Notes

  1. 1 Whether an institution is operated by publicly elected or appointed officials, or by privately elected or appointed officials and derives its major source of funds from private sources, is referred to as its control.

  2. 2 Most data on institutions and some data on degrees used in this report come from the Department of Education’s Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS), which includes completion data for degrees (associate’s, bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral) as well as certificates below (less than 1 academic year, at least 1 but fewer than 2 academic years, and at least 3 but fewer than 4 academic years) and above (postbaccalaureate and post-master’s) the bachelor’s level (2018–19).

  3. 3 The Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education is available at http://carnegieclassifications.iu.edu/. The Basic Classification categorizes academic institutions primarily based on highest degree conferred, level of degree production, and research activity. This report uses the 2018 Carnegie Classification.

  4. 4 However, graduates from many different types of institutions go on to earn S&E doctoral degrees, as discussed by Burrelli and Rapoport (2008), Fiegener and Proudfoot (2013), and other sources.

  5. 5 For a list of all types and how they are designated, see NASEM 2019: Table 3-1 and Table 3-2. One comprehensive list of MSIs is maintained at https://cmsi.gse.rutgers.edu/content/msi-directory.

  6. 6 The Higher Education Act of 1965, as amended, defines an HBCU as “any historically Black college or university that was established prior to 1964, whose principal mission was, and is, the education of Black Americans.” In 2017–18, there were 101 HBCUs in operation in 19 states, the District of Columbia, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Half were public institutions, and half were private nonprofit.

  7. 7 HHE institutions are defined by the U.S. Department of Education as nonprofit public and private institutions of higher education whose full-time equivalent enrollment of undergraduate students is at least 25% Hispanic, according to data that institutions reported in IPEDS, conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). Institutions that enroll between 15% and 24% Hispanic students are considered “emerging HHEs.” Many researchers use high-Hispanic enrollment and Hispanic-serving institution (HSI) interchangeably. HSIs meet a federally designated criterion (i.e., public and private non-profit institutions whose undergraduate, full-time equivalent student enrollment is at least 25% Hispanic) and are eligible to apply for Hispanic-serving institution status. Because there is no information on whether institutions apply for the HSI designation, the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics (NCSES) uses the 25% enrollment criterion to determine which institutions have HHE status. For additional information, see https://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ope/idues/hsidivision.html.

  8. 8 For information on S&E bachelor’s degrees awarded by tribal colleges and universities to American Indian or Alaska Native students, see NCSES WMPD 2021: Table 5-6.

  9. 9 A recent trend among states is to allow more community colleges to offer bachelor’s degrees. See Love et al. (2021) for more information.

  10. 10 These figures come from the 2019 National Survey of College Graduates, accessed using the Scientists and Engineers Statistical Data System: https://www.nsf.gov/statistics/sestat.

  11. 11 These figures are for U.S. citizens and permanent residents earning S&E doctoral degrees. The percentages for students on temporary visas are lower (NCSES SED 2020: Table 30), likely reflecting that many foreign students come to the United States specifically for graduate training.

  12. 12 Data are from IPEDS.

  13. 13 Most of the remainder, 14%, were in “other social sciences.”

  14. 14 Information on the history of distance and correspondence and online education may be found in Harasim (2000).

  15. 15 No standard guideline exists that specifies how much education must be delivered via technology to qualify as online or distance education (Miller, Topper, and Richardson 2017). IPEDS defines distance education as “education that uses one or more technologies to deliver instruction to students who are separated from the instructor and to support regular and substantive interaction between the students and the instructor synchronously or asynchronously.” Distance education courses are courses “in which the instructional content is delivered exclusively via distance education.” Distance education programs are those “for which all the required coursework for program completion is able to be completed via distance education courses.” For more detail, see https://surveys.nces.ed.gov/ipeds/VisGlossaryAll.aspx.

  16. 16 Published price is “the price institutions charge for tuition and fees, as well as room and board, in the case of students residing on campus” (College Board 2020a).

  17. 17 Tuition and fee figures represent charges to full-time first-year undergraduate students over the course of a 9-month academic year of 30 semester hours or 45 quarter hours. In addition to tuition and fees, room and board constitutes another expense for students.

