A Data-Based Assessment of Research-Doctorate Programs in the United States

A Data-Based Assessment of Research-Doctorate Programs in the United States provides an unparalleled dataset collected from doctoral institutions, doctoral programs, doctoral faculty and public sources that can be used to assess the quality and effectiveness of doctoral programs based on measures important to faculty, students, administrators, funders, and other stakeholders. The committee collected 20 measures that include characteristics of the faculty, such as their publications, citations, grants, and diversity; characteristics of the students, such as their GRE scores, financial support, publications, and diversity; and characteristics of the program, such as number of Ph.D.’s granted over five years, time to degree, percentage of student completion, and placement of students after graduation. The data were collected for the academic year 2005–2006 from more than 5,000 doctoral programs at 212 universities. These observations span 62 fields, and the research productivity data are based typically on a five-year interval. Some datasets (such as publications and citations) go as far back as 1981. Information on enrollments and faculty size were also collected for 14 emerging fields.