UCAR 2003 graduate student enrollment survey.

Gabor Vali and Rick Anthes

June 13, 2003.

A more compact version of this report is to appear in the "UCAR QUARTERLY", July 2003.

As part of UCAR's effort to assist member institutions with their educational efforts as well as with their research activities (see also http://www.ucar.edu/student_recruiting/ ) we conducted our third enrollment survey of UCAR member institutions in March 2003. This survey added data for the academic years 2001-2002 and 2002-2003 to earlier surveys which covered years 1995-1996 to 2000-2001. The most significant finding of two previous surveys was that over the period 1995-6 to 1999-2000 there was a steady decline of 8% per year in the numbers of student applying to graduate programs. An article by Vali et al., (2002) explored concerns raised by that fact and by the implied possibility that less qualified students are therefore entering the programs. The article emphasized that the growing horizons of atmospheric and related sciences need a strengthened graduate student population. In relation to that article, Pielke (2003) argued that employment projections should be an important part of the assessment of how many graduate students are needed. Further discussions of the topic will be included in a forthcoming issue of BAMS

All 66 UCAR members were invited to send data and 30 responded in this round. In the combined data set from the three surveys, there were 11 schools that participated in all three and created continuous records covering 8 years for the three main items: the numbers of applications, admissions, and students entering. For those three items separately, there were 14, 12 and 13 schools, respectively, with data for all 8 years. The total inhomogeneous data set contains information from 46 schools.

Results from the recent survey show that the trend in applications has reversed over the last two years. This is good news even with the small magnitude of the upward turn (Fig. 1). Although we'd like to think that part of this upturn in applications is due to our focus on the issue, the major reason may be a consequence of declining employment opportunities. The numbers of students admitted and the numbers entering the programs have changed less, as was the case in the prior surveys, being controlled more by the sizes of departments and their research budgets. Fig. 1 shows, in addition to the overall trend, a breakdown by school size, based on the numbers of entering students and dividing the total of 444 into four nearly equal groups. In terms of relative changes the trend for the inhomogeneous overall sample doesn't differ much from that for the 11 schools with complete records (Fig. 2 upper panel). The lower panel in Fig. 2 displays the average percentages of applications that result in admissions and students entering the programs. These percentages decreased over the last two years, again resulting in stable rates of admissions and enters.

To give a sense of what individual schools face, Fig. 3 shows the application rates changing relative to the average of 8-years or the numbers of years with data. This plot compares all schools regardless of their sizes; the largest degree of scatter no doubt comes from changes of just a few students more or fewer in the small schools. Behind the wild scatter, the overall trend is discernible and the scatter does show how much variability schools face in the pool of applicants to their programs.

The overall message seems to be that the decline in applications halted in 2001 and there was a slight increase since then. Hence, the task of bringing a competent and diverse group of students into the atmospheric and related sciences has become a tiny bit easier in the last two years. What the coming years will bring, might, of course, be influenced by new factors, such as immigration restrictions, changes in economic outlook, and so on.

More survey results are included in Figs. 4-6.

References:

Pielke, R. A. Jr., 2003: Supply and demand for atmospheric science professionals. Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc., 84(2), 170-173.

Vali G. et al., 2002: Wanted: more Ph.D.s. Graduate enrollments in atmospheric sciences. Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc., 83(1), 63-71.

Figure 1: Trends in applications for the overall sample (full line), four groups of schools sorted by size (broken lines) and for the 14 institutions with complete record over the 8 years. The numbers included in the legend show the yearly average numbers of applications for that group. The smaller graph shows how the numbers of institutions are distributed with respect to the average numbers of student entering their programs.

Figure 2: Variations in the annual numbers of applications as percentages of the overall averages over 8 years (or the years with data). The lower panel shows the fraction of applications that result in admissions and in students entering the programs.

Figure 3: Changes in annual numbers of applications for each institution.

Figure 4: Annual admission rates

Figure 5: Numbers of students entering programs.

Figure 6: Frequency distributions of schools vs. the numbers of students applying, being admitted and finally entering. The numbers of schools included in each graph differ due to uneven reporting of data.