  18. 18 At the time of doctoral degree conferral, 41% of 2020 doctorate recipients held debt related to their undergraduate or graduate education, or both (NCSES SED 2020: Table 38).

  19. 19 Sources used by the College Board are available at https://trends.collegeboard.org/student-aid/notes-sources. Note that this section reflects information for all students, not just those studying S&E fields.

  20. 20 The College Board defines graduate students as master’s, doctoral, and professional students. For most of this report, when data on graduate students are presented, professional students are not included.

  21. 21 Occupational outcomes of graduates are covered in the Indicators 2022 report “The STEM Labor Force of Today: Science, Engineering, and Skilled Technical Workers.” In addition, the U.S. Census Bureau has produced a visualization mapping college majors and occupation groups, which can be broken out by a student’s field of study and demographic characteristics: https://www.census.gov/dataviz/visualizations/stem/stem-html/.

  22. 22 Van Noy and Zeidenberg (2014) distinguish between “S&E” and “technician” programs at community colleges. S&E programs tend to prepare students for occupations requiring a bachelor’s degree or higher. Technician programs tend to prepare students for occupations requiring associate’s degrees or certificates (although some go on to bachelor’s degrees or higher). Relative to those in technician programs, a higher proportion of students in S&E programs seek to transfer to 4-year institutions, and fewer of them seek associate’s degrees or certificates.

  23. 23 The total number of bachelor’s degrees conferred annually by U.S. universities and colleges in all fields increased from fewer than 1.3 million in 2000 to over 2 million in 2019.

  24. 24 In 2019, 707 U.S. institutions enrolled graduate students, including 695 enrolling master’s students and 410 enrolling doctoral students (NCSES GSS 2019: Table 4-5).

  25. 25 The Survey of Earned Doctorates (SED) also collects information on interdisciplinary doctoral degrees. Analysis of some of these data is available in Millar and Dillman (2012).

  26. 26 This report refers to racial and ethnic groups following the standards for collection of data on race and ethnicity announced by the Office of Management and Budget in 1997, as described in https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsf19304/technical-notes#racial-and-ethnic-information. To facilitate ease of reading, the report sometimes adopts a shorthand when referring to specific groups (e.g., “Black” for “Black or African American,” “Hispanic” for “Hispanic or Latino”). Additionally, the category “Asian or Pacific Islander” was replaced in 2011 with the separate categories “Asian” and “Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander.” Limited data about S&E degree attainment of another group, military veterans, are available in Milan (2018).

  27. 27 The analysis here focuses on U.S. citizens and permanent residents. Race and ethnicity data are not available for temporary visa holders in the data sources used here. Some changes by race and ethnicity over time may reflect the way NCES and other federal statistical agencies collect information on this topic and how students self-identify over time. Beginning in 2011, some students may be classified as multiracial; in the past, they may have been reported as American Indian or Alaska Native, Asian or Pacific Islander, Black, Hispanic, or White. In 2019, 7% of bachelor’s degree recipients were students of more than one race or other or unknown race or ethnicity. Of these, essentially the same number (71,000) were more than one race as other or unknown race or ethnicity (70,000); however, the 2019 totals reflect a large increase since 2011 in numbers classified as more than one race and a large decrease in those classified as other or unknown race or ethnicity.

  28. 28 More information on educational attainment by demographic group is available from the Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences’ annual Digest of Education Statistics. According to this report, in 2019 the percentage of people ages 25–29 with a bachelor’s or higher-level degree in any field differed among Blacks (29%, up from 20% in 2011), Hispanics (21%, up from 13% in 2011), American Indian or Alaska Natives (14%, down from 17% in 2011), Asians and Pacific Islanders (68%, up from 56% in 2011), Whites (45%, up from 39% in 2011), and persons of more than one race (34%, up from 32%) (de Brey et al. Digest of Education Statistics 2019: Table 104.20).

  29. 29 There may be a time lag between patterns observed in enrollment data and those observed in degree data. Degrees take several years to earn, and not all enrolled students earn degrees.

