Planning Meeting on Indicators of Doctoral Education

National Academy Of Sciences, Washington DC

Investigators

Abstract

The National Research Council (NRC) of the National Academy of Sciences will hold a planning meeting to discuss the creation of a program to collect and disseminate information about research doctoral education. Participants will include representatives of graduate research programs, higher education associations, organizations that provide comparative information on doctoral programs, and others with relevant knowledge and expertise. This meeting will consider the range of data currently available about doctoral education and the potential uses of additional data that could be obtained with a regular program of data collection. The meeting will also consider several practical aspects of such a program, including the willingness of universities to participate and the possible role of the NRC. The goal of the planning meeting is to determine if there is enough interest in and expected value from an ongoing indicators program to warrant further development work. The NRC has conducted three prior studies of research doctorate programs that were carried out on an ad hoc basis, with reports published in 1982, 1995, and 2010. The planning meeting will consider the results of these prior studies for insights about the types of data that might be included in an ongoing indicators program, the technical challenges in constructing these different types of data, and the potential value to the field of making such data available. In particular, the planning meeting will consider the use of reputational rankings and the production of program rankings, both of which were criticized in the prior NRC studies. In addition the planning meeting will consider the implications for the design of an ongoing program to provide information about research doctoral education of new information sources that have recently become available, including commercial efforts to provide comparative information on publication and citation data across doctoral programs. Broader Impacts. A set of doctoral indicators could potentially provide the graduate education community with a number of benefits, including benchmarks for institutional self-improvement, data for higher education research, and comparative information for policymakers and prospective students. As a result, an ongoing indicator program could help drive substantial increases in the quality of research doctoral programs.