The Trump administration has proposed cuts to research and labs across the U.S

There are nearly 500 regional public universities across the U.S. , serving around 5 million students.

These institutions of higher learning span nearly every state, with many rooted in rural areas and communities facing high unemployment, childhood poverty, and limited access to medical care.

At SIU , as at other regional universities, many research projects focus on overlooked issues.

Southern Illinois University has turned Carbondale into a cultural mecca and economic engine in an otherwise vast rural region that has been battered by the decline of manufacturing and coal mining.

Now more cuts threaten to push the university, and the town that depends on it, to a breaking point.

In 2021 SIU Chancellor Austin Lane rolled out Imagine 2030 —an ambitious blueprint for rebuilding SIU .

SIU lost almost 9,000 students in the decade that followed, a nearly 45 percent drop in enrollment .

Concerns surfaced that SIU was enrolling underprepared Black students from inner-city Chicago and failing to support them.

The university has been clawing its way back recently.