New Report Offers Overview of Doctoral Education in the Twentieth Century

A report issued earlier this year by the National Science Foundation provides a comprehensive look at doctoral education in the United States during the twentieth century. U.S. Doctorates in the Twentieth Century examines trends such as the rapid growth of doctoral education, the increasing diversity of doctoral students, the growing debt burden for students, and growth in the time to completion of the PhD and in the median age of doctorate recipients. The report focuses special attention on the relative impact of these trends in science and engineering fields and in non-science and engineering fields. Considered together, the patterns outlined in the report point to rapid changes in doctoral education—changes that were particularly pronounced in the last twenty-five years of the twentieth century and that will likely continue in the twenty-first.

FINDINGS

Characteristics of Doctorate Recipients

• Men received about 73 percent of all doctorates awarded between 1920 and 1999, but there has been a rapid rise in the numbers of women earning doctorates since the 1960s: by 1999, women earned 41 percent of all doctorates, and more than half of all non-science and engineering doctorates.
• Minorities accounted for nearly 14 percent of all science and engineering doctorates and more than 14 percent of all non-science and engineering doctorates between 1995 and 1999, up from about 6 percent (for science and engineering) and less than 10 percent (for other fields) between 1975 and 1979.
• Foreign nationals earned almost one out of every three doctorates awarded in the U.S. during the 1990s.
• Almost 2 percent of people who received doctorates between 1993 and 1999 reported having one or more disabilities.

The Path to the Doctorate

• About 9 percent of all PhDs who received doctorates between 1975 and 1984 had attended a two-year college, but the proportion fell to about 8 percent by the late 1990s, most likely as a result of an increased number of foreign students pursuing doctorates in the U.S.
• About 57 percent of PhDs graduating in 1980–81 and about 58 percent of those graduating in 1996–97 received most of their financial support from research and teaching assistantships, fellowships, traineeships, internships, and dissertation grants.
• In 1999, for the first time, more than 50 percent of graduating PhDs reported having debt related to their undergraduate and graduate education; by the end of the century, about 20 percent of PhDs owed more that $20,000 in education-related debt, compared to less than 7 percent in the late 1980s.
• Between 1920–24 and 1995–99, the median total time between the receipt of the baccalaureate and the receipt of the doctorate rose from seven to almost eleven years, with men on average taking about ten years and women taking about twelve years.

The full text of U.S. Doctorates in the Twentieth Century is available from the National Science Foundation.

DID YOU KNOW?

• More than 1.35 million doctorates were awarded in the United States during the last eight decades of the twentieth century—62 percent in science and engineering and 38 percent in other fields.
• Since 1962, education has been the largest major field for people earning doctorates.
• Since 1960, the median age of doctorate recipients has increased by about two years, to 33.7 years, with doctorate recipients in science and engineering much younger (31.9 years old) than those in other fields (39.5 years old).