[lg policy] Survey of Earned Doctorates Adds Detailed Data for Minority Groups

[Harold Schiffman]

Survey of Earned Doctorates Adds Detailed Data for Minority Groups
By Ben Terris

After nearly a year's delay, the National Science Foundation has released a
report on doctoral-degree attainment, combining data from 2007 and 2008 and
increasing the detail of data for minority groups.

The report on the Survey of Earned Doctorates, which is sponsored by the NSF
and several other federal agencies and prepared by the National Opinion
Research Center at the University of Chicago, usually comes out every
November. But last year the NSF released selected findings only and
postponed publication of the report in order to figure out a way to offer
more detailed data about degree attainment by minority groups while also
maintaining student privacy.

The findings released for 2007 omitted data on certain minority groups with
very small numbers, out of concern that the data could be used to identify
individuals in those groups and thus compromise their privacy. But people
who use the survey complained that the missing data rendered the survey less
useful.

To deal with those problems, this year's report discussed a number of
tactics that would make it hard to identify individuals from the data
reported. One option considered was to lump minority groups with very small
numbers into a larger, "underrepresented minorities" category. In the end,
the division of science resources at the NSF decided to group together areas
of study with small populations. Now, for example, the data show that there
are six American Indians who earned doctorates in "other fields," rather
than dividing them up among six possible categories.

This year's data say, among other things, that 48,802 people were awarded
doctorates in 2008, up 1.4 percent from 2007 (one of the smallest increases
in the last several years). Forty-six percent of doctorates earned in 2008
were awarded to women. The largest doctoral field was the life sciences with
11,088 doctorates awarded.

The full report, "Doctorate Recipients from U.S. Universities: Summary
Report 2007-8," is available on the NSF's Web site.

http://chronicle.com/article/Survey-of-Earned-Doctorates/49317/

-- 
=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+

Harold F. Schiffman

Professor Emeritus of
Dravidian Linguistics and Culture
Dept. of South Asia Studies
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305

Phone:  (215) 898-7475
Fax:  (215) 573-2138

Email:  haroldfs at gmail.com
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/

-------------------------------------------------
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/lgpolicy-list/attachments/20091204/47c19a4c/attachment.htm>
-------------- next part --------------
_______________________________________________
This message came to you by way of the lgpolicy-list mailing list
lgpolicy-list at groups.sas.upenn.edu
To manage your subscription unsubscribe, or arrange digest format: https://groups.sas.upenn.edu/mailman/listinfo/lgpolicy-list