​We invite you to explore the electronic proceedings of the 2016 Global Summit, What Is a Doctorate?. Panel summaries provide an overview of the papers and discussion, with individual papers accessible at the links below.

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​Summit Program and Compilation of Papers*

*Individual papers below have been updated and edited for the electronic proceedings.

CGS contributions to the 2016 Summit were supported by a generous gift from the Educational Testing Service (ETS).

U.S. Master’s Degrees a Major Draw for International Graduate Students (12/17/2015)

New data from the Council of Graduate Schools (CGS) provide an unprecedented picture of the degree objectives of international graduate students studying in the United States. As the only report of its kind to offer data on the current fall term, International Graduate Applications and Enrollment: Fall 2015 reports applications, admissions, and enrollments of international master’s, certificate, and doctoral students at U.S. colleges and universities.

M.J.T. (“Mark”) Smith of Purdue University to Serve as Chair of CGS Board (12/15/2015)

The Council of Graduate Schools (CGS) Board of Directors has announced its officers for the 2016 term. CGS is governed by a 12-member Board of Directors drawn from member institutions. Board members serve for set terms.

Stephen S. Bush Wins 2015 Arlt Award in the Humanities (12/3/2015)

The Council of Graduate Schools (CGS) has awarded the 2015 Gustave O. Arlt Award in the Humanities to Dr. Stephen S. Bush, Manning Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Brown University. The awards ceremony was held during the CGS 55th Annual Meeting.

University of California Los Angeles Receives ETS/CGS Award for Innovation in Promoting Success in Graduate Education (12/3/2015)

The seventh annual ETS/CGS Award for Innovation in Promoting Success in Graduate Education: From Admission through Completion was presented to the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA). The award is sponsored by CGS and Educational Testing Service (ETS). Dr. Robin L. Garrell, Vice Provost for Graduate Education and Dean of The Graduate Division, accepted the award on UCLA’s behalf during the 55th Annual Meeting of the Council of Graduate Schools (CGS).

Winners of 2015 CGS/ProQuest® Distinguished Dissertation Awards Announced (12/3/2015)

The Council of Graduate Schools / ProQuest Distinguished Dissertation Awards, the nation’s most prestigious honors for doctoral dissertations, were presented to Jeongmin Choi and Timo Schaefer at an awards ceremony during the Council’s 55th Annual Meeting. Dr. Choi completed her PhD in 2014 at University of Missouri, in Plant Science, and Dr. Schaefer received his PhD in 2015 from Indiana University, in History.

Graduate Schools Report 3.5% Increase in First-time Enrollment (9/17/2015)

The Council of Graduate Schools (CGS) today reported a 3.5% one-year increase in first-time graduate enrollment between Fall 2013 and Fall 2014—the largest since 2009. Institutions responding to the CGE/GRE Survey of Graduate Enrollment & Degrees received more than 2.1 million applications for Fall 2014, extended over 850,000 offers of admission in Fall 2014, and enrolled nearly 480,000 incoming, first-time graduate students in fall 2014 graduate certificate, education specialist, master’s or doctoral programs—all new highs.

Master’s or Doctorate? For International Students Applying to U.S. Graduate Programs, Clear Preferences Emerge by Country, Field of Study (6/30/2015)

New data from the Council of Graduate Schools (CGS) provides a first-ever breakdown of international graduate applications by degree objective. The report, 2015 CGS International Graduate Admissions Survey: Preliminary Applications, collects data on international graduate applications by all geographic regions and fields of study, revealing trends important to the graduate research enterprise and our understanding of the global competition for top talent. Conducted annually since 2004, the survey was expanded this year to distinguish between applications to programs at the doctorate and master’s & certificate levels.

Edelma Huntley Named 2015-16 CGS Dean-in-Residence (6/8/2015)

The Council of Graduate Schools (CGS) has announced that Edelma Huntley, Dean of the Graduate School and Chief Research Officer at Appalachian State University from 2006 to 2014, has been named the CGS Dean-in-Residence for 2015-16. Dr. Huntley brings to the post significant experience leading graduate education, including serving as President of the Conference of Southern Graduate Schools (CSGS) from 2012 to 2014, and serving two terms on the CGS Diversity and Inclusion Committee. Huntley will join CGS on August 1.

CGS Report Highlights Completion Trends of Underrepresented Minorities in STEM Doctoral Programs (4/14/2015)

The Council of Graduate Schools (CGS) today released findings from the Doctoral Initiative on Minority Attrition and Completion (DIMAC), a 3-year study that examined patterns of degree completion and attrition among underrepresented minorities in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) fields. Funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF #1138814), the project collected data from doctoral students at twenty-one universities in the United States, including universities affiliated with NSF’s Alliances for Graduate Education and the Professoriate (AGEP) program.

