicant’s institution. The award must not replace the institution’s existing support for the applicant’s research. The budget can support research expenses such as graduate students and study participants, while mentors cannot be paid from the award. The FAQ notes that mentors receive a $500 honorarium in exchange for annual program reports.

What the program is meant to support

The Scholars Program is not simply a project grant for work that is already within an applicant’s established specialty. The Foundation looks for a significant change in the applicant’s trajectory. A strong plan identifies the expertise the applicant lacks, explains why that expertise is important to the research questions, and sets out the training and mentoring activities needed to acquire it. The shift may involve a different discipline, method, or content area than the applicant’s prior research and training.

The five-year plan can include several connected studies or stages, but it needs to be coherent. The Foundation expects the research questions, design, methods, and analysis plan to fit one another. It also expects a realistic account of feasibility, resources, time, sampling, measurement, and, where relevant, statistical power or the logic of qualitative case selection. Plans may describe later years in less detail than the opening work, but they still need to show that the full program can be carried out.

The award also creates a professional community. The Foundation holds an annual summer retreat where Scholars discuss work in progress and receive feedback on research design, methods, and professional development. Scholars may attend other Foundation workshops relevant to their work. They may also apply for an additional mentoring award to support junior researchers of color; that later opportunity is separate from the initial Scholars application and is announced to eligible Scholars.

The two research areas

Applicants must align the proposed research with one of the Foundation’s two focus areas.

Reducing inequality

This area supports studies of programs, policies, or practices intended to reduce inequality in young people’s academic, social, behavioral, or economic outcomes. The population is young people ages 5 to 25 in the United States. The Foundation names inequality related to race, ethnicity, economic standing, sexual or gender minority status, language-minority status, and immigrant origins. It is particularly interested in work that can clarify mechanisms of change, test interventions, or help address systemic racism and other structural foundations of inequality.

The Foundation welcomes multiple disciplines and methods. Potential youth-serving systems include education, justice, housing, child welfare, and mental health. A descriptive study can fit if it increases understanding of how a program, policy, or practice operates to reduce inequality; an intervention study can fit if it tests an effort intended to narrow unequal outcomes. Merely documenting an unequal outcome without a clear connection to a response, mechanism, or practice is a weaker match.

Improving the use of research evidence

This area concerns how research evidence is used, how its usefulness can be improved, and what happens when decision-makers use it. Relevant decision-makers include policymakers, public agency leaders, organizational managers, intermediaries, community organizers, and others who shape youth-serving systems in the United States.

The Foundation welcomes impact studies that test strategies for improving research use or examine whether improved research use leads to better youth outcomes. It also welcomes descriptive studies of the strategies, mechanisms, and conditions that improve research use, as well as measurement studies that develop valid and reliable ways to measure it. A proposal should make the pathway to benefits for young people clear rather than treating evidence use as an abstract organizational goal.

Eligibility for the 2026 competition

The Foundation makes grants only to tax-exempt organizations and does not make grants to individuals. Applicants may be based in the United States or abroad, but the supporting organization must be eligible and the research must have compelling policy or practice implications for youth in the United States.

Applicants must have received their doctorate within seven years of submitting the application. The Foundation calculates this by adding seven to the year the doctorate was conferred; the month does not matter. For applicants in medicine, the seven-year period is measured from completion of the first residency. Applicants of any discipline can apply if the proposed work fits a focus area.

The applicant must be employed in a career-ladder position. For many researchers this means a tenure-track university appointment. In another type of organization, there must be a clear path to advancement in a research career and the organization must be fiscally responsible for the applicant’s position. The award is not intended for doctoral students or postdoctoral fellows and may not be used as a postdoctoral fellowship.

Institutional nomination is mandatory. An institution may nominate more than one person overall, but only one applicant may be nominated from each major division, such as a College of Arts and Sciences or Medical School, in a given year. The chairperson of the nominating college or division, usually the dean, submits the nominating statement. The institution must also commit sufficient resources for the five-year plan, including research facilities, equipment, colleagues, administrative support, and the balance of the applicant’s salary. At least half of the Scholar’s paid time must be spent conducting research.

