varied greatly in different fields. In education and engineering, fields in which many if not most students were employed full-time, pursuing primarily master's degrees in the evenings and summers, only 27 percent and 34 percent, respectively, were studying full-time; however, in the life and physical sciences, in which many students were working for their doctorates and received some form of financial assistance, full-time students constituted 75 percent and 68 percent, respectively, of the total enrollment (Table III-1, Col. 4, p. 16).

There was a general but by no means universal tendency for the proportion of fulltime students to be greater in advanced years of study--in the reported population, 42 percent of all first-year but 56 percent of advanced students were enrolled full-time (Table III-D). This may be due to the greater difficulty of successfully completing more advanced courses on a part-time basis, to the greater incentive for older students to accelerate the completion of their studies and embark upon a career, or to the greater opportunities which advanced students have to obtain fellowships or assistantships. The life sciences provide the major exception, full-time students in these fields comprising three-fourths of the enrollment in both the initial and later years; and, of course, when one examines the data in finer field detail, many additional examples come to light of a decrease in the proportion of advanced students who were enrolled full-time (this situation prevailed, for example, in all earth sciences but geology; in civil, industrial, and metallurgical engiTable III--D. PERCENT OF FIRST-YEAR AND ADVANCED STUDENTS ENROLLED FULLTIME, BY MAJOR FIELD, APRIL 1954

neering; in area studies, anthropology, and international relations; in some specialized educational fields; in many foreign and classical languages and liberal arts; and in most professional fields).

FIRST-YEAR AND ADVANCED STUDENTS

Advanced students constituted only 25-32 percent of the enrollment in education, professional fields, and engineering; they constituted 45-48 percent of the enrollment in the humanities and social sciences, and as much as 56-60 percent of the enrollment in psychology and the natural sciences (Table III-1, Col. 5, p. 16).

Although clouded by several factors, there was evidently a close relationship, in most fields, between the proportion of students who were in advanced years of study and the proportion of graduate degrees which were doctorates (Table III-E). Among the factors that occasionally obscure the relationship are: it often takes more than one year of full-time (or the equivalent in parttime) study to earn a master's degree; many degree candidates swell the roll of students without ever winning the award; if the average advanced student is in his second or third Table III--E. RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN ADVANCED ENROLLMENT, APRIL 1954, AND DOCTORATES AWARDED, 1953-54, BY MAJOR FIELD

awarded,

July 1953-54

(1)

year of graduate study, there would normally be a minimum lag of one or two years before he would receive the doctorate, so that advanced enrollment in 1954 should be compared with doctoral awards during the academic year 1954-55 or 1955-56 rather than 1953-54.

SPECIAL STUDENTS

Some 19,714 special students (that is, students not registered for a degree) were reported in the survey--11 percent of the total reported enrollment. The number reported by different institutions ranged from zero to over 2,000; and, among the 23 institutions with the largest graduate enrollments, from 1 to 35 percent of the total enrollment. Obviously, the registration practices of individual institutions have a great deal to do with the classification of students as "special" or "resident". Field of study was also a significant factor. In the social and life sciences, special students constituted less than 7 percent of the total graduate enrollment; in professional fields and education, 13 and 15 percent, respectively--in fact, the latter two fields enrolled three-fifths of all special students. In all major fields, without exception, relatively more special students than resident students were female.

It would be interesting to know in what other respects the special student may differ from the resident student, and what are the special characteristics, if any, of the education he receives. Presumably, he is not registered for a degree either because he fails to meet the educational standards which the institution sets for sets for such registration; because he does not wish or is not able to devote to graduate study the relatively long stretch of time needed to acquire a degree; or because his career is already so established (e.g., as a housewife, or an independent business or professional man) that he does not desire a degree.

GEOGRAPHIC DISTRIBUTION OF

ENROLLMENT

A great deal of information is available in publications of the U. S. Office of Education and other public and private agencies about the distribution by State of graduate enrollment." Within the limitations of reporting that was more complete in the Pacific and

12 See, e.g., Resident, Extension, and Adult Education Enrollment in Institutions of Higher Education: November 1953, Circular No. 414, U.S. Office of Education, 1954; Statistics of Higher Education: Faculty Students and Degrees, 1953-54, U.S. Office of Education, 1956; Residence and Migration of College Students, 1949-50, U.S. Office of Education, 1951; and Higher Education in the Forty-Eight States, The Council of State Governments, 1952, pp. 178-180.

West than in the South, North Central, and Northeastern States," the present report adds information on the geographic distribution of enrollment by field, of full- and part-time students, and of first-year and advanced students.