CGS Builds on Efforts to Understand PhD Career Pathways (4/10/2015)

The Council of Graduate Schools (CGS) today announced it has been awarded grants from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to advance national and local understandings of the career pathways of PhD holders. Over the next nine months, with input from a range of stakeholders in the higher education community, CGS will develop a survey instrument and guidelines for data collection across a broad range of fields. These guidelines will be designed to help universities gather long-term career information from their PhD students and alumni with the goal of improving PhD programs.

Robert M. Augustine Appointed Senior Vice President for Two-Year Term (3/3/2015)

The Council of Graduate Schools (CGS) has announced that Robert M. (Bob) Augustine, Dean of the Graduate School, Research and International Programs at Eastern Illinois University (EIU), has been appointed to a two-year term as the Council’s Senior Vice President. In addition to serving two terms as President of the Illinois Association of Graduate Schools, Augustine served on the CGS Board of Directors from 2011 to 2014 and held the position of Board Chair in 2013. He will join CGS on August 1, 2015.

Brian Mitchell Named 2015-16 CGS/NSF Dean-in-Residence (1/22/2015)

The Council of Graduate Schools (CGS) has announced that Brian S. Mitchell, Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Tulane University, has been named the Council of Graduate Schools/National Science Foundation Dean-in-Residence for 2015-16. Dr. Mitchell brings to the post significant experience leading graduate education at his home university, having served as Tulane’s Associate Provost for Graduate Studies and Research from 2006 to 2014. Mitchell will join CGS on February 1.

**Please note: CGS will only feature stories from CGS member institutions, but we welcome the use of #GradImpact by the larger graduate and professional education community to promote this important work.

Join CGS in Advocating for the Power of Graduate Education

Do you have a great story to share about the impact of master’s or doctoral education? Do you know a graduate student or alumnus whose work has the potential to cure a disease, alleviate poverty, or educate the public? The Council of Graduate Schools would like to hear from you.

CGS will draw from member examples to tell the larger story of graduate education through a variety of outlets: the CGS website, newsletters, social media, advocacy efforts, and media outreach. Our goal is to demonstrate that graduate education matters not only to degree holders, but also to the communities where they live and work.

To that end, we invite CGS member institutions to submit stories in one of three categories below.*

• Innovative Graduate Students

Tell us about a current master’s or doctoral student who is engaged in innovative, high-impact research and/or professional activity. Examples might include, but not be limited to, a doctoral student conducting cutting-edge research, a PMA or PSM student advancing the work of a company or non-profit organization, or a group of MBA students who have created a promising start-up company.

• Recent Alumni Making a Difference

Highlight a recent alum or alums (graduating between 2011 and 2016) who has used their graduate education to make a difference. Examples might be alums working to improve public health locally or globally, educating and inspiring the public in a museum or library, doing high-impact research at a university or national laboratory, or improving teaching and learning.

• Exceptional Employers

Tell us about an employer of graduate students or alumni who is making a difference in the business, non-profit or government sectors. Examples might include employers working to bring medications to market more quickly and safely, to inform public policies, or to bring the arts to a public school system.

Criteria for Selection of Stories:

A committee will evaluate our selection of stories using the following principles:

• Impact on the Public Good: We are seeking examples that positively impact (or have a high potential to impact) the lives of others through education, health, safety and security, the humanities, and economic development. Examples from any field of study are welcome.

• Diversity: CGS will seek to present a diverse range of member institutions, fields of study, and degree types. We also seek a diverse representation of participants in graduate education, particularly in terms of race/ethnicity, gender, and age.

• Share-ability: We will give priority to examples that are already available publicly on at least one website. This will allow us to share them more broadly through our own website and social media outlets. For this reason, we require submissions to include a link to a URL address.

Stories deemed to be particularly effective at demonstrating the impact of graduate education on the public good will be highlighted on the home page of the CGS website or in GradEdge.

*There is no limit on the number of stories your institution may submit. However, please be aware that a large number of submissions will not result in greater representation of your institution in CGS outlets. We will work to ensure that representation is evenly distributed among member institutions that choose to submit examples.

Instructions for Submitting Stories:

Please complete this electronic web form.

Contact:

Katherine Hazelrigg

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

October 27, 2016

Contact
Katherine Hazelrigg (202) 461-3888/ khazelrigg@cgs.nche.edu

Washington, D.C. — The Council of Graduate Schools (CGS) announced today that it has been awarded a grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to help universities collect data on the career pathways of humanities PhDs. Through a competitive sub-award process, CGS will select 15 doctoral institutions to pilot surveys of humanities PhD students and alumni, gathering information about their professional aspirations, career pathways, and career preparation.

