The pipeline for Ph.D.s out of U.S. universities is shrinking at an unprecedented rate: Spots are disappearing, interest is fading, and other countries are eager to fill the void, Axios' Erica Pandey writes.

• Why it matters: America graduates more Ph.D.s than any other country. They go on to invent things, cure diseases and win Nobel Prizes.

🧮 By the numbers: Harvard is cutting Ph.D. admission slots in sciences by 75% and in humanities by 60%, the Harvard Crimson reported this past week.

• MIT admitted fewer biology Ph.D.s this year than last — and the University of Washington's astronomy department is suspending Ph.D. admissions for the upcoming academic year, Nature's Alexandra Witze reports.
• Brown is pausing Ph.D. admissions in at least six humanities and social science departments, per The Brown Daily Herald.

Zoom out: "This is an acceleration of a trend that was already underway," says Julie Posselt, a professor of higher education at USC. "It's not a situation that we can solely place blame on the Trump administration for."

• As more graduate students unionize, it's becoming tougher for universities to afford their salaries, pushing some programs to shrink, she notes.

Even before the Trump administration started revoking international students' visas, many were already choosing programs in Australia, China, the U.K., Germany and beyond over U.S. schools.

• At the same time, the "is college worth it?" debate looms large, and many prospective students are wary of taking on debt to pursue grad school. About 70% of Americans say higher education is "going in the wrong direction," per a recent Pew Research Center survey.

🥊 Now there's fresh political pressure.

• Universities have lost billions of dollars in federal research funding. International student arrivals to the U.S. in August dropped by 19% as the government clamps down on visas, AP reports.

Share this story.

President Trump landed in Malaysia to kick off a nearly weeklong Asia tour.

• Representatives of the U.S. and China have been meeting separately to hash out trade ahead of Trump's first second-term meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping, scheduled to take place in South Korea on Thursday.

💬 "President Trump gave me a great deal of negotiating leverage with the threat of the 100% tariffs on November 1. And I believe we've reached a very substantial framework that will avoid that and allow us to discuss many other things with the Chinese." Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told NBC's Kristin Welker in an interview taped early this morning for "Meet the Press."

• The news will come as a huge relief to financial markets, which feared an escalation of the trade war, and to businesses, which worried about an unimaginable surge in their costs, Axios' Ben Berkowitz reports.

✈️ Trump also said he plans to increase tariffs on Canadian imports because of a television ad sponsored by the Ontario government, which used excerpts from a Ronald Reagan speech to slam tariffs.

• Trump wrote in a Truth Social post in-flight to Malaysia: "Their Advertisement was to be taken down, IMMEDIATELY, but they let it run last night during the World Series, knowing that it was a FRAUD. Because of their serious misrepresentation of the facts, and hostile act, I am increasing the Tariff on Canada by 10% over and above what they are paying now."

Read on.

AI companies are one-upping the tech trend of 9-9-6 — working from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week. Now, some top AI researchers are putting in (and bragging about) 100-hour workweeks, The Wall Street Journal reports (gift link).

• They joke about 0-0-2 — midnight to midnight, with a two-hour weekend.

The less-extreme (!) 72-hour workweek was popularized in China and is now a thing with AI companies in Silicon Valley and even some AI startups in New York, Axios' Emily Peck writes.

🔭 The big picture: Just a few years ago, a roaring labor market led employers to focus on making people happy and fostering work-life balance — while labor unions enjoyed a surge in organizing.

• Now the job market is shaky. Offices are filling back up, and tech companies, particularly startups, aren't shy about demanding long hours.

In San Francisco, workers are increasingly coming in on Saturdays, according to data from Ramp, which tracked a jump this year in corporate card transactions ordering takeout on the weekends.

• A startup called Sonatic posted a job requiring on-site work, "7 days a week" earlier this year. It includes free housing and a subscription to Raya, an online dating service.

Keep reading.

Coffee prices are rising faster, year over year, than any other item the government tracks in the Consumer Price Index.

Kamala Harris gave the strongest hint yet that she might run for president again in an interview with the BBC this weekend.

• The former vice president said she's confident her great-nieces will see a woman in the Oval Office in their lifetimes and that it could "possibly" be her.

"I am not done," she told BBC's Laura Kuenssberg. "I have lived my entire career as a life of service, and it's in my bones."

• Watch the clip.

Police have arrested suspects in connection with the theft of French crown jewels from the Louvre, Paris officials said today, a week after the heist at the world's most visited museum that stunned the world.

• One of the men taken into custody was preparing to leave the country from Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport.

Authorities didn't confirm how many arrests have been made, and didn't say whether the stolen jewels — worth $102 million — have been recovered, AP reports.

• Get the latest ... Go deeper: The $100 million Louvre theft could make France's stolen crown jewels as famous as the Mona Lisa.

Immigration raids in California's Coachella Valley — a key source of the nation's produce — have upended daily life, keeping parents from fields, children from school and multiple families crowded into shared homes.

• Why it matters: Fear in one of the country's poorest regions spotlights how the Trump administration's immigration crackdown is shaking a vulnerable labor force, mostly undocumented, overwhelming churches and food banks, Axios' Russell Contreras reports.

The big picture: The Coachella Valley — a desert area in southern California, 2.5 hours east of LA and home to Palm Springs — supports year-round farming because of its sunny climate, and access to irrigation fed by the Colorado River.

• The region employs tens of thousands of farmworkers and produces crops during the winter months when other areas can't, helping stabilize the national food supply.

Axios interviewed more than a dozen farmworkers, volunteers, advocates and religious leaders in the valley, who said the panic is pushing families to the brink of starvation.

• They said three-bedroom trailers have become homes to three families, sometimes accommodating as many as 15 people.

Read on.

Today is the 200th birthday of the Erie Canal — the 363-mile engineering marvel connecting the Great Lakes to the Atlantic Ocean via the Hudson River.

• Humans dug the canal and built 18 aqueducts and 83 locks to account for 675 feet of elevation change along its route.

New York paid for and managed construction of the canal from 1817 to 1825. It was completed two years early and under budget, George F. Will writes for the Washington Post.

• The Erie Canal minted the "Empire State," Will notes. "[B]y linking Americans living west of the Appalachian mountains to the Hudson River, it created New York City as a financial center."

Keep reading George Will's column (gift link).