Graduate Enrollment in Science, Engineering, and Health Continues to Increase among Foreign Nationals, while Postdoctoral Appointment Trends Vary across Fields | NSF

Conducted since 1966, the GSS is an annual survey of all academic institutions in the United States that grant research-based master’s or doctoral degrees in SEH fields. The 2022 GSS collected data from 22,519 organizational units (departments, programs, affiliated research centers, and health care facilities) at 690 eligible institutions and their affiliates in the United States, Puerto Rico, and Guam. The unit response rate was 98.7%. An overview of the survey is available at https://ncses.nsf.gov/surveys/graduate-students-postdoctorates-s-e/2022.

In 2020, the GSS amended its taxonomy to align with the revised NCSES Taxonomy of Disciplines (TOD) and the 2020 National Center for Education Statistics’ Classification of Instructional Programs (CIP). The only newly ineligible CIP codes were those dropped by the 2020 CIP. As such, these changes did not lead to a large shift in overall reported GSS counts, and data remain comparable with data from 2017 to 2019. Additionally, new CIP codes, such as data science and medical clinical sciences, were added, along with other codes in GSS-eligible series; although these CIP codes are newly eligible, a review of unit names from prior years indicates that many of them were being reported before 2020. Some further adjustments to allow for additional detail in some fields were made to the GSS taxonomy based on the 2020 CIP codes reported to the GSS. Finally, broad fields were added to engineering.

At the field level, some notable changes occurred that may impact trends. First, consistent with the 2020 CIP and TOD, veterinary biomedical and clinical sciences moved from the health sciences to agricultural sciences (which was then renamed agricultural and veterinary sciences). Human development is now reported under psychology, rather than social sciences, to align with the 2020 TOD. Finally, 22 new 2020 CIP codes were added to multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary studies; the addition of these CIP codes likely moved units that were already reported (i.e., many units named data science are now reported with new CIP codes that map to the new data science and data analytics GSS code). For more information about the 2020 GSS taxonomy change, see technical tables A-17, A-18a, and A-18b (https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsf22319).

GSS health fields are collected under the advisement of NIH. These GSS fields are about a third of all health fields in the National Center for Education Statistics’ CIP taxonomy. NIH information on trends seen within these selected health fields can be found at https://report.nih.gov/nihdatabook/. In the NCSES TOD, a master’s degree in a health field is considered to be an S&E-related degree rather than an S&E degree. In the GSS, health fields are reported separately from S&E fields, although they are included in total counts of master’s students.

The full set of data tables from the 2022 survey is available at https://ncses.nsf.gov/surveys/graduate-students-postdoctorates-s-e/2022. Data are also available in NCSES’s interactive data tool (https://ncsesdata.nsf.gov/ids/gss). For more information about the survey, contact the GSS Survey Manager, Michael Yamaner.