Newer information is available.

General Notes

During the production of this report the America COMPETES Reauthorization Act of 2010 was signed into law. Section 505 of the bill renames the Division of Science Resources Statistics as the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics (NCSES). The Center retains its reporting line to the Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences within the National Science Foundation. The new name signals the central role of NCSES in the collection, interpretation, analysis, and dissemination of objective data on the science and engineering enterprise.

Data presented here are derived from the annual National Science Foundation–National Institutes of Health Survey of Graduate Students and Postdoctorates in Science and Engineering (GSS). Unless otherwise specified, data published here represent estimates of total graduate enrollment as of fall 2009 in science, engineering, and selected health fields in 13,285 graduate units (departments, research centers, degree-granting programs, and affiliate health facilities) at 575 academic institutions in the United States and outlying areas.

The survey was refined in 2007 to improve reporting: new fields were added, and some fields were reclassified. Because of these changes, the 2007 data are presented two ways in multi-year tables:

• "2007new" shows the data as they were collected using the new methodology.
• "2007old" shows the data as they would have been collected in prior years.

The 2009 and 2008 data should be comparable to "2007new" data.

Beginning in 2008, the tables that provide data by institutions no longer list names of the non-responding institutions, although their data are imputed and included in the totals for all institutions.

Collection of these graduate enrollment and postdoctoral researcher data began in 1966, and the survey has been modified periodically since then. Appendix A, "Technical Notes," provides more detailed information on the survey over the years. The latest data for prior years are published in this report; only these data should be used in historical analyses.

Data from the GSS fall 1972 through fall 2009 are also available in public-use files and from the WebCASPAR system at https://webcaspar.nsf.gov/.

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