COW-Priorities Committee

1
AAU Graduate Education Taskforce Progress,
Plans, Issues
Presented to AAUDE Annual Meeting May 2005
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AAU/AAUDE groups and projects focused on data,
spring 2005 You cant tell the players (and
groups) without a scorecard!
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The Institutional Data Committee (IDC)Meetings
April, October

• Presidents
• John Wiley (chair), Wisconsin
• John Casteen, Virginia
• Scott Cowen, Tulane
• Larry Faulkner, Texas
• Richard Levin, Yale
• Richard Herman, Illinois

• Provosts
• John Anderson, Case Western
• Paul Courant, Michigan
• Debbie Freund, Syracuse
• Marty Wyngaarden Kraus, Brandeis
• Dave Shulenburger, Kansas.

• Institutional Researchers/AAUDE
• Rana Glasgal, Stanford
• Bill Hayward, Northwestern
• Dennis Hengstler, UC-Berkeley

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Graduate Education Data Task Force Meetings
March, late August

• Graduate Deans
• Dick Attiyeh (chair), UCSD
• Karen Klomparens, Mich State
• Lawrence Martin, Stony Brook
• Lewis Siegel, Duke
• Bob Thach, Washington U
• Graduate School Reps
• T. Jim Matthews, NYU
• Judi Sui, UC Berkeley
• Harvey Waterman, Rutgers

• Researchers on Graduate Ed
• Maresi Nerad, UWashington
• Rachelle Brooks, Maryland (also AAUDE)
• Institutional Researchers/AAUDE
• Julie Carpenter-Hubin, Ohio St
• Bernard Lentz, Penn
• Jed Marsh, Princeton
• Lou McClelland, Colorado
• Lydia Snover, MIT
• Kendrick Tatum, Duke

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Grad Ed Taskforce SubcommitteesReports due
August 1

• Program, institutional data
• Lawrence Martin, chair, Stony Brook
• Karen Klomparens, Mich St
• Lewis Siegel, Duke
• Harvey Waterman, Rutgers
• Bob Thach, Washington U
• Julie Carpenter-Hubin, Ohio State, AAUDE
• Lou McClelland, Colorado, AAUDE

• Student experience, student reported surveys
• Rachelle Brooks, chair, Maryland (AAUDE)
• Judi Sui, Berkeley
• Lydia Snover, MIT, AAUDE
• Kendrick Tatum, Duke, AAUDE
• Outcomes, placement, alumni
• Maresi Nerad, chair, UW
• Jim Matthews, NYU
• Barney Lentz, Penn, AAUDE
• Jed Marsh, Princeton, AAUDE

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Goal ID core data elements to be shared by AAU
member institutions

• Used by members to guide institutional and
  program policy decisions and practices
• Not for prospective students or the public
• Not for rankings
• Data may be used to inform national discussions
  of graduate education and outcomes

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Emphasis Doctoral education

• Masters programs or awards associated with
  doctoral programs included for completeness.
• Professional degrees, MBAs, and stand-alone
  masters programs not an explicit focus

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Program level data

• Unit of analysis/comparison Programs or
  departments, often by degree level
• Issue Need the division into programs be
• Mutually exclusive?
• Exhaustive?
• Issue Should campus totals come from
• Summing over all programs
• Separate report

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Priority topics subcommittees

• Student experience, from student surveys
• Student placement, outcomes, alumni
• Not just immediately after the degree, but later
• Institutional or program data
• Admissions
• Retention, graduation rates and time-to-degree
• Financial support
• Enrollment/ demographics

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Emphasis Data to answer questions, use in
management Examples

• Placement
• Where graduates go
• Correlation between admission credentials and
  first professional placement
• Program
• Time to complete a doctoral degree
• Fraction of students graduating with a PhD
• Changes in the demographic profile of students
  applying for doctoral programs
• Financial Support
• Cost to support a PhD student
• Student surveys
• How students assess their doctoral experience

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Operating principles endorsed by the Grad Data
Taskforce

• Sufficient safeguards must be in place to ensure
  the privacy of individuals
• Self-reported student data should be use only
  when institutional data are not available
• Whenever possible data should be collected by
  degree level at the academic program level.
• The reporting of summarized data (e.g.,
  percentages) should avoided as much as possible
• Even unit record data under consideration
• Data should be submitted electronically in a
  disaggregated format that facilitates inclusion
  in the data warehouse, in data files not in
  Excels.
• Each data element should be clearly defined and
  documented in a data dictionary that compares and
  contrasts similar data elements commonly
  available to the public.