The project builds upon two earlier phases of CGS research: a feasibility study supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and a survey development phase supported by Mellon, Sloan, and the National Science Foundation (NSF). In the most recent phase, CGS developed two surveys—one for current PhD students and one for PhD alumni— by gathering input from senior university leaders, research funders, disciplinary societies, researchers, PhD students, and alumni.

While recent data exist on the first jobs obtained by PhDs in the humanities, relatively little is known about the longer career trajectories of these degree-holders. The survey pilot will be the first large-scale effort to collect data on the long-term career pathways of humanities PhDs since 1996, when the National Science Foundation’s Survey of Doctoral Recipients (SDR) eliminated the humanities from its data-collection efforts. While the main purpose of the project is to enable institutions to collect data about their own PhD alumni, it will also provide an opportunity to analyze patterns across the 15 partner institutions.

CGS President Suzanne Ortega noted that the initiative has the potential to improve the preparation of humanities PhDs for a more diverse range of careers. “Information on the full range of careers that humanities PhDs follow will allow graduate schools to improve curricula, professional development opportunities and career counseling services,” she said. “By offering a more complete picture of PhD holders’ career options, it will also enable current and prospective students to make more informed decisions when selecting degree programs and planning their careers.”

In the coming months, CGS will issue a Request-For-Proposals (RFP) to CGS member institutions to participate in the project as funded partners. The RFP will be accompanied by the survey instruments and an Implementation Guide that offers a framework for successful implementation. In addition to collecting aggregate data from partners, CGS will gather information about the implementation process with a view to developing recommended practices for data collection and analysis.

CGS’s career tracking project will complement its recently-announced effort to support career diversity for humanities PhDs. Through a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), CGS has established the Next Generation Humanities PhD Consortium (Next Gen Consortium), a collaborative learning community for the 28 NEH Next Generation PhD grant awardees. These universities, all of which are CGS member institutions, will seek to broaden the career preparation of PhD students in the humanities. 

NextGen PhD Consortium

CGS has received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to establish the Next Generation Humanities PhD Consortium (Next Gen Consortium), a collaborative learning community for the 28 recent NEH Next Generation PhD grant awardees. These universities, all of which are CGS member institutions, seek to strengthen the career preparation of PhD students in the humanities. CGS will provide intellectual leadership to this group and guide their mission to transform the culture of graduate education.

Future of the Doctoral Dissertation

CGS is leading the graduate community in discussions about the future of the PhD dissertation. A project on the dissertation supported by ProQuest culminated in a workshop held in Washington, D.C. in January 2016. The two-day workshop convened key stakeholders to discuss how emerging technologies and other innovations in doctoral training may shape the Ph.D. dissertation of the future. Presentations were given by graduate deans, publishers, library and information professionals, scholars, and disciplinary representatives.

Learning Outcomes in Doctoral Education

To better understand the state of doctoral outcomes assessment in the U.S., the Council of Graduate Schools (CGS), with support from Lumina Foundation, conducted a year-long research project to explore national and global contexts for doctoral learning outcomes and evaluate the use of competency frameworks at the doctoral level. The results of this project inform the work of learning outcomes assessment for doctoral programs as well as next steps for graduate schools, faculty, and other stakeholders.

In 2016, CGS received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to establish the Next Generation Humanities PhD Consortium (Next Gen Consortium), a collaborative learning community for the 28 NEH Next Generation PhD grant awardees. These universities, all of which are CGS member institutions, seek to strengthen the career preparation of PhD students in the humanities. CGS provided intellectual leadership to this group and guided their mission to transform the culture of graduate education.

New resource: Inclusive language options for talking about humanities PhD careers

Other results from the project include:

• Promising Practices in Humanities PhD Professional Development: Lessons Learned from the 2016-2017 Next Generation Humanities PhD Consortium

Written to help guide applicants to NEH Next Generation Humanities PhD grants, as well as any campus team interested in pursuing the goals of the Next Gen program. Part I, Lessons Learned, summarizes the common features of Next Gen projects and outlines some of the challenges and promising solutions employed by grantee universities in pursuit of the larger goals of the grant program. Part II, Emerging Strategies, offers suggestions for additional considerations that might be included in the design of Next Gen programs. Please note that Promising Practices does not constitute evaluation criteria for the selection of 2018 grantees; rather, this document is intended to help institutions understand what practices have been most successful for past grantees, and identify ideas and approaches that are appropriate to their campuses.

• Review of Prior Work in Humanities PhD Professional Development; and

Provides a history of prior work in humanities PhD professional development, and is intended to serve as an introduction to the field for anyone interested in professional development for humanities PhDs.

