By Vic Cox

For the better part of a year, UCSB administrators, faculty, and staff have been pulling together data for the National Research Council’s study and ranking of doctoral programs at selected universities across the United States. Some 230 institutions of higher education are involved, and the NRC estimates that more than 5,000 programs will have been assessed when all is complete later this year.

The last time the NRC undertook such a massive national assessment was in 1995, and 41 doctoral fields were surveyed. This year, 60 fields are included and, the NRC says, the study will emphasize quantitative measures and greatly reduce the role of reputation in weighing the strengths and weaknesses of a given institution’s doctoral programs.

This shift in emphasis to reporting factual material—questionnaires ask, for example, about faculty gender and ethnic diversity, number of Ph.D.s issued over five years, time to degree, graduate students’ experiences, and other specifics—is a welcome change for younger research universities. The effects of this study’s program evaluations will spread across the spectrum of a university’s vital interests.

In thanking faculty for their participation, Chancellor Henry T. Yang observed, “This ranking is highly regarded, and plays a significant role in helping us attract outstanding faculty, students, and staff to UC Santa Barbara, as well as research grants and private support.”

Last month, Gale Morrison, acting dean of the Graduate Division and point person in the campus survey effort, congratulated UCSB faculty for their level of involvement and dedication to meeting the February deadline. “Our campus NRC faculty questionnaire completion rate was 93.9 percent,” she said. “That is phenomenal.”

It is also 26 points better than the average national rate of completion, she noted, adding, “The high level of participation reflects how well the campus community understands the value of NRC measurement to the future good of UCSB.”

However, the 6.2 percent of “core” faculty—those whose appointment is within a doctoral degree-granting department and who serve on the doctoral committee—who have yet to complete their detailed questionnaires will be encouraged to do so, Morrison said.

Additional steps will be required in the next two months “before this study rests,” she warned.

Among them are advanced student surveys from the departments of chemical engineering, physics, economics, and English; two different verification checks by the Department of Institutional Research and Graduate Division; and a faculty rating/anchor study with participants chosen by the NRC.

Details are available on the Web site <www.graddiv.ucsb.edu/prospectivestudents/acclaim/nrc.htm>, which also links to the NRC’s survey Web site.

Rankings and ratings will come out of this process as they did in the 1995 report, but not exactly in the same way. Then, 10 UCSB graduate programs placed in the top 20 nationally, and four departments had programs in the top 10.

No matter what the numbers are this time, the NRC promises to deliver them as a range, rather than an “absolute number,” and with greater speed than in the past—they’ll be available online <www7.nationalacademies.org/resdoc/Whats_new.html> at a date to be announced in 2007.