FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

NORC Media Contact:                              NSF Technical Contact:

Cathleen C. Savage                                   Jaqui Falkenheim

NORC                                                       National Science Foundation

202-223-1635                                           703-292-7798

savage-cathleen@norc.org                         jfalkenh@nsf.gov

NSF Awards Contract for Survey of Earned Doctorates to NORC

CHICAGO– Senior Vice President for Education and Child Development, Harrison N. Greene, announced today that NORC has been selected by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to conduct the Survey of Earned Doctorates (SED) for the next six years. NORC has held the SED contract since 1997.

“The SED is a tremendous informational resource for the United States and indeed the world. We’re looking forward to continuing work with the Graduate Deans, NSF, and the other federal sponsors to enhance this great project,” said Greene.

The survey is important to the nation and its policy makers because it allows them to see long-term trends in the numbers and fields of study of the new research doctorate recipients. The SED has charted the steady increases over the past three decades in the numbers of international students earning doctorates from U.S. universities, and the growing representation of women among doctorate recipients.

The SED is sponsored by the National Science Foundation and five other federal agencies (National Institutes of Health, U.S. Department of Education, National Endowment for the Humanities, U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration). 

The survey gathers information annually from all new U.S. research doctorate graduates (more than 45,000 in 2006) about their educational histories, funding sources, and post-doctoral plans. The SED also collects valuable information on trends in the length of time it takes to earn the doctorate, students’ sources of financial support, and the numbers and types of institutions granting research doctorates.

The SED employs a range of data collection modes -- paper survey, Web, write-on PDF, and critical-item phone completion -- that facilitate NORC achieving annual survey response rates of at least 91 percent.

Each year the SED data are added to a large historical record of doctorate-degree graduates, which contains data collected since 1920 on over 1.6 million doctorate recipients. The annual information is used to track the number of graduates in various fields; the educational paths of scientists, engineers, and humanists; and the movement of graduates into the labor market.

Mary Hess, a senior survey director at NORC and the lead project manager of the SED since 2002, will direct the project under the new contract. Hess notes that the project provides work for more than 40 staff members. The SED is conducted from NORC’s Chicago offices in Hyde Park and the downtown Loop.

Questionnaires, brochures, summary data and reports from the SED are available at: www.norc.org/sed.htm and www.nsf.gov/statistics/doctorates

NORC at the University of Chicago, known since 1941 as the National Opinion Research Center, conducts high quality, social science research in the public interest. Learn more at www.norc.org.