Application steps and materials

The 2026 application window is over, but its process is useful for preparing for the next round. The Foundation’s FAQ says there is no letter of inquiry. An applicant must first be nominated by the institution before submitting application materials.

1. Confirm the institutional route. Ask the research office, dean, department chair, or division leader how the limited-submission nomination will be handled. Because the one-per-major-division rule can require an internal competition, the internal timetable may come before the Foundation’s dates.
2. Check the eligibility clock and institutional status. Confirm the doctorate or first-residency year, the career-ladder appointment, the nonprofit or tax-exempt status of the supporting organization, and the institution’s ability to protect at least half of paid time for research.
3. Choose one focus area. The research plan should directly address reducing inequality or improving the use of research evidence for U.S. youth ages 5 to 25. State the contribution to theory and empirical knowledge, the relevance to policy or practice, and why the design and analysis answer the questions.
4. Define the expertise to be added. Explain exactly how the award will change the applicant’s capabilities. The Foundation’s examples include taking courses or workshops, learning new data-collection or analytic techniques, receiving repeated feedback on manuscripts and tools, and developing new professional networks. A single promise to meet a mentor monthly is not enough.
5. Recruit one or two mentors. The Foundation allows one to two mentors for the first two years, with two typical and recommended. Mentors should have the credentials, expertise, resources, and time to help with the proposed shift. Mentor letters and the mentoring plan should agree on goals, interaction frequency, substantive topics, training activities, and evidence of progress. Proposed mentors cannot also submit reference letters.
6. Assemble the submission. The official applicant-resources page provides an abstract form, an abridged C.V. form, and a budget and budget-justification form. The full application also needs the research and mentoring plans, the institutional nomination, and the required mentor and reference letters described in the current guidelines. Use the Foundation’s application system and the next published guide for the exact format and limits.
7. Track separate letter and application deadlines. For the 2026 competition, the online application opened March 27, 2026, at 3 p.m. ET. Mentor and reference letters were due June 10, 2026, at 3 p.m. ET, and the application deadline was June 30, 2026, at 3 p.m. ET. Those dates have passed and should not be reused for a future cycle until the Foundation confirms them.

How selection worked

Foundation staff first screened abstracts, brief C.V.s, and, when warranted, full applications for fit with the research areas and other review criteria. The Scholars Selection Committee then reviewed the remaining applications, with each application receiving detailed reviews from two committee members. The committee selected approximately ten finalists.

For the 2026 competition, finalists were invited to New York City for an interview in February 2027. Before the interview, two external reviewers assessed each finalist’s proposal. During the interview, finalists responded to committee members’ and external experts’ reviews. The committee then selected four to six Scholars to recommend to the Board of Trustees. Applicants were to be notified of the Trustees’ decision by the end of March 2027.

Reviewers assess the applicant’s potential to become an influential researcher, prior training and publications, and record of first-authored, high-quality empirical publications in peer-reviewed outlets. They also assess whether the award would significantly extend the applicant’s expertise. For the research plan, reviewers look for strong theory and empirical grounding, rigorous and appropriate methods, attention to gender, ethnic, and cultural appropriateness, feasibility, cohesion, and a clear contribution to one focus area. For the mentoring plan, they look for specific goals, credible mentors, a real time commitment, and activities that add significant value beyond an ordinary mentoring relationship.

What to do now that the cycle is closed

Do not submit against the archived June 30, 2026 date. The official Foundation page currently labels the Scholars Program closed and says that dates for the next competition will be posted in January 2027. Until that announcement appears, there is no confirmed next deadline to record.

Researchers considering a future application can use the closed cycle to prepare: review the Foundation’s focus-area descriptions, identify the precise expertise the award would add, discuss nomination procedures with the relevant institutional division, and approach potential mentors early enough to design a substantive two-year mentoring plan. Keep the research plan and mentoring plan connected. The strongest application will show not only that the proposed study matters, but also why the applicant needs this particular combination of training and guidance to carry it out.

The official program page, its FAQ, and the applicant-resources page are the authoritative places to check when the next round is announced. Confirm the new award amount, eligibility language, forms, letter deadline, application deadline, and review timeline before reusing any detail from this historical 2026 entry.