In the fall of 1953, institutions in New York alone enrolled 49,200 or 22 percent of all graduate students in the United States; New York, California, Pennsylvania, Illinois, and Massachusetts together enrolled 113,200 resident and special graduate students--51 percent of the national total. This marked concentration was related to, but nevertheless exceeded, the concentration of income and population in these states, and attests to the national and international functions exercised by important graduate institutions in these and other States. During 1949-50, the most recent year for which information is available, 28,000 or 26 percent of the 110,000 graduate students in these five States came from States other than the one in which they were enrolled, 4,400 or 4 percent came from foreign countries, and some 300 or 0.3 percent from outlying parts of the United States. 15 There is some reason to believe that students from other States and foreign countries are of high quality and that the proportion of the former receiving advanced degrees is greater than among students attending institutions in their home State.

Graduate students tend to cluster in a relatively few, large and well-known, institutions. Two, New York University and Columbia University, together enrolled over 26,000 or over half of the New York total and 12 percent of the national enrollment in the fall of 1953. In California, the Universities of California (all campuses) and Southern California enrolled over 11,000, half of that State's total. The Universities of Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania accounted for half the graduate enrollment in Pennsylvania; the Universities of Chicago and Illinois, half the enrollment in Illinois; and Harvard and Boston Universities, 44 percent of the graduate enrollment in Massachusetts.16

13

See Appendix A-1, Table 3b (p. 158), for a statement of reporting by region.

In 1953, the above five states had 39 percent of the national income and 33 percent of the national population. There was a correlation of .92 between the 48 States and the District of Columbia ranked in order of graduate enrollment in the fall of 1953 and income as of 1953, and a correlation of .86 between enrollment and population; the correlation between enrollment and per capita income was comparatively low (.43) (State income and population for 1953 being taken as given in Statistical Abstract of the United States, Bureau of the Census, 1955, pp. 14 and 291).

15 Residence and Migration of College Students, 1949-50, U. S. Office of Education, 1951, p. 21. See Chapter XII of the present report for a fuller discussion of the regional distribution of foreign graduate students during 1953-54.

16 Resident, Extension, and Adult Education Enrollment in Institutions of Higher Education: November 1953, Circular No. 414, U. S. Office of Education, 1954,

Appendix A-1, Table 3, Col. 1 (see p. 155-6) and Map 1 give the distribution by State of all graduate students in the Fall of 1953, as reported by the U. S. Office of Education. In the Northeast, there is a sharp cleavage between Rhode Island, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine, which together enrolled little more than 1,000 students, and the five remaining States, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, which enrolled over 87,000 students or two-fifths of the national total. The latter States are part of a phalanx of thirteen contiguous States stretching westward from the Atlantic to Minnesota and Missouri and including the border State of Maryland and seven of the eight States in the North Central region, each of which enrolled over 3,000 graduate students.

In this strip of territory, including the District of Columbia, were to be found 147,000 graduate students--66 percent of the national total. In the Southern region, two antipodal areas, Texas, and Maryland and the District of Columbia, enrolled 23,000 students, 10 percent of the national total and as many as the fourteen other Southern States combined. The twelve Western prairie, mountain, and desert States enrolled less than 10,000, most of whom were in the central strip of Kansas, Colorado, and Utah. In Nevada and the five northernmost States of the region--the Dakotas, Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming --an expanse of almost 600,000 square miles or one-fifth the area of the continental United States, less than 1,200 graduate students were enrolled. There were 26,700 students in the three Pacific Coast States, almost three times as many as in the West; 86 percent were located in California.

Little attention is given in this report to outlying parts of the United States, because information was received by the Foundation on only 188 graduate students in Hawaii and 9 in Alaska. However, it may be noted that the U. S. Office of Education reported in November 1953 a graduate enrollment of 658 at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu, 51 at the University of Puerto Rico in Rio Piedras, and 14 at the University of Alaska in College. No graduate students were reported in the Canal Zone or Guam, although undergraduate instruction was available at the Canal Zone Junior College and the Territorial College of Guam."

The graduate students reported to the Foundation by institutions in the continental United States were distributed geographically substantially as were all graduate students counted by the U. S. Office of Education in November 1953: almost two-fifths were in Northeastern

17 Resident, Extension, and Adult Education Enrollment in Institutions of Higher Education: November 1953, U. S. Office of Education, 1954, p. 29.

States, over one-fifth in North Central States, and one-fifth in the South; of the remaining fifth, one part was in Western and two parts in Pacific States (see Appendix A-1, Table 3b, p. 158). The predominance of Northeastern institutions is primarily due to the many students enrolled part-time in evening classes in metropolitan areas. There were actually more full-time students enrolled in North Central than in Northeastern schools; in educa tion, fewer full-time students were reported by Northeastern departments than by departments in any other region (see Appendix B, Table 3, p. 230).

