Need US rank of grad degrees awarded

October 17, 2011 9:27 AM

How can I find where the U.S. ranks internationally in graduate degrees awarded in engineering, computer science and math?

I've searched the U.S. Dept. of Education site but cannot find this specific information.

posted by Joleta to Education (7 answers total)

Do you mean the number of degrees awarded per year?
posted by dgeiser13 at 9:52 AM on October 17, 2011

Response by poster: Yes, per year. Most recent year available.
posted by Joleta at 10:02 AM on October 17, 2011

I think that this will be more difficult to discover than you imagine, particularly to get good data on all graduate degrees (not just doctorates) and to get numbers on specific fields. You might start with the appendix tables (2-38 through 2-41) in the NSF's Science and Engineering Indicators 2010. It looks like that they, at the very least, tell you how many S&E doctoral degrees were awarded in most of the major Western and Asian countries, and what field, roughly, the students studied (e.g. Physical/biological sciences).

As of 2006, it looks like the USA produced the most S&E doctorates in all fields, except engineering, where China was #1. China did not report numbers for math/comp sci Ph.D.s, but they could be #1 there too.
posted by dd42 at 10:16 AM on October 17, 2011

I got as far as the UNESCO Institute for Statistics - Global Rankings. I don't know if the information on their site can be tweaked to give you the results you are looking for.
posted by dgeiser13 at 10:25 AM on October 17, 2011

You could also look at figure 2-27 (PDF) on page 2-35 of the above-mentioned NSF report. In the aggregate, the total numbers of doctoral degrees awarded in 2006 look to be about the following:

• USA: 22,000
• China: 21,000
• Germany: 9,000
• UK, Japan, and India: 7,500 each

As you can see from the graph, China was dramatically increasing the numbers of science & engineering degrees it awarded from 2000–2006, and it may well have surpassed the U.S. by now.
posted by Johnny Assay at 10:31 AM on October 17, 2011

The 2012 Statistical Abstract has Master's and Doctorate's Degrees Earned by Field (including totals) up through 2009. But that's for the US only. You would need the equivalent stats for every other country of interest before ranking them.
posted by dgeiser13 at 10:31 AM on October 17, 2011

Response by poster: Thanks, all. I was asked to find this number for my boss (who assumed it would be easily accessible). We're going to go in a different direction for the document, since this wasn't a major part of the report and we don't have time to do all the research and number crunching.
posted by Joleta at 11:01 AM on October 17, 2011