NRC Ranks 5,000 U.S. Doctoral Programs

October 4, 2010 

The National Research Council released a its long-awaited report evaluating 5,000 U.S. doctoral programs in 62 academic fields at 212 universities. Based on findings of the 2005-2006 academic year, the report's scheduled release has been postponed since 2007. 

Titled “An Assessment of Doctoral Programs in the United States,” the report contains information on faculty publications, grants and awards, students' GRE scores, financial aid, employment outcomes, program size, time taken to complete degree, faculty composition, and diversity of students and faculty.

The report ranks programs via survey-based ratings, which reflect the relative importance of characteristics in a program to faculty in the field, and regression-based ratings, which compare individual programs based on randomly selected faculty evaluators’ ratings of a sample of programs in each field. 

Nationwide, 11% of programs received a regression rating 1-4. Only 10% of programs nationwide received a survey rating 1-4.

Several Ph.D. programs at Princeton University, for example, received survey-based and regression-based ratings of between one and four: applied and computational mathematics, electrical engineering, mathematics, and computer science. 

"There are many different sources of uncertainty in the data," said Jeremiah P. Ostriker, chairman of the NRC project committee and professor of astrophysics at Princeton University. "That means that we can't say that this is the 10th best program by such-and-such criteria. Instead, we can say that it's between 5th and 20th, where that range includes a 90 percent confidence level. It's a little unsatisfactory, but at least it's honest." 

Debra W. Stewart, president of the Council of Graduate Schools, noted that the long-term response to the report "will be the important one. I think that the framework of this report will help support an ethos of continuous improvement." 

Source: The National Academies Press; AACRAO Official Press Release; The Chronicle of Higher Education (September 28, 2010); The Daily Princetonian (September 30, 2010)