The regional distribution of graduate enrollment in major fields is summarized in Table III-3 (p. 17). In the physical sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities, it will be seen, the distribution approximates closely the national pattern for all graduate students, with the largest enrollment in the Northeast, followed, in order, by the North Central and Southern regions, the Pacific, and the West. Essentially the same distribution was also observed among students of engineering and of professional fields (as defined in Chapter XI), although their concentration in Northeastern institutions far surpassed that of students in other major fields. More than half of the resident students of both engineering and professional fields were enrolled in the Northeast; and, conversely, relatively few were enrolled in Southern, Western, and Pacific institutions (only 24-26 percent, compared with 37-41 percent in other major fields and 50 percent in education). The life sciences were the only major field in which decidedly more graduate students were located in the North Central than in the Northeastern States, which is due to the marked development at land-grant institutions of instruction not only in agriculture but also in the biological sciences. In psychology, roughly the same number of students were reported in both regions. In education, Northeastern institutions, as usual, outranked all others in enrollment, followed by Southern and Pacific Coast schools, which reported relatively more students of education than of any other major field of graduate study.

PROPORTION OF STUDENTS RECEIVING MASTER'S AND DOCTOR'S DEGREES

Table III-4 in this chapter (p. 17) and Table 4 in Chapters V-XI present two indices of the proportion of students in various fields who received master's and doctor's degrees.

Table III-4, Col. 7 (p. 17), and Table III-F, Col. 2, summarize the proportion of doc torates among the degrees conferred during the academic year 1953-54 which were reported to the Foundation. The proportion was higher

in the natural sciences and psychology (34-39 percent); than in the humanities or social sciences (17-25 percent); it was lower in engineering (13 percent) and education (6 percent), and lowest of all in professional fields (2 percent). When, as in Table III-F, Col. 1, these proportions are recalculated upon the basis of the more complete Office of Education data, the identical ordering of fields prevails, although the proportion of doctorates in most fields is slightly less, as relatively more doctorates than master's were reported to the Foundation. (In professional fields alone of the major fields in this table does the proportion of doctorates reported by the Office of Education exceed that in the Foundation survey. This is due to the classification by the Office of Education of many master's degrees in social work as first professional degrees, which are grouped with the bachelor's level degrees.

proportion of job openings are at institutions of higher education, the Ph.D. is now a virtual requirement for a successful career; in some biological and medically related sciences and psychology, it has been suggested that the exceptionally large proportion of students seeking the Ph.D. is in part attributable to the attempt to establish standards and win a status for these scientists comparable to that held by medical doctors. To a lesser degree, the proportion of doctorates also reflects the extent to which various fields have penetrated lower levels of the educational pyramid, since it is obvious that if adequate coursework in a subject (like genetics, anthropology, or philology) is not available at the collegiate level, the student can pursue his interest only in graduate school.

Table III-4, Cols. 3 and 5 (see p. 17), indicates that as of April 1954, 3.6 resident graduate students were enrolled to each master's and 19.7 to each doctor's degree awarded during the academic year 1953-54. Comparable figures computed from Office of Education information show 3.9 graduate students (both resident and special) as of November 1953 to each master's and 24.9 to each doctor's degree awarded during the academic year 195354 in all fields, including those excluded from the Foundation survey. 18 To get a more meaningful idea of what such figures indicate in the actual pattern of graduate enrollment, it may be useful to compare them with hypothetical educational systems of known dimensions:

1. A model with a yearly intake of 1,000 graduate students, all candidates, in the first instance, for the master's degree. Ninety percent of master's recipients depart for employment, housework, military service, or other activities; 10 percent remain to pursue the Ph.D. (This was the proportion established in June 1952 by a Foundation survey of 8,724 persons who received the master's degrees in June 1951.19) Twenty percent of master's candidates and 10 percent of doctoral candidates leave school each year without obtaining their degree. Forty percent of those who survive receive a master's in one year and the remainder (minus the 20 percent second-year attrition) in two years. All successful doctoral candidates receive the Ph.D. two years after the master's.

This system assumes that all students are enrolled full-time and makes no allowance for yearly increases in enrollment or for lengthier periods of study than stated. In stable operation, it produces a yearly yield of

18 The Office of Education reports 223,832 resident and special graduate students in the United States and outlying parts at November 1953, and 56,823 master's and 8,996 doctor's degrees awarded during 1953-54 (Circular No. 414, 1954, p. 6, and Circular No. 418, 1954, P. 4).

19 Education and Employment Specialization in 1952 of June 1951 College Graduates, National Science Foundation, 1955, p. 46.