  30. 30 Data in this section come from the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS’s) Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS), which collects administrative data, including numbers of international students enrolled in colleges and universities in the United States who are on visas (DHS/ICE 2020). It may not include students enrolled in online-only programs who are not physically present in the United States. Data include students enrolled in associate’s, bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degree programs whose status is listed as “active” in the SEVIS database on 15 November of each year. Those participating in optional practical training (OPT) are excluded. Data on OPT students are provided by the Institute of International Education’s annual Open Doors report (2020), which constitutes another valuable source of information on international students in the United States and related topics.

  31. 31 From 2011 to 2019, the number of U.S. citizens and permanent residents earning bachelor’s degrees increased from about 1.7 million to 1.9 million. In 2019, around 35% of bachelor’s degrees awarded to U.S. citizens and permanent residents were in S&E fields.

  32. 32 During this interval, the number of U.S. citizens and permanent residents earning S&E master’s degrees increased from 151,000 to 210,000.

  33. 33 Data are from IPEDS. According to SED data, temporary visa holders represented 37% of U.S. S&E doctoral recipients in 2019.

  34. 34 Data are based on national labor force surveys and are subject to sampling error; therefore, small differences among countries may not be meaningful (OECD 2020).

  35. 35 For more information, see https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/education/isced-2011-operational-manual/tertiary-education_9789264228368-9-en.

  36. 36 The international degree data presented in this report were obtained largely from OECD’s statistical database, OECD.Stat (2021b). For a few countries not available from OECD, as noted in the Supplemental Tables, data were obtained from Eurostat (2021) or from country-specific sources. Because of changes in the International Standard Classification of Education (more information about which is available in https://www.nsf.gov/statistics/2018/nsb20181/assets/561/comparability-of-international-data-in-tertiary-education.pdf), data from 2000 to 2012 may not be strictly comparable with data from 2013 and subsequent years. Caution is warranted in interpreting time trends across this interval. For consistency and comparability, U.S. data as reported by OECD were used and may differ from U.S. data from IPEDS and other sources, as presented in other sections of this report. More detailed methodology notes on international first-university degrees and international doctoral degree data are available in the Technical Appendix.

  37. 37 For international degree comparisons between the United States and other countries, this report uses data as reported to OECD, which may differ from IPEDS and SED. Additionally, for international degree comparisons, S&E does not include medical or other health fields because international sources cannot separate the MD degrees from degrees in the health fields, and the MDs are professional or practitioner degrees, not research degrees.

  38. 38 In 2019, 35% of U.S. S&E doctorates were earned by students on temporary visas, according to IPEDS. Equivalent data are not available from OECD.

  39. 39 Higher education institutions have also opened increasing numbers of campuses in other countries. Data on international branch campuses are maintained by the Cross-Border Education Research Team (http://cbert.org/), and the most recent available data were reviewed in Indicators 2018: Chapter 2.

  40. 40 Data on internationally mobile students come from the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (2021). More information on the data is available at http://uis.unesco.org/sites/default/files/documents/education-statistics-faqs-2018-en.pdf. Project Atlas from the Institute of International Education (IIE) is another resource on international student mobility, including trends in U.S. students who earn degrees abroad (https://www.iie.org/Research-and-Insights/Project-Atlas).

  41. 41 For data on U.S. students studying abroad, see IIE’s Open Doors report (2020).

  42. 42 See Project Atlas from IIE: https://www.iie.org/Research-and-Insights/Project-Atlas.

  43. 43 See https://www.teqsa.gov.au/latest-news/publications/statistics-report-teqsa-registered-higher-education-providers-2018. Numbers reported by other sources—for instance, for Canada (available at https://cbie.ca/international-students-surpass-2022-goal/)—may differ from those in Figure HED-31, which are from UIS. One possible reason for the discrepancy is that UIS data cover students who pursue higher education degrees outside their country of origin and do not include students who are under short-term for-credit study and exchange programs that last less than a full academic year. For more information, see https://www.iie.org/en/Research-and-Insights/Project-Atlas/FAQs#Q6.