• Rethinking Humanities PhD Resources

Contact

Julia Kent

Overall First-Time Graduate Enrollment Increases by 3.9%

Contact:
Julia Kent, CGS: (202) 461-3874 / jkent@cgs.nche.edu

Washington, DC — The Council of Graduate Schools (CGS) today reported modest growth in first-time enrollments for a number of key demographic groups enrolling in graduate school. Notably, all underrepresented minority (URM) groups monitored by the survey saw greater increases in first-time graduate enrollment than their White, non-Hispanic counterparts, although their overall representation in the graduate student body still remains relatively low. Among first-time U.S. citizens and permanent resident graduate students in Fall 2015, at least 22.5% were underrepresented minorities, including American Indian/Alaska Native (0.5%), Black/African American (11.8%), Native Hawaiian/Other Pacific Islander (0.2%), and Hispanic/Latino (10%).

CGS President Suzanne T. Ortega responded to the growth in URM graduate enrollment with cautious optimism. “The sizeable increase in overall first-time enrollments for underrepresented minorities, particularly seen among URM women, is great news, but the share of underrepresented minorities among U.S. citizens and permanent residents is similar to previous years. URMs remain proportionally underrepresented, and we must sustain this trend for several years to ensure a larger impact across graduate programs and a more diverse workforce.”

Survey results also showed increases in domestic and international enrollments. Between Fall 2014 and Fall 2015, there was an increase (3.8%) in first-time enrollments for U.S. citizens and permanent residents, the largest one-year increase since 2010. These gains contributed to a 3.9% one-year increase in all first-time graduate enrollment between Fall 2014 and Fall 2015—the largest since 2009.

First-time graduate enrollment of international students rose by 5.7%, a rate considerably lower than in recent years, though international students still constitute a robust share (22%) of first-time graduate students. At research universities with very high research activity (RU/VH), three out of ten first-time enrollees (30.4%) were temporary residents. Shares of international students among first-time enrollees were particularly high for fields of mathematics and computer sciences (63.2%) followed closely by engineering (58.5%).

Institutions responding to the CGS/GRE Survey of Graduate Enrollment & Degrees for Fall 2015 again set new highs for the admissions cycle, receiving more than 2.18 million applications, extending over 877,000 offers of admission in Fall 2015, and enrolling nearly 507,000 incoming, first-time graduate students in graduate certificate, education specialist, master’s, or doctoral programs.

Other report findings are summarized below. 

Findings by field

• Engineering, business, and health sciences saw the largest number of total applications for Fall 2015. Together these broad fields of study accounted for 39.3% of total applications.
• The largest share of doctoral-level applications was seen in the social and behavioral sciences, which saw 18.7% of all doctoral applications reported. Social and behavioral sciences was also the second most competitive in terms of acceptance rates (14.7%), trailing only business (13.4%).
• Consistent with previous surveys, business, education, and health sciences were the three largest broad fields of study in Fall 2015 for first-time graduate enrollments.
• Roughly one-third (33.4%) of all first-time graduate students were enrolled in master’s degree or graduate certificate programs in business and education.

Findings by degree level

• The large majority of first-time graduate enrollment in Fall 2015 was in programs leading to a master’s degree or a graduate certificate (83.6%).
• Applications for admission decreased for doctoral programs (-4.3%) and increased for master’s/other programs (3.8%) between Fall 2014 and Fall 2015.
• At the doctoral level, education (4%) had the largest one-year increase in the number of applications of all broad fields of study. At the master’s/other level, mathematics and computer sciences (11.2%) reported the highest one-year percentage increase.

Student demographics

• The majority of first-time graduate students both at master’s degree and certificate level (58.2%) and at the doctoral level (51.3%) were women.
• According to survey respondents, women earned nearly two-thirds (66.4%) of the graduate certificates, 58.4% of the master’s degrees, and 51.8% of the doctorates. Academic year 2014-15 marked the seventh straight year women earned a majority of doctoral degrees.
• Overall among first-time enrollees in Fall 2015, men were more likely to be enrolled full-time than women (72.8% and 66%).
• All underrepresented minority groups experienced larger increases in first-time graduate enrollment than in the prior year.

About the report

Graduate Enrollment and Degrees: 2005 to 2015 presents the findings of an annual survey of U.S. graduate schools, co-sponsored by CGS and the Graduate Record Examinations (GRE) Board. It is the only annual national survey that collects data on graduate enrollment by all fields of study and is the only source of national data on graduate applications by broad field of study. The report, which includes responses from 617 institutions, presents statistics on graduate applications and enrollment for Fall 2015, degrees conferred in 2014-15, and trend data for one-, five- and ten-year periods.

Full Report

Media Kit

The LaPidus lecture will be presented at 8:30 am on Saturday, December 10. This lecture was established to honor the late Jules B. LaPidus, a past-president of CGS. The lecture is delivered each year by a different international leader and visionary thinker. Rush Holt will deliver the 2016 lecture, "Science in a Changing Political Landscape."

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