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Known needs and issues

• Definitions, especially for graduation rates and
  time to degree
• Discipline crosswalks and rollups among the NRC,
  IPEDS, NSF-SED, CGS, and other data collection
  systems.
• Grad deans realize theres no right answer, want
  just to do something and not get bogged down on
  this.
• Programs vs. departments vs. disciplines
• Labeling vs. grouping level of detail
• Rules about data release, including rules that
  appropriately limit the reporting of small cell
  sizes
• Ways of ensuring that data collected will allow
  meaningful aggregation

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Known needs and issues (continued)

• Relationship to NRC, and NRC plans and timing
  both for scheduled review and further updates
• Fit to, extension of, exploitation of ongoing
  large-scale required or high-coverage data
  collections
• SED Confidentiality agreements, local capture
  with supplemental questions, utility for things
  also in records.
• Already in warehouse for MIT, Florida, Colorado.
• IPEDS completions and enrollment
• CGS/GRE survey of grad enrollment
• CGS PhD completion project
• AAUDE exchanges such as grad stipends
• NSF Survey of Graduate Students and Postdocs

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Timing, deliverables

• Subcommittee reports due August 1
• Prioritized list of at least five key questions
  of interest to policy makers
• Set of data elements required to address the
  questions
• Circulate to entire Taskforce
• Meet late August or early September to discuss
  the sub-committee reports and prepare a draft
  report
• Report to provosts, AGS, and IDC before
  presidents meeting in October

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AAUDE Reps Accomplishments

• The white paper
• ftp//aaude.mit.edu/IDC/Grad/graded_paper20050320.
  doc
• Official name Graduate Student and Graduate
  Education Data Needs
• The glossary
• ftp//aaude.mit.edu/IDC/Grad/graded_glossary.doc
• Concordance of items on various student surveys
• Grad stipend exchange item
• Grad CDS
• This presentation!

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White paper Useful for you

• Julie, 2003, augmented by Julie, Jed, Lydia, Lou,
  2005, used at 3/05 task force meeting
• Topics numbers and demographics credentials
  financial support student experience including
  graduation rates and time to degree career
  track policies.
• Sources discussed re coverage, availability,
  issues, recommendations

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White paper Sources covered

• CGS/GRE Survey of Graduate Enrollment
• Survey of Earned Doctorates (SED, to the DRF
  Doctoral Research File)
• Self-reports by students of records-type info
• IPEDS Fall Enrollments
• NSF Survey of Graduate Students and
  Postdoctorates in Science and Engineering
• Thomson Petersons Annual Survey of Graduate and
  Professional Institutions
• IPEDS Completions
• US News World Report Americas Best Graduate
  Schools
• GRE Summary Statistics Reports
• Rutgers Graduate Education Survey (collection
  from selected PhD programs at 6-8 AAUs, with
  both student survey and records information)

• Graduate CDS
• AAUDE Graduate Student Stipends Survey
• Rutgers and Duke/MIT student surveys
• CGS PhD Completion project
• NAGPS National Doctoral Program student survey
• Placement surveys by academic associations and
  other researchers, including the Ph.D.s-Ten
  Years Later Study
• NSF Survey of Doctoral Recipients re science and
  engineering doctoral graduates.
• Institutional or program collections of placement
  data
• Responsive PhD, Re-envisioning the PhD, and
  Carnegie Initiatives on the Doctorate

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AAUDE Reps Endeavors

• Paper on cohort definition, time to degree, grad
  rates, etc.
• Build on work by Colorado, Maryland, and
  Wisconsin, especially for the CGS completion
  project
• Analysis of SED re time to degree for the schools
  with data in the warehouse.
• Making Penns mechanisms available to others, for
  collecting postdoc and first professional
  placement
• Possibilities for release of SED data from all
  AAUs to the warehouse, and/or local or
  coordinated web administration with data to the
  warehouse
• Work on crosswalks, rollups, level of detail,
  etc. for PhD programs in particular.

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AAU Graduate Education Taskforce Progress,
Plans, Issues
Presented to AAUDE Annual Meeting May 2005